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"I was driving a dynamite truck when I was 14 years old in North Carolina."
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In this excellent short story, the first spaceship takes off for a destination outside the solar system. How to keep your ship on course over the long days...
This is not a true autopilot, since it does not correct the course. It just warns the pilot if the ship has wandered from its course setting.
However, I think it's a pretty good idea for 1931; airports had only started using lights in the late 1920's. They didn't even have real approach lighting until the 1930's. The lights in rows were only standardized in the 1940's.
I'm guessing that Wilson's idea is derived from the idea of using a photoelectric cell to keep a telescope trained on a star, which has been around since about 1915 (if I remember correctly). Comment/Join this discussion ( 0 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This | Additional
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