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

Ummmmm?

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

The article's author holds up the boots as an example of how entrepreneurism is failing in Russia. I'm not sure it's such a good example, as the reason the boots failed is - from tfa:

the energy in calories used to move the two-pound boot at a run would exceed the energy input from the gasoline engine.

and

gasoline-assisted running remains dangerous.

"The worst situation is when the spark fires as the runner just lands, and the force of the blast is absorbed by his body," Garipov explains flatly.

The two powerful engines tend to throw a wearer off balance or cause knees to buckle.

Doh!

Also, check this:

The Russian inventor of the Tetris video game was unable to patent his invention, and thus lost out on huge amounts of money.

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.

Re:Ummmmm?

[xoyoyo]

"WTF? Where could the 'inventor' of tetris have gained patent protection? Methinks the author of tfa has no idea what they're talking about."

Completely agree with you that the TFA-A is clueless. However, you most certainly can patent a game concept in the US (search for "Board Game" on patents.google.com to see extensive examples). In the UK you're bound by the normal limits on not patenting abstracts (which are the rules) but you can patent the totality of the game: http://www.intellectual-property.gov.uk/faq/how_pr otect/board_game.htm

Of more interest is whether Pajitnov had any rights to Tetris in the first place. The Sovs did exploit the rights by selling them to Nintendo, but Pajitnov, as a scientist working for the Soviet Academy of Scientists didn't benefit from the deal. The obvious conclusion is that the state ownership of property stifles innovation, but in what way was Pajitnov's situation different from a US academic researcher or government scientsit who would find their work equally appropraited either by the University or the state?

How is this news?

[WaZiX]

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!

Re:How is this news?

[mi]

but whenever R&D is not pushed by consumer need/demand, it will never be able to satisfy consumer demand.

This is true, of course, but even "Communism" (Socialism, really — USSR never completed the "building of Communism") could've done much better than it did, if it did not spend so much on the military. They tried to keep up with the West on military spending, which meant, pretty much, no resources for anything else... I believe, this was the GP's point...

The Cold War drained them of everything and bankrupted the country, while leaving the US with "merely" a huge national debt...

Re:Military secret, not a political problem

[gad_zuki!]

>invent something militarily useful and it will dissappear from public knowledge.

Man, wouldnt it be cool to have something like the internet (a military project) in the US (to spread to the rest of the world) where we could complain about the oppressive military-industrial complex and falsibly equate the soviet and US systems. damn you secretive regimes! Oh wait...

The irony of posting this on slashdot: copyrights

[goombah99]

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.

Re:Military secret, not a political problem

[RexRhino]

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. In Capitalism, there is a financial incentive to move the military technologies into the civilian world: to make a profit on consumer goods. In fact, there are often the implication that military contracters intentionally leak technology to move them into the civilian use quicker (I don't know if the implication is true, but the fact that they are accused of doing so implies they have the incentive). Under Communism, the incentive is to keep technology secret as long as possible, as there is no real benefit or way to profit from moving the technology to the civilian economy.