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"The whole problem of energy sources is going to be solved by little solutions, not by some big new piece of technology that does everything. We got into this crisis by believing that we had one big piece of technology that would do everything (oil)."
- Gregory Benford
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| Transparent Aluminum | ||
| Invisible light steel. |
As far as I know, the first instance of the phrase "transparent aluminum".
| "This ship is five hundred feet in length, eighty feet wide amidships, and is perhaps forty-five feet high, which includes the cabin. It is built of transparent steel, the discovery of which I made while experimenting with machinery for taking substance from the air. I had already discovered the means of taking palatable food and water from the air, not to mention the salt and all other requirements of the human body. In the discovery of the metal of which this ship is built, I found that it was as bard and tough as steel, and lighter than aluminum. I therefore built my electromagnetic motors of this material. They, too, are transparent, save for the parts of copper and iron which constitute the electro-magnets. The gas bag is built of the same material, with many girders running crosswise and lengthwise of the bag. It is filled with helium, which I have also succeeded in taking from the air. I have a machine for the purpose of making each. Therefore, when your friend crashed into me near the Mohave desert and broke a dangerous hole in the forward end of the bag, I gained altitude as quickly as possible. I made the necessary amount of what you may call transparent aluminum and the necessary repair. |
| Technovelgy from The Space Hermit,
by E. Edsel Newton. Published by Amazing Stories in 1929 Additional resources -
|
This is what it looked like:
I gasped. I could not doubt Sails.
"I circled and started back to get a good view of whatever it was up there. I got only a glimpse of it before it disappeared like a bullet into the sky above. It looked like a huge glass fish turned on its side with a cabin suspended underneath, and it was transparent and I could see inside the thing.
For those who are curious, the first appearance (!) of Wonder Woman's invisible jet was in 1942.
It seemed like a sort of dirigible car made of glass and there was a man standing inside it and staring at us. That's all I saw of him when Claxon smashed the Waco right into the thing."
('The Space Hermit' by E. Edsel Newton)
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Tech news articles related to The Space Hermit
Tech news articles related to works by E. Edsel Newton
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| Goldene - A Two-Dimensional Sheet Of Gold One Atom Thick |
| GNoME AI From DeepMind Invents Millions Of New Materials |
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'An adjustment panel outside the door would cause it to extrude various appurtenances in memory plastic...'
'Annealed in any shape for a time, and codified, the structure of that shape is retained down to the molecules.'
It's not really polite to tear the limbs off robots.
'...the imaginary companions discovered by needful children.'
''Pardon me, Struthers,' he broke in suddenly... 'haven't you a section of the factory where only robot labor is employed?''
'I opened the oblong box, where lay the automatons side by side...'
'They tied the memory to the bloodline and that was their record!'
'It seems that at one time computers were designed directly by human beings.'
'...the spot was a lonely one in an uncharted region, far from the normal lanes of space traffic.'
