Tesla’s toy boat: A drone before its time

Welcome to Time Machines, where we offer up a selection of mechanical oddities, milestone gadgets and unique inventions to test out your tech-history skills.

The military complex has certainly embraced the concept of telerobotics, especially in the use of drones, but luckily the technology has also led to other, more peaceful applications. Drones have been used to entertain, take on laborious tasks and even deliver packages (and burritos!). As we pursue the development of remotely controlled and autonomous craft, we must tread carefully or suffer the same fate as the fabled Icarus. Nikola Tesla saw both the terrible as well as the beneficial consequences for this technology when he debuted the “remote control” and the jury is still out as to whether we’ll succumb to a dystopian Terminator-style future or reach a peaceful stasis, where we harness the usefulness of robots and autonomous devices, and avoid the worst-case scenarios. Head past the break for more of the story.

Nikola Tesla’s Remote Control Boat

Tesla once said, “The world moves slowly, and new truths are difficult to see.” It was his way of responding to the crowd’s stunned disbelief upon viewing his scientific wizardry at New York’s Madison Square Garden in 1898. Using a small, radio-transmitting control box, he was able to maneuver a tiny ship about a pool of water and even flash its running lights on and off, all without any visible connection between the boat and controller. Indeed few people at the time were aware that radio waves even existed and Tesla, an inventor often known to electrify the crowd with his creations, was pushing the boundaries yet again, with his remote-controlled vessel.

Tesla’s presentation, which was part of an Electrical Exhibition, was decried as magic by some, but it’s unsurprising that others would focus on its potential as a weapon. It wouldn’t be the first time that well-known inventors had made a foray into war devices. Thomas Edison had been involved in the Sims-Edison Electrical Torpedo Company and in 1892 demonstrated the merits of its wire-guided torpedo. This 31-foot-long device was powered and controlled through a hardwired tether and manipulated by a remote on-shore operator, with the goal of harbor defense by delivering an explosive payload into invading vessels. A few months prior to Tesla’s radio-controlled presentation, W.J. Clarke, general manager of the US Electrical Supply Company, made use of radio waves for yet another warlike implementation. He proceeded to blow up toy ships by wirelessly detonating floating mines with radio waves, cribbing the basic design for his machine from Italian inventor Gueglielmo Marconi.

When Tesla unveiled his own invention at the 1898 exhibition, the display consisted of an indoor pool, a 4-foot-long miniature ship and a control box equipped with various levers. The deck of the ship was studded with antennae for receiving signals, with the tallest located in the center and two others topped with small light bulbs. The lights would help an operator gauge the position and direction of the vessel in the cover of darkness. Its motion was driven by a screw propeller, with a keel and rudder situated in the standard positions for a nautical vessel. Inside the boat’s hull, there was an electric motor driving both the propeller and rudder, a storage battery and a mechanism for receiving the radio signals sent from the control box. Without the limits of a wired connection between the controls and the remote device, Tesla’s invention would allow operators to effect changes in speed and direction, and control on-board gadgets (such as lights or moving parts), even from a moving vehicle.

Although newspaper headlines chose to focus on the use of Tesla’s device as a wirelessly controlled torpedo, his plans for the invention were not wholly aimed at warfare. In a 1900 article from Century magazine, Tesla described a moment of self-realization, seeing his own mind and body as an automaton, reacting to external stimuli and situations. He stated that contemporary automatons were simply using a “borrowed mind,” and responded to orders from a distant and intelligent operator. Tesla believed that one day we may be able to endow a machine with its “own mind,” where it, too, can act on environmental stimuli of its own accord. According to Margaret Cheney’s Tesla: A Man Out of Time, when asked about the boat’s potential as an explosive-delivery system, Tesla retorted, “You do not see there a wireless torpedo; you see there the first of a race of robots, mechanical men which will do the laborious work of the human race.”

Filed under: Science, Alt

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Inhabitat’s Week in Green: Passat BlueMotion, jellyfish drones and a pig-cloning factory

Each week our friends at Inhabitat recap the week’s most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us — it’s the Week in Green.

The North American International Auto Show kicked off last week in Detroit, and Team Inhabitat went to the Motor City for an early look at the industry’s eco-friendly offerings. Topping the list at this year’s show is Ford’s C-MAX Solar Energi, a hybrid electric car with a set of high-efficiency SunPower photovoltaic panels installed on its roof. Also in Detroit, Audi unveiled its Allroad Shooting Brake Concept, a compact plug-in hybrid that’s designed to handle “light off-road conditions.” And Volkswagen showed off its new Passat BlueMotion concept, which boasts the highest highway fuel economy rating of any non-hybrid mid-size sedan. Auto companies have good reason to be bullish on eco-friendly cars — just ask Tesla. The electric automaker recorded its highest sales figures in history in the fourth quarter of 2013. But despite recent advances in fuel efficiency, a new University of Michigan study makes a case for ditching personal cars altogether, proving that cars are the most inefficient form of transportation.

Wind farms are great and all, but they’re big and expensive to operate. Wouldn’t it be great if we could use a shrink ray like in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and scale windmills down to a tiny size without losing much efficiency? Researchers at the University of Texas are working on producing teeny-tiny windmills that are just 1.88mm wide and could be used to charge mobile devices. Meanwhile, Spain is embracing wind energy on a large scale. Last year, the country generated 21.1 percent of its energy from turbines, making wind Spain’s top energy source for 2013. In California, an enormous 579MW solar power plant just went online. The plant will ultimately provide enough electricity to power 255,000 homes. And in Las Vegas, a new grove of solar trees is providing the energy to light the “Welcome to Las Vegas” sign.

The big news out of Silicon Valley last week was that Google had acquired Nest, the maker of energy-saving thermostats for $3.2 billion. The acquisition is a big validation for green tech, and it instantly made Nest a household name. Google’s experimental X Lab also made headlines by unveiling a smart contact lens that can monitor the glucose levels of diabetics. In other science and tech news, a South Korean designer unveiled a conceptual scuba mask that turns divers into human fish, and researchers at NYU created a tiny drone that mimics the movement of a jellyfish. Also in the “biomimicry” file, the company Bioglow has taken a cue from fireflies to create the world’s first light-producing plant, and our resident biomimicry expert Dr. Tamsin Woolley-Barker explained what the humble water flea can teach us about innovation. In a particularly disturbing development, the world’s first cloning factory is now open for business in China — and it clones 500 pigs a year. The company’s cafeteria serves as a testing ground for “genetically enhanced” meats, vegetables and even yogurt. In an attempt to learn more about the mysterious colony collapse disorder affecting bees, scientists are planning to fit 5,000 honeybees in Australia with tiny sensors to study how environmental changes impact the behavior of bee colonies. Japan is getting creative in its effort to remove the manmade debris that is cluttering up outer space — the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency is preparing to launch a satellite equipped with a 300-meter magnetic net that will sweep up space junk. Boeri Studio shared with Inhabitat new photos of its vertical forest skyscraper nearing completion in Milan, and in anticipation of summer, the company Netatmo recently produced “June,” a smart bracelet that monitors UV exposure, letting its wearer know when they’ve soaked in too many rays.

Filed under: Misc

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Paramount now releases movies only in digital form

While it’s no secret that film-based movie distribution won’t last much longer in the US, the big Hollywood studios haven’t officially completed their transition to digital. However, one of them may have quietly made that leap — sources for the LA Times claim that Paramount is the first large studio to send its major movies (not just smaller flicks) to American theaters solely in digital form. Anchorman 2 was reportedly the company’s last high-profile analog release, while The Wolf of Wall Street was the first to go all-digital. Paramount hasn’t commented on the apparent leak. If the report is accurate, though, the 8 percent of US theaters without digital equipment now have little choice but to upgrade if they want to offer the same selection as most of their peers.

Filed under: Home Entertainment, HD

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Source: LA Times