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"For the sciences, the way to change science's perception of things is to wait until all the old farts have died off."
- Larry Niven
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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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'Power could be compressed thus into an inch-square cube of what looked like blue-white ice'
'It's so light that you can set it up in five minutes by yourself...'
'Heavy penalties... were to be applied to any one found driving manually-controlled machines.'
'Buy a Little Dingbat... electropen, wrist watch, pocketphone, pocket radio, billfold ... all in one.'
'... an elastic, tinted material that had all the feel and appearance of human flesh and epidermis.'
'It is remarkable that the long leverages of their machines are in most cases actuated by a sort of sham musculature...'
