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"I can't tell whether or not there's going to be a Singularity. I don't really believe the rapture of the nerds stereotype..."
- Charles Stross

Tickler  
  Clears smog and saves the residue for later use.  

Didn't I see one of these in the Sharp catalog? Maybe for one room in your house; this one would freshen the air in your neighborhood.

You remember that anciently there was smog in the cities. Oh, it could be drawn out of the air easily enough. All it took was a tickler. Albert made a tickler machine. He would set it fresh every morning. It would clear the air in a circle three hundred yards around his hovel and gather a little over a ton of residue every twenty-four hours. This residue was rich in large polysyllabic molecules which one of his chemical machines could use.
Technovelgy from Eurema's Dam, by R.A. Lafferty.
Published by New Dimension in 1972
Additional resources -

I seem to recall Nicholas Negroponte pontificating about how WiFi would free the internet by making "lilypads" of access (200 foot diameter circles around WiFi access points). Well, that would be nice; but I think having lots of 300 yard diameter clean air zones would be nicer.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from Eurema's Dam
  More Ideas and Technology by R.A. Lafferty
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