xenith | Entries tagged with technology

Watching the tweets about the live stream from the Hugos, I remembered how in 2002 we went straight from the ceremony to the internet lounge so we could be the first to post the results on sff.cons.worldcon (That's a newsgroup.) Do they even have internet lounges at cons now?

Of course, if I'm thinking about live feeds from awards, I have to think about the Nebula Awards in May, 1998. SFF Net arranged to have a live feed, by hooking Vonda McIntyre up with a computer, dial-up of course, and having her type a running commentary of events during an IRC chat.

And it went very well, except for a slight hiccup during the "Best Novel" presentation. I'll include that bit below.

( Cut for length )

I thought this was cool.

William Bland was surgeon on HMS Hesper until he killed the ship's purser in a duel and got transported for 7 years. On arriving in Sydney though, he was soon pardoned and he set up a private practice. He gets involved in various medical & political affairs, including turning down a medical appointment at Port Dalrymple offered "on condition that he passed an examination to be conducted by Drs D'Arcy Wentworth, William Redfern and West, but he refused as he considered himself better qualified than his examiners"1 and being sentenced to twelve months imprisonment for publishing & writing "some anonymous lines in 1818 on Macquarie's habit of attaching his name to geographical features and monuments"2. (Macquarie overdoing the naming thing? Who'd've thought)

Anyway, he has a couple of inventions to his name. One being the "Suppression of Spontaneous Combustion in Wool Ships", a working model of which was shown at the International Exhibition in London in 1851. The second was his Atmotic Ship -- a gas-filled balloon that supported an iron undercarriage for carrying pages & freights. Some references say it was intended to travel between Sydney & London in less than a week.

Drawings of the Atmotic Ship were sent back to England to be patented, and lithographs of these can be viewed on the State Library of NSW website.

And now here is the animated version of the lithographs!

webfarmer has a post about wind-powered boats , so I got to thinking about bigger things.

Preliminary findings:

There is Flettner's rotor ship, which

webfarmer mentions. It appears on the cover of Popular Mechanics in 1925

These days, there's obviously a bit of thought (and money) being put into wind-assisted ships, where a large kite provides part of the power alongside the traditional fuel motor. These are very big boats.

For a cargo ship driven totally by renewable energy, there's the futuristic Orcelle. There's a lot a talk about this one, type 'Orcelle' into Google

Another renewable energy alternative are solar ferries.

Going back a century or more though, could ships powered by wind turbines/rotors be an alternative to traditional sails? If they were faster, able to sail into the wind, used less crew and maybe less reliant on the fickleness of wind. Would they be practical though? Reliable? Affordable? Doable?

Or what about wave-power as a supplement to sails?

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