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"[Science fiction] is the one literary medium left in which we have a free hand. We can do any damn thing we please."
- Alfred Bester
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| Rolling Road | ||
| A set of fast-moving strips to move people over distances. |
This idea can now be seen in most major airports; they're called passenger conveyor belts. Heinlein also wrote about a more "pedestrian" version - the slidewalk.
| They glided down an electric staircase, and debouched on the walkway which bordered the north-bound five-mile-an-hour strip." Have you ever ridden a conveyor strip before?" Gaines inquired. "It's quite simple. Just remember to face against the motion of the strip as you get on." They threaded their way through homeward-bound throngs, passing from strip to strip... After passing through three more wind screens located at the forty, sixty and eighty-mile-an-hour strips, respectively, they finally reached the maximum speed strip, the hundred mile and hour strip, which made the round trip, San Diego to Reno and back, in twelve hours. |
| Technovelgy from The Roads Must Roll,
by Robert Heinlein. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1940 Additional resources -
|
This is probably a Heinlein rediscovery; you can read an earlier version of this concept - the moving roadway from H.G. Wells' 1899 story When the Sleeper Wakes. The first commercial passenger conveyor belt was built in 1954 (by Goodyear for the Hudson and Manhattan railroad).
Even earlier, the street slides from Mrs. Maberly: Or, The World as it Will be (1836) by an Anonymous Author.
By the way, the "electric stairway", or escalator, was introduced in 1900.
See also the speed belt (ribbon conveyor) from Slaves of Mercury (1932) by Nat Schachner.
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