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"...science fiction is sort of like a sociological genome. It's a huge range of possible futures, most of them useless; some vital. You never really know in advance."
- Peter Watts
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| Thermlectrium | ||
| An alloy that turns heat directly into electricity. |
Scientist Malcom Mackay needed to get close to the sun to perform some experiments, but how can you handle the heat? Perhaps it would be possible to convert that heat to electricity?
| It was a dull, silvery gray, rather heavy, being nickel-iron-cobalt-carbon steel...
Thermlectrium is a magnetic alloy, the unique property being that its crystals are of almost exactly uniform size. In any permanent magnet, the crystals are tiny individual magnets, all lined up with their north poles pointing the same way. In magnetized steel, if the bar is heated, the heat-motion of the molecules turns some of them around, with the result that the magnetism is lost. In thermlectrium, even at low temperatures, the crystals turn, but they all turn together. The result is the same as though the bar had been inverted. A current is induced in the surrounding coil. And, of course, the energy which inverts the magnet, and drives the current of electricity, is the molecular motion known as heat. Heat was conquered! |
| Technovelgy from Blindness,
by John W. Campbell. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1935 Additional resources -
|
And the end result? The free energy present in the atmosphere could be harvested by thermlectrium - "every home, every store, every man, has his private thermelectrium element."
To see some recent research on this very thing, see the article on Nanostructured thermoelectric devices.
Thanks to reader Winchell Chung for suggesting this item.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from Blindness
More Ideas
and Technology by John W. Campbell
Tech news articles related to Blindness
Tech news articles related to works by John W. Campbell
Thermlectrium-related
news articles:
- Nanostructured Thermoelectric Devices (And John W. Campbell, Jr.)
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| Can 'Tactical Umbrellas' Shield One From Drones |
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'Chris, the City Fathers are not interested in your welfare; I suppose you know that. They're interested in only one thing: the survival of the city.'
'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
