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"Science Fiction is speculative fiction in which the author takes as his first postulate the real world as we know it, including all established facts and natural laws."
- Robert Heinlein
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| Automatic Pilot | ||
| A device to control the movement of aircraft using computer components. |
Marketing is everything in this classic novel from the 1950's. Although Pohl certainly did not invent the automatic pilot, he is one of the first to use a non-mechanical method to make it work.
| A team of designers went to work on an automatic pilot. When it was done it worked pretty well. And weighed four and a half tons in spite of printed circuits and relays constructed under a microscope. |
| Technovelgy from The Space Merchants,
by Frederik Pohl (w/CM Kornbluth). Published by St. Martin's Press in 1952 Additional resources -
|
Elmer A. Sperry built the first automatic pilot for aircraft using gyroscopes in 1910.
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Science Fiction
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'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.'
'...it rears and spreads its fan. It can pick one man out of a crowd.'
'...a new plastic with the characteristics of an avian eggshell.'
'It was a pushpot, which could not possibly be called a jet plane because it could not possibly fly. Only it did.'
'She wouldn't stop until Antar had told her everything he knew about whatever it was that she was playing with on her screen.'
'Does thinking you're the last sane man on the face of the Earth make you crazy?'
