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."

Comments

Disambiguation

[Anonymous Coward]

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'.

Re:Disambiguation

[DigitalReverend]

The term "Gas" was coined by Chemist Jan Baptist van Helmont as a phonetic spelling of the flemish pronunciation for the Greek word for chaos. Based upon it's original definiton, gasoline, or gas makes perfect sense. After tall, it's not as abiguous as tele, do they mene television or telephone. Or rubbers, these are the boots you wear on your feet, not the condoms, but boots are rear storage areas of an automobile. Finally, petrol isn't even British, it was borrowed from the French. So here's a two finger salute to you.

http://www.bookrags.com/Gas
http://www.bookrags.com/Jan_Baptist_van_Helmont
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=gas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=etymology+gas oline

Skinned knee?

[LaTechTech]

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

Military secret, not a political problem

[xoyoyo]

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.

Link to an article with photos and a movie

[VitrosChemistryAnaly]

Here it is.

Enjoy.

The Hop Rod

[Deadstick]

We had that beat in 1960:

http://www.bpmlegal.com/wpogo.html

rj