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"I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
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| Automatic Light Switch | ||
| A device that senses if an illuminated room is empty, and turns off the light. |
Waste not, want not - a saying made for the lunar environment.
| As they left their joint office, Strong, always penny conscious, was careful to switch off the light. Harriman had seen him do so a thousand times; this time he commented. "George, how about a light switch that turns off automatically when you leave a room?"
"Hmm- but suppose someone were left in the room?" "Well... hitch it to stay on only when someone was in the room- key the switch to the human body's heat radiation, maybe." "Too expensive and too complicated." "Needn't be. I'll turn it over to Ferguson to fiddle with. It should be no larger than the present light switch and cheap enough so the power saved in a year will pay for it..." |
| Technovelgy from The Man Who Sold The Moon,
by Robert Heinlein. Published by Shasta in 1950 Additional resources -
|
This kind of switch exists today, of course; they are cheap enough to pay for themselves in a year or so of use.
I don't know if this idea is original to Heinlein or not; commercial light switches for use in homes have been around since the 1890's, if not a bit earlier.
Heinlein continues his justification for such a device, proceeding along in a vein that seems to have some validity today.
"You can if the power continues to be rationed. There is a power shortage now; and there will be a bigger one."
Thanks to an anonymous reader, new to Technovelgy.com, who left this tip on the contact page.
Strong objected. "It's no good commercially. Switching of a light when you leave a room is a matter of temperament... If a man hasn't got it, you can't interest him in such a switch."
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'Compounds devised by the biochemists for the rapid building of bone...'
'The car faltered as the external command came to brake...'
'It is about the size and shape of a kitchen stool, gyro-stabilized...'
'The greatest problem of all was the elimination of the human element of braking together with its inevitable time lag.'
'Across the ancient sea floor a dozen tall, blue-sailed Martian sand ships floated, like blue smoke.'
'Power could be compressed thus into an inch-square cube of what looked like blue-white ice'
