Monthly Archives: October 2005

Only a handful of decades ago, a group of very smart scientists figured that if they crammed a giant metal barrel full of explosive chemicals and bolted on a little compartment for people or cargo, they could light the fuse and use the resulting explosion to propel the stuff into outer space. They called this assembly a “space rocket,” and aside from a few dozen catastrophic failures, the idea has been working swimmingly ever since. Unfortunately, moving stuff into space with rockets isn’t particularly economical, costing about $10,000 per pound even when the assembly doesn’t blow up. A single launch of the reusable US space shuttle costs roughly $500 million in total.

The problem is that the Earth’s escape velocity (the speed required to escape Earth’s gravity) is so bloody high. A rocket, which often weighs tens of thousands of pounds, must push that enormous weight up to about 420 miles per hour, and sustain such speeds for several minutes. The rocket must carry so much fuel to sustain these speeds that the fuel makes up a significant portion of the vehicle’s weight, meaning that much of the fuel is spent lifting the rest of the fuel off the ground.

Because there has been no alternative (aside from avoiding outer space altogether), humankind has been stuck with this method of Earth egress for as long as such efforts have been undertaken. Many clever people have contemplated the idea of a tower or cable that can reach into Earth’s orbit and ferry people and cargo into space and back with much less energy, but when knowledgeable persons took to scribbling out the calculations, they found that the tower was physically impossible, and that the strongest material known to man was only half the strength necessary to make a cable reaching into space. But all of that changed in 1991, when carbon nanotubes came along and offered a possible solution.

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Speaking personally, I consider sleep as a chore to be postponed for as long as possible. But sleepiness is a tenacious, unrelenting adversary, and drowsiness can have all the compassion of a 2×4 to the back of the head. I find it vaguely unsettling that every day, we humans experience the irresistible compulsion to pass out, and then remain unconscious for hours upon hours. We simply accept this involuntary stupor as natural when we really ought to be mortified.

All told, we humans spend about one third of our lives lying very still with our eyes closed. That means if you live to ninety years of age, you’ll have slept through thirty years of your life. What a waste. But is it feasible to reclaim that part of your life by reducing or eliminating sleep, without unwanted side effects?

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Mankind doesn’t really evolve. Not as a people. We copy, mimic, and integrate, all standing on the shoulders of the great men that came before. It’s an inherently unsteady system, and especially tragic where we can peer back through history and spot one of the rare and special truly great men who was, in his time or the generations thereafter, disregarded.

One such man was Hero of Alexandria. One of the Greek inventors of the first century AD, his geometric proof “Hero’s formula” was embraced and lived beyond him, he put automatic supermarketesqe doors on the temple, made a coin-operated vending machine for holy water, and built a fully automatic machine gun for arrows; but the one invention that really should have earned him notoriety was completely missed by the men of the era.

Hero created a steam engine, but they called it a aeolipile. Basically, a sealed boiler pot with a pipe running up to a sphere that would spin with the release of steam. The invention was likely dismissed because that’s all it did; it was a sight, but not practical at that time.

In 1600 years, when the steam engine was reinvented in France, ideas for its use came fast and frequent, but it hasn’t been until near the 21st Century that the first inventor of the world’s most used engine type has gotten any credit.

Wikipedia Aeolipile

The Rose Bowl is arguably the most famous annual college football game there is, often referred to as “The Granddaddy of Them All.” Every year, it is attended by tens of thousands of fans, and watched on television by millions. This was also true forty-four years ago, in 1961.

On that particular year, on January 2nd, the Minnesota Golden Gophers were taking on the Washington Huskies. The Rose Bowl stadium was filled to capacity, and almost 10 million viewers tuned in to NBC’s live coverage from homes, restaurants, and bars. The game itself was not particularly remarkable, and would have become just another smudge in the blur of history were it not for the unexpected events which unfolded during the halftime show. That day’s game has lived on in infamy ever since.

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In the first few days of 1916, Charles Hatfield and his brother Joel finished construction of a twenty-eight foot tower beside Morena Dam reservoir, about 60 miles east of San Diego. Atop the tower were galvanized steel evaporating tanks, ready to be filled with a secret chemical cocktail of Charles’ design. He had been hired by the San Diego city council to fill the near-empty Morena Dam reservoir, and was offered $10,000 to put it at capacity. Charles Hatfield was known as a Rainmaker, though he referred to himself with the much more scientific-sounding title of “Moisture Accelerator.”

Mr. Hatfield was infamous in America for his rain-making efforts, with enough high-profile “successes” to offset the failures (though whether he was causing the rain or just skillfully predicting it was a subject of lively debate). By the time the San Diego city council hired him, he had already been experimenting with rainmaking chemicals for about thirteen years. Just after the new year, the Hatfield brothers filled the evaporating tanks beside Morena Dam reservoir. Smoke and fumes wafted skyward, and within a few short days, the rains poured. And poured, and poured.

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