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"The thing that I'm most interested in at the moment is the so-called Infinite Energy solution - the possibility of finding new ways of tapping into virtually limitless sources of energy."
- Arthur C. Clarke

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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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from Eurema's Dam
  More Ideas and Technology by R.A. Lafferty
  Tech news articles related to Eurema's Dam
  Tech news articles related to works by R.A. Lafferty

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Science Fiction in the News

The Morphing Wheel And The Smartwheel
'If you surf over a bump, the spokes contract to roll over it.'

Transporting Antimatter
'...drawing plans for the magnetic tongs and bed plates and relays.'

Polish Turns Your Nail Into A Stylus
'He wrote on it, using the pointed fingernail of his right forefinger...'

I Wish This Plaudit Pin Was More Like A Wristpad
'Frank was cursing into his wristpad, switching between Arabic and English.'

World's Largest Teleoperated Arm
'...a pair so huge that Stevens could not conceive a use for it..'

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'...each of them is a neural mapping of the mind of a Tibetan monk who actually lived.'

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'The leg was to function, in a way, as a servo-mechanism operated by Larry’s brain, through the mediation of the electronic brain in the leg.'

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'...there's a narrow belt where the climate is moderate.'

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