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"I'm strictly an ivory-tower person. I can explain things but I can't do things."
- Isaac Asimov
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| Solar-Powered Aircraft | ||
| A plane powered entirely by solar energy. |
I don't know who first thought of powering an aircraft with solar energy alone; as far as I know, working models didn't appear until the 1970's. So, this is a fairly early mention of the idea.
| "Dad, I believe that you have been trying to develop a successful solar engine. One that could be placed in the wings of a plane to generate power from the light falling on that surface..."
"...the one big trouble with all solar engines, eliminating the obvious restriction that they decidedly aren't dependable for night work, is the difficulty of getting an area to absorb the energy. |
| Technovelgy from The Black Star Passes,
by John W. Campbell. Published by Amazing Stories in 1930 Additional resources -
|
The brothers Albert and Gaston Tissandier developed the first electrically propelled dirigible, first flown in 1883.
(Image: Library of Congress)
Compare to the electric plane from Synthetic (1930) by Charles Cloukey.
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More Ideas
and Technology from The Black Star Passes
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and Technology by John W. Campbell
Tech news articles related to The Black Star Passes
Tech news articles related to works by John W. Campbell
Solar-Powered Aircraft-related
news articles:
- Solar-Powered Aircraft In Fact and Fiction
- Solar Impulse HB-SIA Solar-Powered Plane Tested
- Electric Jet Planes With Superconducting Generators
- Solar Impulse Solar-Powered PlaneFlies!
- Solar Impulse Completes Night Flight
- VoltAir Electric Aircraft Concept
- Transcontinental Flight By Solar-Powered Plane
- Airbus E-Fan All-Electric Plane Now Ready
- Caihong Solar-Powered Drone 'Atmospheric Satellite'
- easyJet Short-Haul Electric Jets
- HVSD, Kitty Hawk's Electric Plane
| Darpa 'Defiant' Unmanned Autonomous Ship |
| DNA Printed Book By Isaac Asimov Now Available |
| Stratospheric Solar Geoengineering From Harvard |
| Create An Accurate Tiny Model Of Yourself |
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'An adjustment panel outside the door would cause it to extrude various appurtenances in memory plastic...'
'Annealed in any shape for a time, and codified, the structure of that shape is retained down to the molecules.'
It's not really polite to tear the limbs off robots.
'...the imaginary companions discovered by needful children.'
''Pardon me, Struthers,' he broke in suddenly... 'haven't you a section of the factory where only robot labor is employed?''
'I opened the oblong box, where lay the automatons side by side...'
'They tied the memory to the bloodline and that was their record!'
'It seems that at one time computers were designed directly by human beings.'
'...the spot was a lonely one in an uncharted region, far from the normal lanes of space traffic.'
