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"Science fiction has gotten more accurate as we've gotten closer to the present, because science fiction stories have not only attracted, but also generated current scientists."
- Larry Niven
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| Repellor Anti-Gravity Rays | ||
| Device provides support for planet-side air travel. |
| The ship was about the same shape as the great dirigibles of the 20th
Century that I had seen, but without the suspended control car,
engines, propellers; rudders or elevating planes. As it loomed rapidly
nearer, I saw that it was wider and somewhat flatter than I had
supposed.
Now I could see the repellor rays that held the ship aloft, like searchlight beams faintly visible in the bright daylight (and still faintly visible to the human eye at night). Actually, I had been informed by my instructors, there were two rays. The visible one was generated by the ship's apparatus, and directed toward the ground as a beam of "carrier" impulses. The true repellor ray, the complement of the other in one sense, induced by the action of the "carrier" reacted in a concentrating upward direction from the mass of the earth. It became successively electronic, atomic and finally molecular, in its nature, according to various ratios of distance between earth mass and "carrier" source, until, in the last analysis, the ship itself actually was supported on an upward rushing column of air, much like a ball continuously supported on a fountain jet. |
| Technovelgy from Armageddon: 2419 A.D.,
by Philip Frances Nowlan. Published by Amazing Stories in 1928 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the notion of an anti-gravity substance like apergy from Across the Zodiac (1880), cavorite from The First Men in the Moon (1901) and the bolt anti-grav from Sacred Martian Pig (1949) by Margaret Saint Clair.
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'I don't have to tell you about the seven two-mile-diameter orbital mirrors that circulate around the satellite, making it habitable.'
'The steel tortoise gave MacKinnon a feeling of Crusoe- like independence.'
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't came out into plain view. Darkington glimpsed a slim body and six short legs of articulated dull metal.'
'The suit stands up and starts walking, gripping me round the calves and waist, taking the bulk of my weight off my throbbing feet.'
'Internally it’s made up of millions of components, but the most important ones are the thinking and memory parts of the Mind proper.'
'I could look down at that face of carefully molded synthetic rubber, tinted the exact shade of the doctor's living flesh.'
