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"The wealth of the universe is all over your head. We need to take command of the solar system to gain that wealth..."
- Larry Niven
 |
| Telelubricator | ||
| Makes any surface or substance perfectly frictionless. |
Professor Methuen has gone slightly mad and uses his considerable scientific and engineering gifts to pull pranks on his colleagues. When they try to stop him at his house, something unusual happens.
Every time he applied a horizontal component of force to a hand or knee, the hand or knee simply slid backward.
So, how does it work?
...something happened to the front steps under him. They became slicker than the smoothest ice...
| "...My telelubricator here neutralizes the interatomic bonds the surface of any solid on which the beam falls. So the surface, to the depth of a few molecules, is put in the condition of a supercooled liquid as long as the beam is focused on it. Since the liquid form of any compound will wet the solid form, you have perfect lubrication." |
| Technovelgy from The Exhalted,
by L. Sprague de Camp. Published by Astounding Science-Fiction in 1940 Additional resources -
|
Clifford Simak was also fascinated by the idea of a frictionless surface; see the frictionless surface from his 1963 story Way Station.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from The Exhalted
More Ideas
and Technology by L. Sprague de Camp
Tech news articles related to The Exhalted
Tech news articles related to works by L. Sprague de Camp
Telelubricator-related
news articles:
- MIT Tunes Ions For Frictionless Surface - Superlubricity!
- Omniphobic Liquid-like Surfaces And de Camp's Telelubricator (1940)
| Terraformer Industries Make Methane |
| Ridiculous 'Ghost Murmur' Tech Still Science Fiction |
| Infrared Contact Lenses To See In The Dark |
| Can 'Tactical Umbrellas' Shield One From Drones |
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'Chris, the City Fathers are not interested in your welfare; I suppose you know that. They're interested in only one thing: the survival of the city.'
'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
