Slashdot Mirror
Practical Jetpack Available "Soon"
Ifandbut was one of several readers to point out the arrival in Oshkosh of the first practical jetpack. It was invented by a New Zealander Glenn Martin, who has been working on the idea for 27 years. He plans to sell the gizmos for somewhere in the neighborhood of $100K. While previous attempts at jetpacks have flown for at most a couple of minutes, Mr. Martin's invention can stay aloft for half an hour. Both "practical" and "jetpack" may need quotation marks, however: The device is huge and it's incredibly noisy. And, "It is also not, to put it bluntly, a jet. 'If you're very pedantic,' Mr. Martin acknowledged, a gasoline-powered piston engine runs the large rotors. Jet Skis, he pointed out, are not jets, and the atmospheric jet stream is not created by engines. 'This thing flies on a jet of air,' he said. Or, more simply, it flies."
Lucky the $100k includes a couple of guys to hold it for you!
I suspect he either needs a fly by wire computer that manages stability or a third fan. Either way I think we're a wee way off from a production model.
Excellent, now my mechanic will be available to get to my flying car (which is also coming "soon") no matter where it is.
Yeah, but "Impractical Not-Really-A-Jetpack Maybe Available Sometime" doesn't have quite the same ring to it, does it?
I'm so excited I just made water in my pantaloons!
Okay, so it's not so much an android as a small two foot tall robot.
And by 'robot'.. I mean a cat wearing a cardboard box.
------------------ See! I can make my inventions sound grandiose by making things up, too!
In June 1997, seven weeks after the birth of his second child, Mr. Martin figured his prototype was now powerful enough to lift its first flier, so long as that person weighed less than 130 pounds. So he turned to his wife. "I said, 'Hey, Vanessa, what are you doing tonight?"
Mrs. Martin agreed to be her husband's levitating guinea pig.
She said she felt, in a way, that she had conquered it - "the taming of it, that's so exciting." It was, she said, "probably the best experience of my life."
Doesn't say a lot about being married to Mr. Martin or Mr. Martin's prowess in the sack, does it?
No mod points, no meta-moderating/Firehose/all the other free work Slashdot wants me to do.