Slashdot Mirror
Gas-Powered Boots As Metaphor For Cold War
News.com has a piece up looking at a set of gas-powered boots that were developed during the cold war. While the technology itself is interesting, article author Andrew Kramer uses it as a launching point for a discussion of Russia's technological stagnation during the cold war. Outside of military applications, many of the innovative ideas developed in the former USSR during the 80s and early 90s were left to rot on the drawing board. The boots were eventually brought to market, but failed sometime last year. They do, of course, also go into how the boots work: "Taking a step down will compress air in the shoe--as in a typical sneaker, said Enikeev, who was a designer on the project. But then, a tiny carburetor injects gasoline into the compressed air and a spark plug fires it off. Instead of fastening a seat belt, the institute's test runner, Marat D. Garipov, an assistant professor of engineering, strapped on shin belts at a recent demonstration. Then he flicked an ignition switch."
Also, check this:WTF? Where could the 'inventor' of tetris have gained patent protection? Methinks the author of tfa has no idea what they're talking about.
Oh - and what you really came to the comments for - links to pics & vids: Video #1, Video #2, and a nice diagram of how they work.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
That's gas as in `gasoline, the fuel for motor cars'. Not gas as in `gas, the third state of matter and fuel for cookers and heaters'.
When I lived in North America, that particular usage confused me almost as much as `homo milk'.
In Soviet Russia boots run you!!
Communism by definition (at least in the non-utopic form) is a state where production is decided by the state. Now The state itself is quite good at defining its needs, especially militarily, but whenever R&D is not pushed by consumer need/demand, it will never be able to satisfy consumer demand. And when there is no consumer demand for a product, how can R&D not stagnate? This is the most fundamental flaw of communism, and this flaw has been demonstrated around the same time Marx came out with his theory in the first place!
everyone knows This is what rocket boots look like!
note the flames people... note the flames
News.com has a piece up looking at a set of gas-powered boots
Goblin or Gnomish? And i sure hope it doesn't share a cooldown with anything important!
Have you read my journal today?
I would try these things out. Imagine going three miles in about 10 minutes by foot. That would be really cool. However, if you did trip it would be pretty bad. I would probably break an arm. I would definitely don the mandatory "stunt" helmet. Skinned knees be damned. Link to an older article with pictures
I want my! I want my! I want my Eee PC!
These seem to be a variation on the gas powered pogo stick. Like this; http://www.bpmlegal.com/wpogo.html They were a commerical product. They were also pretty dangerous. They appear on ebay on occasion.
This seems like a situation that would benefit from the application of composite materials, seeing how they seem to incorporate a fair amount of metal...
The reason given for the fact that the boots were not commercialised before the fall of the Communism was that they were classified as a military secret. Very frustrating for the inventor, but nearly all western patent regimes allow the government to classify any invention as a military secret - in the US they're called "Secrecy Orders" - see http://www.bitlaw.com/source/mpep/120.html and http://patentbaristas.com/archives/2006/12/06/is-t he-government-keeping-more-inventions-secret/ for more information.
Better yet, there's obviously no way we can know how many inventions are covered by such orders, or what they cover.
Note that this has nothing to do with Communism or capitalism, which is the thesis the author's trying to build. The R&D regimes are actually identical: invent something militarily useful and it will dissappear from public knowledge.
Here's the original NY Times article with a half dozen pictures of the contraption and on a single page:u siness/17gazshoes.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted =all
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/17/business/worldb
Shielding is a bit of an issue, also ensuring that the helium used as the gas doesn't get out, though a suitable nuclear isotope would replace a slow loss of helium with alpha particles.
So there you have it, a carbon neutral, cheap and easily manufactured transport system. I'm honestly amazed we couldn't get anybody interested in manufacturing it in volume.
Pining for the fjords
... And then he disappeared in a puff of smoke.
Store with salt
Of course, it will be several years after the initial commercial release before these boots will be available in California, pending additional emissions control devices.
I think that would have been more interesting...
Look, this is serious engineering, not some half-assed scheme. You'd expect us to have taken safety seriously, wouldn't you? (Thinks of Sellafield (AKA Windscale, aka "Perfectly safe just don't visit the beach") reactor catching fire and the burning graphite sending plutonium particles up the shaft and out into the atmosphere...)
Pining for the fjords
From the article...
"They should work like a Kalashnikov," he said. "Reliable in anybody's hands."
That's all we need...a bunch of speedy terrorists carrying AK-47s.
On a more realistic note...if you think Heelies are bad can you imagine the kids in the mall wearing these things?
As interesting as these boots are, they only allow a regular person (albeit a heavily clothed one) to attain speeds comparable to that of current world-class sprinters. Michael Johnson's world record 400m time of 43.18s puts him at just a shade under an average of 21mph--that's average speed, not top speed, as build-up from a complete stop is factored in. Supposedly Carl Lewis hit speeds of over 26mph during his fastest points when running the 100m.
Here it is.
Enjoy.
"It's a tarp!" -- Dyslexic Admiral Ackbar
We had that beat in 1960:
http://www.bpmlegal.com/wpogo.html
rj
This gives me a great idea. As the piston enters the cylinder, it compresses the air and a small amount of fuel is injected....
Resulting in reciprocating action even if the wearer is to tired to propel the engine themselves. My calculations show that speeds of up to 3600 RPMs and durations of 4 hours may be possible on a single tank of gas. This should be a great boon for exhausted soldiers and sailors to make the most of their limited R&R leaves.
The fuel injection is all handled peristatically so the only complex part is the magneto for the spark. I'm working on eliminating that by going to a diesel version, be so far the glow plug in the tip has just cause nasty burns.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Don't you have to say a magic spell first to make sure they don't rip you apart?
The theme the article repeated points out is that without a profit incentive these pieces of intellectual property--which under the soviet system where not property-- languished. Sounds like they needed some sort of patent protection system that profited the patent holders so that it could have been sold to greedy venture capital firms that could have made a profit commercializing it.
designation of things as property and assinging them as profit vehicles to the owners is what has driven the western expansion for hundreds of years. The new world discovered, the west was explored, railways built all on the backs of monopoly trade and land grants.
Kinda puts this whining about how copyrights and patents are evil in perspective.
Of course one can go too far the other way. But locking up technology as intellectual propertry is what pays for it's development.
Now consider the Gas powered boots. Are these a great invention or a joke. It's pretty darn hard to tell. Sure it sounds goofy. But I could see it really becoming something with armies of people walking to work in them if they were simple and easy to use.
Would you invest? probably not. Do you think the person that takes the risk and does invest make a lot of money if it succeeds? yes surely.
And for all the 1000 other crackpot sounding ideas that flop, it takes a lot of profit for the one that succeeds to make it worth the risk. That's why patent and copyright protection for those few cases that seem so unfair matter.
To give an example: Two items seeking investment in england around 1775 was the steam powered troop transport and the machine gun. The companies proposed to invest in inventing and developing these. Neither stock offering for these was subsrcibed. As a result the english lost the war in America.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
What's the last thing many engineers do? "...And then he flicked the ignition switch."
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
As a senior project, I was on a team that built something like this. We were told we had to design the better pogo stick. The first question was whether or not it had to have one foot... we took the liberal notion that a pogo stick didn't need to have one foot, since this clearly removed a lot of man's built in skill in maneuvering...
We modeled our design on the old Wile E. Coyote cartoons - the springs on the feet thing... We quickly found out that the real problem wasn't putting springs on your feet, but being able to stand on them and then bounce. You notice from the pictures the rigs up the legs... without a rigid support, you're just asking for a broken ankle
So in our design iterations, we solved two issues. First, we needed a way to make sure the springs didn't go off in side to side motion. We built an elaborate "outrigger" for that which assured that the things could only compress front to back, not side to side. Second, we solved the broken ankle thing by mounting ski boots to them.
These gas powered things look a lot like what we build, but we had a much bigger footprint. Also, we were not allowed to add power devices, so we couldn't do the whole gas powered thing anyway.
We did outperform one foot designs handily. We also outperformed the two footed designs as well and ended up winning the overall competition. The only thing we didn't win was weight... I think they weighed in at a combined 40 pounds! (They made us weigh the ski boots too, even though we argued they were just "footwear").
At the end of the day, I think the idea of these "kanga-shoes" as we called our device are basically trouble. Although devices such as the Segway give me pause, I'd say that devices such as these end up being about as hard to use as it is to dribble a football.
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
Like filling high-rise buildings with planes?
Those things reminded me too much of the super boots in the Super Mario Bros movie. Please tell me I'm not alone in this.
http://www.poweriserpages.com/, a less combusable version of the same thing, using fiber glass leaf springs instead of pistons, and you can actually buy them.
to welcome our rapidly-running power-booted Red communist overlords....
I think Steve Martin might have prior-art claims if a patent was sought for the boots. He reference a "Gasoline powered turtleneck sweater" on his first album.....(along with a fur sink, $300 pair of socks, and an electric dog polisher....of course he bought some "dumb stuff too").
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
"Now, they have been held up as a symbol of both Russia's deep and rich scientific traditions and the country's inability to convert that talent into useful--and commercial--merchandise outside of the weapons business." if u follow the link to: http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News .asp?NewsNum=740
there is a youtube video if translated. talks about today. they boots are used as attraction and rented like roller skates. additional talks about how 50 exported to japan/australia. these is how my russian speaking friend translated^^ also they joke about how military can use for the military post man to speed him up in delivery as they are known for being slow.
The shoes sound like a shoe version of this US gas powered pogo stick that actually made it to the market.
http://www.bpmlegal.com/wpogo.html
About a dozen non-government funded inventions a year get hit by a secrecy order in the United States. (That number is from the 1990s; this may have changed.)
One of the best suppressed ideas was Airadar, which was a radar for light aircraft developed in the early 1970s. It was a phased-array radar with a conformal antenna built into the wing and a fast sweep rate. All modern radars are like that, but back then, the USAF still had only systems with a big moving dish in the aircraft nose and slow-updating images. They were unhappy about the civilian sector pulling ahead. So that became a suppressed invention, even though it had been demonstrated and reviewed in Flying magazine.
"Spring-Heeled Jack runs blind, blue fumes crackling from his heels. His right hand, outstretched for balance, clutches a mark's stolen memories. The victim is sitting on the hard stones of the pavement behind him. Maybe he's wondering what's happened; maybe he looks after the fleeing youth. But the tourist crowds block the view effectively, and in any case, he has no hope of catching the mugger. Hit-and-run amnesia is what the polis call it, but to Spring-Heeled Jack it's just more loot to buy fuel for his Russian army-surplus motorized combat boots."
-- from "Accelerando" by Charles Stross
Well, some of those technologies were not well-refined. The French had some sort of "steam tricycle" around this time for hauling around artillery, but it was too expensive and difficult to maintain, so was abandoned. But, it takes thousands of miles of railroads for trains to be effective at moving goods and people. That wasn't going to pop-up in 1775.
Thats the most retarded thing I have ever seen. Leave it to the Russians to over build shit.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a [gas powered] boot stomping on a human face -- forever.
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. -HLM
Yeah, you read that right. Spark plugs are for sub-300 lb wuses. Compression ignition is where it's at. Better yet, I combined liposuction with SVO diesel technology and literally burn off the calories!
The troop transports in question here were of the sailing ship variety. At that time a ship was the most potent mitiary weapon possible. Few port cities could host the firepower that bring ro bear in a concentrated way. Making them able to cruise the atlantic swiftly and then picket off the coast would have dominated the Colonies in a way they could not have beat. As it was, the colonists could kill off british officiers almost faster than they could ship them from england.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
To give an example: Two items seeking investment in england around 1775 was the steam powered troop transport and the machine gun. The companies proposed to invest in inventing and developing these. Neither stock offering for these was subsrcibed. As a result the english lost the war in America.
You're forgetting three amazingly important facts, and blatantly ignoring another.
0: Technology in the 18th century was essentially all hand-crafted, and very, VERY error prone. The first attempt at a submarine in the modern warfare was "the turtle", which failed amazingly during the revolution.
1: The UK had bigger worries at the time than the American Revolution. The armies they sent were not the best, and Parliment knew better than to try and spend more than the colonies ever sent in direct taxes.
2: The Redcoats were a highly traditional force; there's a reason for the American charactiture of them as hidebound and inflexible fools. Heck, European armies were still using human wave tactics in the first World War.
3: Even if the British were able to create a technologial advantage, and even if they were able to get them in appreciable quantity, and even if they send them to the Revolution, the advantage would not have lasted for long. Copyrights and Patents are only respected by allies in peacetime -- and the Americans ignored foreign IP for generations after '76.
They still wouldn't have helped. Steamships require an extensive fuel infrastructure, which simply was not present in 1775. Guess why the British laid claim to so many small islands in the middle of nowhere during the 1800s?
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
I just read a thread where a flying pig and a cold wet dog were discussing proper engineering of a nuclear pogo stick.
And, I found this entirely believable.
For a case study of how innovation and intellectual property was handled in a communist country, see the story of Otto Wichterle's invention of the soft contact lense in Czechoslovakia:
p lay.html
http://www.dynamist.com/articles-speeches/forbes/
"Give a man a fish and he will ask for tartar sauce and French fries!"
They miss step 3:
1. Invent clever gas powered boot
2. Turn into military secret
3. ???
Well it is sort of a chicken and egg issue. Given the incentive of a war with the colonies the fuel supply for a military woul doubt have been mobilized. Consider for example the Pan Am Clipper aircraft which was a wide body passenger plane that could land on water. It came into service just before WWII. At that time it was needed for two reasons 1) there were no runways developed in most of the world. and pan am server the world not just major cities. 2) it was not possible to navigate since electronic navigation had not yet been invented. You had to land and shoot the stars. And to land in the ocean you needed a boat-plane.
Then poof ww2 happened. Did they use Clippers? nope. They built runways. And after wwII, the clippers vanished because well, who needed them with all the runways and network of control towers to get your position from.
Same would have happened I predict with coaling for transports.
However, Obviously it was untested so we can't know if they coul dhave even built them. And second the original proposal was actually for their use in crossing the english chanel. The idea of a war with the colonies was not really the likely issue at that time. France was. So these woul dhave been built and put to service without the need for coaling stations on their chanel runs. Then when the war with the colonies broke out, they would already have had the ships and only need to figure out the fuel distribution system--a smaller problem than evolving both at once.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I would dispute this thesis. Indeed your point 3 is the very basis of the refutation. The entire success of the revolutionary war can pretty much be laid at the feet of a single technological innovation: the american hunting rifle. These were quick to reload compared to the smooth bore english guns wich required a mallot and minutes to reload. their accurate range was hundreds of yards compared to at most 20 to 50 for the english weapons. Early in the war washington got congress to fund the rifle brigades. There were effectively no rifles in new england at that time being something mainly used by inland woodsmen where there was a premium on range, rate or reload, and lower consumption of ammo. Europe had no simmilar hunting situation so few rifles existed and they were not of the same quality.
Washington managed to kill so many british officers that replacement and then recruitment became their limit. There are numberous records of cases where 12 rifflemen could decimate a hundered british troops holed up behind stone walled building not to mention in the fields. It was at this point that the brits went to the Hessian mercinaries to solve their recruitment problems and lack of rifle proficiency. (the hessians did have some rifle brigades).
So my point is that a single technological innovation can make the difference in an outcome. Especially if it comes early enough in a war. (e.g. the superior german weapons at the end of WWII arrived too late to make a difference). The brits could have copied it. They knew what the problem was having captured riflemen. But they could not react to it fast enough. The hessians were a stopgap too late.
If transports and machine guns had been developed they would also have been, like sailing ships, items of great capital cost whose factories coul dnot easily be defended. This would have been advantage to the british as well.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
1. Russian engineers _REALLY_ suck at marketing. It may be a good thing for Russian economy, too, judging by how modern marketing allowed huge amounts of unimaginable crap to worm its way into consumers' lives. I am a Russian engineer, and I suck at marketing, though I am in US and therefore it's a bad thing for me.
2. Software patents aren't exactly a great thing now, and they certainly weren't in 80's. Copyright and trademark could protect the game implementation though, but protection of them were very weak in USSR. Pajitnov couldn't benefit much from domestic distribution of the game because at that time there were too few computers and too many software pirates, so the only thing where he was screwed was selling the game abroad. However since he was an employee, it would be just as bad in US.
3. Most of inventions made in US end up not being worth the patent application fees, and companies fail all the time. From the technology development point of view any innovation made in a large, Soviet-style state-sponsored organization has better chances to see successful implementation because bureaucrats are interested in their superiors seeing an improvement in that organization's output, but are free to spend vast amounts of resources as long as the results are visible. So even in the short term the invention's result is financially negative, it is positive for overseeing bureaucrats' reputation.
In Capitalist system it's more likely to fail unless it's a part of established development program -- the invention either does not promise immediate monetary benefit, or can't be implemented within the narrow business model of a company, forcing the inventor on a risky path of creating his own company from scratch. Obviously failures are never known to the public unless company has some initial success.
4. What is good for the military not necessarily is so for the public -- acceptable safety and required level of training are different. This was especially important for Soviet military considering that it actually had to defend the country few decades ago, so safety of a soldier had to be balanced against adequate protection for the rest of 300 millions of people populating it. In US, where before 2003 military was seen as some kind of government-provided high-paying job for unskilled and poor people, it would be strange to expect any lowering of safety standard even if it helped in purely hypothetical case when such a military actually had to fight a well-armed and organized enemy.
This doesn't mean that mechanical boots can't be developed into a safe and efficient device fit for civilian use. However an example of another, obviously well-developed, safe and (as opposed to boots) designed for a modern city device, Segway scooter, is an example that the market for those things is pretty bad to begin with.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Mosdrators should not moderate on the basis of their opinions but on the value of the content to the conversation. Why was this highly moderated item modded down?
I took a history of technology course at one point, and the professor firmly believed that every single major outcome in history was more tied to a technological difference or innovation that any other single factor. I have to say he made a damn good argument.
Doesn't this sound like the beginnings of a Darwin Award?
...well, actually, a share in one of these. I never got very good with it, but one of the other owners used it the way you'd use a dirt bike in the woods - and could get places that were pretty amazing.
We'd all wear dirt-bike gear when using it (there was a good deal of falling down and banging into stuff involved) but nobody broke any bones before we wore it out past repairability (couple of sprained thumbs and a lot of bruises). And, no, they weren't particularly repairable, in spite of being essentially a ported two-stroke (so dead simple mechanically - no crank or bearings, even). Speaking of "two stroke", yes they did smoke.
I'd like another one, please...
The only flaw in communism is that it's designed for (actually based upon) certain types of insects, not for higher life forms.
..... (someone else's problem).
The notion that the cold war stagnated russian technological process is like blaming a hot stove for cooling a pot of ice water down to boiling.
the Soviet Union has always had plenty of kook ideas, at least in time of war. When there's no external or internal threat, there's not any reason to change anything. Part of the reason perhaps is that the plush jobs (compared to ditch digging by hand) tend to want the best and brightest but ask for the more politically astute and spectacular (as in comic book science). Unfortunately, the reward for failure there was quite a bit worse than here so the optimal mix was usually to suggest something that so totally spectacular it couldn't be built yet due to
R&D is spurred by several factors, usually related to survival on some scale or another. For the Soviets, it was survival of the elites in power, from either domestic or foreign destruction. For companies, it is the survival of the companies, keeping up with competitors and keeping customers happy. It's totally the 'joys' of monopoly for the customers - or more aptly put - the serfs.
There is no competition in the socialist workers paradise. It's bureaucratic hell - harvest the crop when the equipment is scheduled to be available, not when the crop is ready - if the crop is ready and the schedule is not - too bad. Same goes for the schedule being ready and the crop not ready.