Notes on various technologies and gadgets mentioned in Sewer, Gas & Electric
First, a general style note: when I started work on Sewer, Gas & Electric, cyberpunk
was still very much the rage in science fiction. Because I knew my story was going
to deal more with androids and robots than cyberspace, I decided to go with a more
retro version of The Future, in which the emphasis was on big, clunky machines and
Rube Goldberg-style contraptions. In Sewer, Gas, virtual reality and the Internet
exist, but don’t seem to get used much; people are too busy arguing with their household
appliances to spend hours online. Even the computers are throwbacks: Jerry Gant’s
state-of-the-art Cray PC sports a DOS-style interface, and the evil Gas Analogue
Supercomputer is big enough to require a bunker full of support equipment.
Though some of the technologies and gadgets mentioned in the story—like the plasma
computer—are purely my own invention, many were inspired by devices that either exist
or that somebody at some point wanted to create. Descriptions of some of these, and
notes on where I first heard about them, are listed below. As you’ll see, my most
valuable source of inspiration was a pair of books by Malcolm Abrams and Harriet
Bernstein called Future Stuff and More Future Stuff—both volumes sadly out of print,
alas.
George Washington’s Submarine · Acoustic Refrigeration System
“Portable” Televisions · Transparent Solar Collectors · Ostrich Farming
Privacy Windows · Petabyte RAM Chips · Laser Blinding Weapon
Liquid-Sensitive Power Interrupters · Pykrete · Ultrasonic Insect Repellers
The Swingspeed Baseball Bat
† † †
GEORGE WASHINGTON’S SUBMARINE
The first submarine to see action in wartime was the American Turtle, a one-man,
hand-powered vehicle built by Yale student David Bushnell in 1776.
— Sewer, Gas & Electric, chapter two
Sources: Various.
I’m not sure where I first read about the American Turtle, though it was probably
in a book called Good Old-Fashioned Yankee Ingenuity by Harry Harris. Since then
I’ve run across a dozen accounts of this Revolutionary War-era sub, all of them annoyingly
contradictory. When Tom Clancy wrote about the Turtle in his non-fiction book Submarine,
I was initially pleased, as he is supposed to be a whiz at military trivia—but Clancy
flubbed one of the few facts about the Turtle I had been able to verify with certainty,
which of course called the rest of his research into question. In the end I reminded
myself that as a fiction writer—and an absurdist fiction writer, at that—I didn’t
need to be perfectly accurate, and could give the Turtle any history I wanted it
to have.
The true story, though, goes something like this: once upon a time, in 1776, there
was a guy named David Bushnell who was either a student or a teacher at either Yale
University or Yale College—unless, that is, he was a gentleman farmer who just happened
to live near Yale. As his contribution to the fight for independence, Bushnell designed
and built a primitive attack submarine, having received a research grant for that
purpose from either George Washington or the Connecticut Safety Council.
The Turtle—so named because the flattened-egg shape of its hull resembled a turtle
floating head-down in the water, or because, like a turtle, it could stay submerged
for a while but eventually had to come up for air, or for some other reason—was made
mostly of wood. It carried a crew of one, and had enough air inside to keep said
crew member alive for about half an hour, unless he did something silly like light
a candle so that he could see what he was doing. Depth was controlled by means of
a ballast tank operated with foot pedals; a hand-cranked propeller drove the Turtle
forward through the water. Its only weapon was a gunpowder time bomb, attached by
a cord to a metal screw; the idea was that the Turtle’s pilot would sneak under an
enemy ship, use a hand-powered drill to drive the screw into the ship’s belly—thereby
anchoring the mine to the ship—light the mine’s fuse, and get the hell away before
it went off.
The Turtle’s trial run was an attempt to blow up the British flagship Eagle as it
lay at anchor in New York Bay (Tom Clancy says Boston Harbor, but he’s wrong). The
pilot for this attempt was an army sergeant named Ezra Lee, who had either trained
for the mission for months or been grabbed at the last minute when the original pilot—David
Bushnell’s brother—chickened out. After being towed out to the middle of the bay
by a rowboat, Lee proceeded under his own power to the British anchorage, and managed
to locate his target without being detected. But try as he might, he couldn’t get
the drill to penetrate the ship’s hull. This was because (a) the Eagle’s hull had
been sheathed in copper to protect it against parasites; (b) Lee had the bad luck
to strike an iron bolt; or (c) every action creates an equal and opposite reaction,
and the free-floating submarine had no way to brace itself, so every turn of the
screw just pushed it away.
Whatever the reason, Lee mucked around in the dark until his oxygen started to run
out and then gave up. By this point, the British had become curious about the funny
scratching noise on the hull, and launched one or several longboats to pursue the
fleeing Turtle. To distract his pursuers, Lee cut his time bomb loose; it exploded
harmlessly in the middle of the harbor, and Lee escaped.
Following this, the Turtle did or did not make one or two additional attempts to
sink British warships; if it did, they were also unsuccessful. Following that, the
Turtle was either dismantled to keep it from falling into the hands of the British,
or destroyed when the transport ship that was carrying it was sunk by cannon fire,
or packed away in the same government warehouse where they keep the Ark of the Covenant
and the bodies of the Roswell aliens.
And that’s what happened.
† † †
ACOUSTIC REFRIGERATION SYSTEM
Eskimos were hardy people who lived in sub-zero temperatures without a shiver. They
built houses of ice and caribou hide and never bathed. Morris Kazenstein thought
Ringo was kidding when he asked to have his sleeping quarters chilled to minus thirty
degrees Fahrenheit, but then got caught up in the technical challenge of the design.
After clearing out and insulating a double stateroom, Morris rigged up a chemical-free
acoustic refrigeration system...
— Sewer, Gas & Electric, chapter two
Source: More Future Stuff, by Malcolm Abrams & Harriet Bernstein.
The real-world acoustic refrigeration system that inspired Morris’s fictional one
was invented by a quartet of government scientists—Tom Hofler of the Naval Postgraduate
School in Monterey, California and Drs. John C. Wheatley, Gregory W. Swift and Albert
Migliori of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. While researching heat pumps for
the Department of Energy, they took a look at some earlier research that showed how
temperature change can be manipulated to create sound, and asked themselves whether
the process could be reversed, to manipulate sound in such a way as to dissipate
heat.
The answer was yes. According to More Future Stuff, “The technology uses a high-amplitude
loudspeaker—similar to the one in your stereo—with a piston on it that moves slightly
at a very high frequency. This piston is attached to a tube filled with a pressurized
gas, such as helium...Electronically generated sound waves are sent through this
device, causing it to ‘breathe’ in and out, which pumps out the heat. This action,
in turn, causes the tube to grow progressively colder. Voilà, refrigeration.”
Though not, strictly speaking, chemical-free—it does use pressurized helium—the major
selling point of the acoustic cooling engine is that it requires no ozone-depleting
chemicals like Freon. Though the government now owns the patent, Dr. Migliori confirmed
to me in an e-mail that he and his colleagues have hopes of marketing a “sound-powered”
home refrigerator sometime in the near future.
† † †
“PORTABLE” TELEVISIONS
Lexa’s home office contained her desk, a computer with numerous peripheral devices...a
folding bed, a collection of heart-shaped portraits, and, at the moment, the family
television, which was portable and ambled from room to room when not in use.
— Sewer, Gas & Electric, chapter three
Source: Future Stuff, by Malcolm Abrams & Harriet Bernstein.
Most of the Portable Televisions in Sewer, Gas & Electric are androids “with cable-ready,
high-definition monitor screens in place of heads,” but Lexa Thatcher’s TV is described
as “an antique Sony Animan, a 19-inch screen perched on pistoning legs of oiled brass.”
The Animan is an actual walking TV being developed by Sony as a possible commercial
product (although the real Animan’s legs aren’t brass, I’m sure you’ll be able to
order a custom model if the thing ever makes it onto the market). In addition to
being the perfect centerpiece for your favorite rich uncle’s home media suite, the
Animan supposedly has potential as an electronic watchdog. Brian Elliot, the Animan’s
inventor, equipped his prototype with a security camera: “When night falls, the Animan
becomes the Aniscout as it patrols the home and sounds an alarm if a burglar is on
the premises.” Some skeptics may ask why anyone would pay thousands of dollars for
an Electric Watchdog when real watchdogs are available for free at the local ASPCA
shelter, but remember: you can’t watch The X-Files on a Doberman.
† † †
TRANSPARENT SOLAR COLLECTORS
And of course there was the dome. Buckminster Fuller had yet to establish a foothold
in Rabat or Tangier, but New Bedford-Stuyvesant lay enclosed and protected beneath
a geodesic bubble. Each triangular panel in the structure was a transparent solar
collector, so that on long sunny days the dome generated enough electricity to run
the climate-control center and satisfy up to forty percent of the neighborhood’s
modest power needs.
— Sewer, Gas & Electric, chapter three
Source: Future Stuff, by Malcolm Abrams & Harriet Bernstein.
My old college friend Evan Evanson points out that these should properly be called
translucent solar collectors, since a genuinely transparent medium by definition
doesn’t collect anything. Semantic issues aside, though, these are basically solar
panels that you can see through. Japanese engineers at Sanyo Electric figured out
a way to etch thousands of microscopic holes in solar cells, letting enough light
through that the cells can be used as window panes, while still skimming off enough
photon energy to serve as a useful power source.
Incidentally, regarding the forty percent figure mentioned in the above excerpt:
detail-freak that I am, I thought seriously about trying to calculate that number—working
out the power generating capacity of a one-foot square transparent solar cell on
an average long sunny day at 41 degrees north latitude, multiplying that by the projected
surface area of a neighborhood-sized Fuller dome, and dividing that by a guesstimate
of the daily energy consumption of New Bedford-Stuyvesant in the year 2023—but in
the end I just made it up.
† † †
OSTRICH FARMING
“Progress,” Kite said, shaking her head. “I remember one of the last steady jobs
I ever had, wrangling ostrich on a Texas farm just after the millennium. Saturday
nights all the hands would sit out under the stars, drink, and roast three-foot drumsticks
on an open grill—the only right way to do it.”
— Sewer, Gas & Electric, chapter four
Sources: The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
Not a gadget or a technology, but The Next Big Thing in livestock...maybe. According
to the American Ostrich Association, U.S. ostrich farming got its start in the early
1980s, and as of 1995 there were between 350,000 and half a million of the birds
being raised commercially across the country. “Most ostriches go to slaughter at
10-14 months of age, produce about 70 pounds of meat, 14 square feet of leather and
two pounds of feathers.... Ostrich meat has been served in the United States in fine
restaurants since 1992. While ostrich meat is new to us, it is not new to much of
the world. Ostrich meat...has long been served in gourmet restaurants in Europe...
A satisfying alternative for red-meat lovers—the color, flavor and texture of ostrich
meat is similar to beef with two-thirds less fat.”
One potential stumbling block to the acceptance of ostrich into the red meat family
is the lack of a proper euphemism. When I want to order a high-cholesterol breakfast,
I ask for “bacon and eggs,” not “pig meat and eggs”; likewise, “veal piccata” would
sound a lot less appetizing listed on a menu as “anemic calf piccata.” Suggestions
for possible ostrich-meat euphemisms should be forwarded to the American Ostrich
Association at aoa@ostriches.org.
† † †
PRIVACY WINDOWS
“Please to shut up and dim window,” Salvatore replied... “Keep your pants on,” said
Frankie. He thumbed a button on the sill and the window glass became opaque, blocking
out the view of the pool.
— Sewer, Gas & Electric, chapter ten
Source: Future Stuff, by Malcolm Abrams & Harriet Bernstein.
Another real-world product, privacy windows consist of a polarizing medium—like the
liquid crystal used in LCD watches—sandwiched between two panes of glass. By applying
an electric current to the medium, the windows can be made to switch between transparent
and opaque states, eliminating the need for drapes. Early versions came with a simple
on/off switch, but more recent models replace the liquid crystal with a “suspended
particle device film” in which the degree of polarization can be modulated, allowing
you to dim the windows without darkening them completely.
Though still too expensive for most homes, privacy windows have found some interesting
commercial uses. One Philadelphia restaurant designed its bathrooms—which are visible
from the main dining area—with doors made of privacy glass. The doors are see-through
until they are locked, and the poor schmuck going about his or her business inside
must cope with the nagging suspicion that the opaqueness is really only one-way.
Excellent for paranoids.
† † †
PETABYTE RAM CHIPS
Maxwell left the overhead lights off, using his flash to locate the Cray PC that
Joan wrote letters and balanced her checkbook with; designed to meet the needs of
a public opinion comptroller, the PC was absurdly over-powered for such menial tasks,
though still handy for the occasional special project... Working by flashlight, it
took him only a few minutes to patch the egg into the Cray’s CPU and give it an extra
petabyte of RAM to run around in.
— Sewer, Gas & Electric, chapter eleven
Source: AI; The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence, by
Daniel Crevier.
In Sewer, a crazy ex-Marine accidentally conjures up a godlike artificial intelligence
called the Eye of Africa when he plugs a stolen memory core into a powerful desktop
PC. In order to make this scene at least remotely plausible, I wanted to make sure
the PC in question had enough random access memory to hold a human-sized (or slightly
larger) consciousness. Daniel Crevier’s book AI conveniently provided me with a number
of estimates for the memory capacity of a typical human brain. The most conservative
of these estimates, in which Crevier assumes that each of the brain’s quadrillion
synapses can hold four bits of information, yields a total storage capacity of 500
trillion bytes, which I rounded up to one quadrillion bytes to give the computer
an edge over the average human.
1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes equals 1,000,000,000,000 kilobytes, which equals 1,000,000,000
megabytes, which equals 1,000,000 gigabytes, which equals 1,000 terabytes, which
equals, you guessed it, one petabyte—a unit of memory storage so large that, even
among computer geeks, it is not common parlance...yet.
Will home computers really have petabyte-sized memories twenty-five years from now?
Probably not, or at least not quite. If you trust Moore's Law, the industry rule-of-thumb
that says computers double in power every eighteen months, the current (early 1998)
PC standard of 32 megabytes of RAM should increase to around four terabytes of RAM
by 2023—most of it totally unnecessary for anything other than game-playing.
Update 2007: Nine years/six doublings later, my just-purchased Dell computer sports
2 gigabytes of RAM, which is about nine gigabytes shy of what Moore’s Law would have
predicted. Then again, I haven’t upgraded to Microsoft Vista yet...
† † †
LASER BLINDING WEAPON
“The Cinder was an automated laser system. It scanned a fixed area, tracked a low-power
beam back and forth, up and down, looking for reflective surfaces: eyeglass lenses,
binocular optics, telescopic sights. When it found one, or two right next to each
other, it upped the wattage on the beam for a few seconds. Get the picture?”
— Sewer, Gas & Electric, chapter thirteen
Source: How to Make War: A Comprehensive Guide to Modern Warfare for the Post-Cold
War Era, by James F. Dunnigan.
First off, it’s worth noting that any sufficiently powerful laser—such as the laser
rangefinders on many high-tech weapons—can be used as an impromptu blinding tool;
the Iraqis are reported to have done this during their 1981-89 war with Iran. Laser
weapons designed specifically to cause permanent blindness in enemy troops are technologically
feasible and have been researched by a number of countries, including Russia and
the U.S., though they are not yet in wide scale use by any army.
Blinding weapons are predictably controversial. In addition to being considered inhumane,
there is concern that any mass-produced blinding laser would inevitably end up in
the hands of terrorists. Many of the same groups that have been seeking a world ban
on land mines are also lobbying for a ban on blinding lasers.
While I can understand the horror that these weapons inspire, and make reference
to it in Sewer, I have to say that the distinction between humane and inhumane warfare
is largely lost on me. Opposition to land mines is one thing—those things hang around
for years after a battle is over, and kill civilians. As far as fighting enemy soldiers
is concerned, though, if I am willing to decapitate someone with an artillery shell,
I can’t imagine why I’d scruple at just maiming him, especially once he started lobbing
artillery shells at me.
The Department of Defense, however, doesn’t see it that way. In September of 1995,
the D.O.D. officially prohibited the use of blinding laser weapons by U.S. troops.
Also, the current generation of laser target-designators are said to use light frequencies
less harmful to unprotected eyes—so people who have smart bombs dropped on them won’t
have to worry about needing seeing-eye dogs afterwards.
† † †
LIQUID-SENSITIVE POWER INTERRUPTERS
Okay, so you couldn’t kill a shark by throwing a hair dryer in the water. In the
twenty-first century, all plug-in appliances came equipped with liquid-sensitive
power interrupters to prevent accidental electrocution, but how was Frankie Lonzo
supposed to know that? People still fried themselves in the bathtub all the time
in movies.
— Sewer, Gas & Electric, chapter thirteen
Source: Future Stuff, by Malcolm Abrams & Harriet Bernstein.
Actually called an Immersion Detection Circuit Interrupter, or IDCI, this is a specialized
circuit breaker that trips if you dunk it in water. Drop an IDCI-equipped hair dryer
in the tub, and it shuts off before the current can kill you. Fortunately these are
not yet required by law, so slasher-movie directors who are fond of the old space-heater-in-the-Jacuzzi
shtick can still claim verisimilitude.
† † †
PYKRETE
“That's the latest addition,” Jerry said, indicating a metal cabinet whose drawer-trays
contained the entirety of the Wall Street Journal on microfilm. “You wouldn’t think
it, but they have some marvelous human interest stories tucked in among the financial
reports. Historical chestnuts, some of them, the sort of nifty anecdotes that don’t
make it into mainstream history texts. Did you know, for instance, that during World
War II the Allies were considering building an aircraft carrier out of ice?”
“Did the originator of this idea,” Kite asked, “have a short last name?”
— Sewer, Gas & Electric, chapter fourteen
Source: Significa, by Irving Wallace, David Wallechinsky and Amy Wallace.
It was British inventor Geoffrey Pyke who came up with the idea of countering the
German U-boat threat by building an artificial iceberg that would serve as an aircraft
carrier. Pyke had developed a frozen mixture of water and sawdust, dubbed “pykrete,”
that was extremely slow-melting, buoyant, and tough, yet could be sawn and shaped
like wood. Pyke sent a sample of pykrete along with a lengthy proposal to Vice Admiral
Lord Louis Mountbatten, who in turn took Pyke’s idea to Winston Churchill. According
to Significa, Churchill was soaking in a bubble bath when Mountbatten came to see
him: “Mountbatten tossed the pykrete into the hot water. To their amazement, the
ice did not melt.”
Pyke’s plan called for 280,000 prefabricated pykrete cubes to be assembled into a
2,000-foot long floating platform, which would then be hollowed out to provide space
for crew quarters, plane hangers, engines, and a gigantic refrigeration plant. The
resulting carrier, which Pyke called Habakkuk, would displace two million tons and
be able to carry as many as 150 long-range bomber or fighter planes.
A 1,000-ton test model was constructed at Patricia Lake in Alberta, Canada. It was
repeatedly bombed, strafed, and torpedoed, but would not sink. Despite the successful
test, Allied commanders thought better of the idea, and decided not to build the
Habakkuk. Pyke was devastated by the project's cancellation: according to Significa,
he adopted the motto “Nothing must be tried for the first time,” and ultimately committed
suicide.
Update 2007: Thanks to a reader named Thomas Fuller, I now have a recipe for pykrete:
“Put seven cups of cold water in a plastic milk jug—put the jug in the freezer long
enough for flowable slush to form—(about 32.3 degrees F)—put in one heaping cup of
fine sawdust—shake well so that the sawdust remains in suspension. Put the jug back
in the minus 10 degree F freezer for about four days. The jug of Pykrete will keep
an ice chest colder longer than the ‘blue stuff.’”
† † †
ULTRASONIC INSECT REPELLERS
“Wait. New contact!... Bloody Mary says it’s a blimp... Eight turbine engines, low
over the water, and also some sort of loudspeaker feedback whine, very high-pitched,
almost ultrasonic—like the high-frequency sound used to repel insects.”
— Sewer, Gas & Electric, chapter twenty
Sources: Various.
You’ve seen the ads for these in the backs of magazines: “insect repellers” that
supposedly chase mosquitoes and other nasty bugs away by emitting sound in a frequency
too high for humans to hear. The only problem is, there’s absolutely no scientific
evidence that they work (except, of course, against robot insects specifically programmed
to be susceptible to them).
While we’re on the subject, the more common “bug zappers” don't really work either.
While they do offer a certain sadistic psychological comfort, most of the insects
they kill are of the non-biting variety; and even if every bug they fried was a mosquito,
the overall effect on the mosquito population—and on the number of mosquito bites—would
be negligible. Still, they’re fun to watch.
† † †
THE SWINGSPEED BASEBALL BAT
Vanna took an involuntary step back. Something shifted behind her, some piece of
the clutter Harry had collected in his office. She reached a hand around to steady
it, and felt a smooth wooden handle. It was a baseball bat—a Swingspeed Training
Bat, manufactured by the same toy company that made Gant’s puzzle boxes. It measured
the batter’s swing velocity and displayed it in miles per hour on a digital readout
at the bottom of the handle.
— Sewer, Gas & Electric, chapter twenty-two
Source: Future Stuff, by Malcolm Abrams & Harriet Bernstein.
Invented by a dean at the University of Maine who was worried about his son’s athletic
scholarship prospects, the Swingspeed Bat uses a device called a slide potentiometer
to measure the centrifugal force of your swing and convert it into a miles-per-hour
velocity measurement. Though it would seem to be a natural for the Hammacher Schlemmer
catalogue, the Swingspeed Bat doesn’t appear to have made it onto the market yet.
Useless trivia fact #5283: In German, the Swingspeed Bat is called a Swingspeed-Übungsschläger.
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