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"Science fiction operates a little bit like science itself, in principle. You've got thousands of people exploring ideas, putting forth their own hypotheses. Most of them are dead wrong; a few stand the test of time; everything looks kind of quaint in hind"
- Peter Watts

Tickler  
  Clears smog and saves the residue for later use.  

Didn't I see one of these in the Sharp catalog? Maybe for one room in your house; this one would freshen the air in your neighborhood.

You remember that anciently there was smog in the cities. Oh, it could be drawn out of the air easily enough. All it took was a tickler. Albert made a tickler machine. He would set it fresh every morning. It would clear the air in a circle three hundred yards around his hovel and gather a little over a ton of residue every twenty-four hours. This residue was rich in large polysyllabic molecules which one of his chemical machines could use.
Technovelgy from Eurema's Dam, by R.A. Lafferty.
Published by New Dimension in 1972
Additional resources -

I seem to recall Nicholas Negroponte pontificating about how WiFi would free the internet by making "lilypads" of access (200 foot diameter circles around WiFi access points). Well, that would be nice; but I think having lots of 300 yard diameter clean air zones would be nicer.

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  More Ideas and Technology from Eurema's Dam
  More Ideas and Technology by R.A. Lafferty
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Science Fiction in the News

The New Habitable Zones Include Asimov's Ribbon Worlds
'...there's a narrow belt where the climate is moderate.'

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'... with the Master-operator all you have to do is push one! A remarkable achievement!'

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'Not like me. A T-1000, advanced prototype. A mimetic poly-alloy. Liquid metal.'

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'It was riddled with holes that were the mouths of tunnels.'

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'The massive feet working the pedals, arms and hands flashing and glinting...'

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'There is a philosophical problem of some difficulty here...'

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'On the chest of drawers something was perched.'

Leader-Follower Autonomous Vehicle Technology
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