Where Are The Edges Of Today's Technology World?

Veeru writes "As mentioned on Nova, my great-great-grandfather Amos Ives Root published the first eye witness account of the Wright Brothers flight almost 100 years ago. Scientific American had rejected his article as 'unbelievable' and 'having no practical application'. The secretive Wright Brothers allowed Amos to publish the article in his own Gleanings Bee magazine instead. Because of his objective account, other experimenters may not have received the credit they deserved. I recently realized that Amos was intent on investigating the highest tech advances of the day and that the airplane was the most advanced phenomenon he could find. If Amos were alive today, what obscure technology would he be pursuing?"

Comments

Re:Time travel

[WinterpegCanuck]

A quick google answered my own memory gap. Here is a short article on it. Yeah, bad karma for posting without researching better the first time, but I have an exam tomorrow. Back to the books. Cheers.

Re:Time travel

[VertigoAce]

While I haven't heard about the theory the original poster was talking about, I understood it as allowing travel back to the time when the machine was turned on.

In general I agree that time travel backward through time is impossible using the same logic you used. Maybe (though I doubt it) it is possible to use a machine to travel back to when the machine was started. As such a machine does not currently exist, we couldn't use everyday experience to rule it out.

Rename it?

[herrvinny]

What about renaming them? MRI (Magnetic Reasonance Imaging) came from NRI (Nuclear RI), renamed because doctors thought patients might not like the word nuclear.

Dumont beat them too it...

[Anonymous Coward]

Santos Dumont the real father of flight.

Dont belive the Wright Bros. Hype.

Re:Safe Nuclear Batteries

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunatly they arnt that safe. The russians used them for a while but eventualy realized it was a realy bad idea... something about "what happens if blows up???" turned out to be a major issue. Sure they are safe in their lead lined cases... but once out in the open they are deadly. The russians are realy scared of these things after one turned up in Georgia without its lead case... all one would need to do is strap some TNT to it... and detoniate it near a city... instant radiation bomb.

Not to say some sort of safe nucular battery isent possible... but it will probably use something similar to a "betavoltic" battery

Energy, especially nuclear

[vruba]

I don't know about really obscure stuff, but we could take another look at something obvious: power.

• Pebble bed modular reactors are very safe, very clean, and ready right now. Come up with some improvements on them.
• Fuel cells. They're still not good enough for general use, but they have good prospects -- look at vanadium redox batteries.
• Solar panels. They're already the best solution for most remote stuff in relatively sunny climates (navigational buoys, spacecraft), and they're still not very efficient (15%?).
• Energy transmission by microwave or laser (e.g. for orbital solar power).
• Floating seawater-cooled reactors. Don't laugh.
• Passive or semi-passive stuff: tidal, geothermal, hydroelectric, weird-ass solar chimneys, etc.
• Why muck around? Go for cold fusion. Yes, the most famous attempt was a fraud. Yes, it's not going to be ready tomorrow, even given a huge breakthrough. But the potential is amazing.

There are three basic kinds of power: grid power, which comes in bulk; portable fueled power, like a car engine; and embedded power, like a battery. All of could be a lot safer, cheaper, and cleaner. Happy research.

Re:Safe Nuclear Batteries

[HalfFlat]

The devices used by the Russians (eg to power nuclear lighthouses!) were thermal generators, which are about 100000 (10^5) times less efficient than the device being proposed here. Which indeed is a sort of betavoltaic device! So blowing up one of these batteries, while still dangerous, is not nearly as severe, by virtue of it using orders of magnitude less strontium.

Your gramp was late, Ader was first

[SysKoll]

Maybe your gramp should have traveled to Europe. There, he would have found that the first powered flight occured in France on October the 12th, 1897. Clement Ader flew his steam-powered (!) Avion on about 150 ft in front of his military patrons.

The French army brass, disappointed that they couldn't already have a B-52, cancelled the funding, and a bitter Clement Ader stopped his aeronautical experiments.

The real innovation introduced by the Wright brothers was an effective way of controlling the plane. The Avion was using a crude wing-warping system that didn't prove efficient. However, the Wright machine was just as unbalanced as Ader's Avion.

The steam engine was the only available motor at the time of Ader's design, and its shortcoming prevented the Avion from flying for more than a few minutes because of the water and fuel weight.

However, flight historians should say that the Wright brothers made the first powered, guided flight, wereas Ader made the first powered flight.

propeller especially

[rebelcool]

one of the wrights key designs was the proper, efficient shape of the propeller, a very complex and difficult thing to design, but also build correctly and to the necessary tolerances with the technology of the time.

They also refined alot of the math behind the physics. When they first started building their test results didn't match the ones published in the standard book of tables of various aeronautic physics at the time. Turns out the guy who wrote that book was wrong about alot of things and they ended up rewriting everything, fixing equations and the like based on their empirical data gathered.

While it will undoubtedly be argued to death about what constitutes the first "flight", the wrights were far and away the first aeronautical engineers to build a working plane - and continue to build and improve them - on sound physics and principles.

Re:Why not

[B'Trey]

Not a point for point rebuttal, but I rather enjoyed what Michael Crichton had to say to the Commonwealth Club.