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"In 1970 I found little difficulty staying 30 years ahead of the man in the street, and now I find it difficult to stay 18 months ahead of the man on the street."
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In the story, the last two survivors of an expedition are the victims of a peril too small to see. Pilot Al Kerny had an idea:
He gets out a Scarab - a "microrobot" - about a quarter of an inch long. Scientist Dr. Kurt Rolf was sceptical; even at a quarter of an inch in length, it was hopelessly too big.
This story clearly anticipates the idea of a nanomachine, and provides a method for constructing such a device. Other parts of the story contain speculations on whether or not materials would have the necessary properties in extremely small sizes.
Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman made quite a stir in his famous 1959 speech on nanotechnology by essentially reiterating what Gallun suggested more than twenty years earlier.
… Now, I want to build much the same device—a master-slave system which operates electrically. But I want the slaves to be made especially carefully by modern large-scale machinists so that they are one-fourth the scale of the “hands” that you ordinarily maneuver. So you have a scheme by which you can do things at one- quarter scale anyway—the little servo motors with little hands play with little nuts and bolts; they drill little holes; they are four times smaller. Aha! So I manufacture a quarter-size lathe; I manufacture quarter-size tools; and I make, at the one-quarter scale, still another set of hands again relatively one-quarter size! This is one-sixteenth size, from my point of view. And after I finish doing this I wire directly from my large-scale system, through transformers perhaps, to the one-sixteenth-size servo motors. Thus I can now manipulate the one-sixteenth size hands.
Well, you get the principle from there on. It is rather a difficult program, but it is a possibility.
Science fiction fans of course know that when Feyman is taking about "set of master and slave hands" he is referring to waldoes, which were invented by Robert Heinlein. So, I think sf writers anticipated this idea no matter how you slice it.
And here's an even earlier reference, the microhands by Boris Zhitkov - in 1931!
Compare these ideas to the microhands from Microhands (Микроруки) (1931) by Boris Zhitkov, the microrobot from The Scarab (1936) by Raymond Z. Gallun, the ultra-microrobot from Menace in Miniature (1937) also by Gallun, waldo from Waldo (1942) by Robert Heinlein, the golden shuttles from The Mechanical Mice (1941) by Maurice Hugi, the autofac nanorobots from Autofac (1955) by Philip K. Dick, the nanomachine swarm from The Invincible (1954) by Stanislaw Lem, the Christmas Bush robot from Rocheworld by Robert Forward and the robot cells from Robot City (1987) by Michael Kube-McDowell. Comment/Join this discussion ( 0 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This | Additional
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Science Fiction
Timeline
SpaceHopper Microgravity Robot Lands On Its Feet
'...a slender-legged tripod surmounted by a spherical body no larger than a football.'
Brin's 1990 Novel Earth Still Full Of Predictions
'... making the point that their likenesses, every move they made, were being transmitted.'
Gaia - Why Stop With Just The Earth?
'But the stars are only atoms in larger space, and in that larger space the star-atoms could combine to form living matter, thinking matter, couldn't they?'
Microsoft VASA-1 Creates Personal Video From A Photo
'...to build up a video picture would require, say, ten million decisions every second. Mike, you're so fast I can't even think about it. But you aren't that fast.'
Splendid View Of Eclipse From Orbit Visualized And Repurposed By Arthur C. Clarke
'The area affected was five hundred kilometres across, and perfectly circular.'
Goldene - A Two-Dimensional Sheet Of Gold One Atom Thick
'Hasan always pitched a Gauzy - a one-molecule-layer tent, opaque, feather-light, and very tough.'
SpaceX Wants A Moonbase Alpha
'And he had been sent with troops, supplies and bombs to command Russia's most trusted post, the Moonbase.'
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