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"I think engineering will supply our demand for a "spiritual" life after meat death."
- Bart Kosko
 |
| Disintegrator Plate Ray | ||
| Ray cuts through metal like butter. |
Destruction on a vast scale.
| It did not take us long to find the dark bulk of the disintegrator. It was a squat cylinder, for all the world like a huge boiler. At one end there up-ended a periscope arrangement which broadened out to a funnel. In the funnel was a very powerful lens, cut to special measurements. The light of the sun, or any light, for that matter, was concentrated through the lens onto a series of photo-electric cells, composed of an alloy of selenium and the far more delicate element, illinium. A high tension current was there created, of such powerful intensity that it disintegrated the atoms of every element except osmium and indium into their constituent electrons.
Consequently the interior as well as the long slit nozzle orifice at the other end, were made of these resistant metals. Through a special process the tremendously powerful current was forced through the wide-angled nozzle in a spreading thin plate ray that sheared through earth and rock and metals as if they were butter. Such was the machine we were after. |
| Technovelgy from The Revolt of the Machines,
by Nat Schachner (w. AL Zagat). Published by Astounding Stories in 1931 Additional resources -
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"The robot solemnly hit a ball against the wall, picked it up and teed it, hit it again, over and again...'
'There was a wall ahead... It was riddled with holes that were the mouths of tunnels.'
'...support the interior human structure against Jupiter’s pull.'
'Anything larger than a BB shot it picked up and placed in a tray...'
'The German chemists have discovered how to supply the needed elements in compact, undiluted form...'
'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...'
