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"People are choosing to allow television and Electronic Arts to do all their imagining for them."
- Peter Watts
 |
| The Cosmic Express | ||
| A means of transmitting matter wirelessly. |
Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding wrote novels of high adventure - in a drab, boring era in the not-too-distant future, when the plodding of the scientific method had reduced all challenges to harmless trivialities. Ah, to escape to a more primitive world - Venus, perhaps? But how to get there...
| "The Cosmic Express?"
"A new invention. Just perfected a few weeks ago, I understand. By Ludwig Von der Valls, the German physicist... A new way to travel—by ether!" "...the method, in the new Cosmic Express, is simply to convert the matter to be carried into power, send it out as a radiant beam and focus the beam to convert it back into atoms at the destination." "...The beam is focused, just like the light that passes through a camera lens. The photographic lens, using light rays, picks up a picture and reproduces it again on the plate--just the same as the Express Ray picks up an object and sets it down on the other side of the world.
 (The Cosmic Express) "An analogy from television might help. You know that by means of the scanning disc, the picture is transformed into mere rapid fluctuations in the brightness of a beam of light. In a parallel manner, the focal plane of the Express Ray moves slowly through the object, progressively, dissolving layers of the thickness of a single atom, which are accurately reproduced at the other focus of the instrument--which might be in Venus! "But the analogy of the lens is the better of the two. For no receiving instrument is required, as in television. The object is built up of an infinite series of plane layers, at the focus of the ray, no matter where that may be. Such a thing would be impossible with radio apparatus because even with the best beam transmission, all but a tiny fraction of the power is lost, and power is required to rebuild the atoms. Do you understand, dear?" |
| From The Cosmic Express,
by Jack Williamson. Published by Amazing Stories in 1930 Additional resources -
|
I'd also point out that this is the earliest description that I know about of the idea behind 3D printers.
Here's a description of how it works:
Eric helped Nada to a place on the crystal, lay down at her side.
"I think the Express Ray is focused just at the surface of the crystal, from below," he said. "It dissolves our substance, to be transmitted by the beam. It would look as if we were melting into the crystal."
"Ready," called the youth.
A bell jangled. "So long," the youth called.
Nada and Eric felt themselves enveloped in fire. Sheets of white flame
seemed to lap up about them from the crystal block. Suddenly there was a
sharp tingling sensation where they touched the polished surface. Then
blackness, blankness.
Thanks to Jordan Bassior for suggesting this item.
Compare to Deposition (3D Printing) from Assassin (1978) by James P. Hogan and plastic constructor from Things Pass By (1945) by Murray Leinster. Also, the Biltong life-forms from Pay for the Printer (1956) by Philip K. Dick.
The little door had swung open again, and Eric led Nada through. They stepped into a little cell, completely surrounded with mirrors and vast prisms and lenses and electron tubes. In the center was a slab of transparent crystal, eight feet square and two inches thick, with an intricate mass of machinery below it.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from The Cosmic Express
More Ideas
and Technology by Jack Williamson
Tech news articles related to The Cosmic Express
Tech news articles related to works by Jack Williamson
The Cosmic Express-related
news articles:
- Fab@Home 'Fabber' Freeform Fabricator
- 3D Printed Replacement Tissue
- EXPLORER, The First Total-Body Scanner
| ODYSSEUS Solar-Powered Stratospheric Plane Flies Forever |
| Phil Nuyttnn's City Under The Sea |
| Stick-On Tape Speakers, As Predicted By Bruce Sterling |
| Has Climate Change Already Been Solved By Aliens? |
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'... forcing the energy transfer which allowed him to ... erase the other internal-external damage.'
'Of course, being negative matter, when you push it, it comes toward you..'
'They'll also start pulling in gases and liquids from the local atmosphere...'
'The plastex swam and whirled like boiling toothpaste...'
'The object is built up of an infinite series of plane layers, at the focus of the ray...'
'... the computing mechanisms that studied and restructured the incoming material.'
'... an instrument having relatively small bit pieces adapted to be gripped between the teeth.'
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'The cab was an egg-shaped bubble of light metals and plastics...'
