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"I was involved in a cloning project. .. to send me into outer space along with a lot of other people. Not the whole me - just a hair from my head, while I still had some. I would thus pop up in another galaxy in the distant future."
- Arthur C. Clarke
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| Hilsch Vortex Tube | ||
| A T-shaped device that admits air under pressure and outputs hot air from side and cold from the other. |
The Hilsch Tube is a real device that dates from 1928. A French physics student named George Ranque was experimenting with a pipe that produced a vortex when he noticed warm air coming from one end and cool air from the other. Pressurized air blown into the single "bottom" leg of the "T" encounters a special valve at the junction; if adjusted properly, hot air comes out of the right side upper end at 100 degrees Fahrenheit and cold air comes out the other end at -70 degrees Fahrenheit. Unfortunately, it was not commercially viable at that time and was forgotten. It was picked up again by a German physicist named Rudolph Hilsch, who published a paper on the device.
Today, there are commercial companies that produce real, working Vortex Tubes; they produce cool air without electricity, and without all of the moving parts required by refrigeration equipment.
| And Development had not developed but found a remarkable little thing called a high-speed Hilsch Tube. Using no power, it could refrigerate the pioneers' homes by using the hot tornadoes of Venus. It was a simple thing that had been lying around since 1943. Nobody until us had any use for it because nobody until us had that kind of wind to play with. |
| Technovelgy from The Space Merchants,
by Frederik Pohl (w/CM Kornbluth). Published by St. Martin's Press in 1952 Additional resources -
|
Here's what I really like about the use of the Hilsch Vortex Tube in the story. It shows real flexibility of mind to take something which was of no apparent industrial use at the time (too much work involved in pressurizing the air going in), but would work in the new context of a windy Venus. Even though the Technovelgy site is about science fiction, not fantasy, this seems to be a case in which Maxwell's demon really exists.
If you are interested in the Hilsch Vortex tube, you might also be fascinated with the Windhexe. Nicknamed the "Tornado in a Can", the Windhexe creates a tornado-force wind within a steel funnel. It can reduce two tons of trash into one ton of sterile powder at a fraction of the energy cost of typical crushers, shredders and dryers. And nobody knows exactly how it works.
Take a look at some other real-world technologies that are put to work in a science fiction setting: lidar used in floating nanobots in Neal Stephenson's novel The Diamond Age, or the Sunpower screen that powered the grandfather of All Terrain Vehicles (ATVs) in Robert Heinlein's Coventry.
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Additional
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More Ideas
and Technology from The Space Merchants
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and Technology by Frederik Pohl (w/CM Kornbluth)
Tech news articles related to The Space Merchants
Tech news articles related to works by Frederik Pohl (w/CM Kornbluth)
Hilsch Vortex Tube-related
news articles:
- Vortex Engine - Tame Tornadoes May Generate Power
| 'Whisper Mode' ala Blue Thunder Researched At Bristol |
| Moonwalkers AI-Controlled Electric Shoes |
| Electric Catamaran 'Explorer Eco 40m' Has 'Solar Skin' |
| Harvest Power From Tears And Blinking With Smart Contact Lens |
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'Tell me your torments,' the Padre said, in an elderly voice marked with compassion.
'...a slender-legged tripod surmounted by a spherical body no larger than a football.'
'... making the point that their likenesses, every move they made, were being transmitted.'
'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?'
'...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.'
'The area affected was five hundred kilometres across, and perfectly circular.'
'Hasan always pitched a Gauzy - a one-molecule-layer tent, opaque, feather-light, and very tough.'
