Celebrating Inventor's Day and finding missing pages
Today, November 9, 2012, is officially "Inventor's Day" and is Hedi Lamarr's birthday - she was not only an actress, but also a prolific inventor.
As a youth, my goal was to be a scientist-inventor. The bumps and grunts of life too soon interfered with manifestation of that dream, yet still I made lots of effort. Always in near poverty, affording a patent application was out of the question. However, I often attempted to interest my various employers of ideas I had that might be of interest them - naive me.
Most of my documents and correspondence regarding my ideas for inventions have been stolen from my paper and computer files over the decades.
Nonetheless there are a few items that I can still find. Recently I discovered a set of the hardcopies of one of my early Mooncable concept documents that included the two missing pages, Page 2 and Page 3, that contained the two equations I had derived and utilized for the concept, which were the equation for calculating the work done to a mass by lifting it between two specific planetary radii; and the other was for calculating the cross-section along a tapered anchored tether structure which nowadays is called a Space Elevator; this one was to go from the lunar surface through L-1 toward the Earth, balanced across L-1, and be made of space-rated fiberglass.
So in celebration of Inventor's Day and do-it-yourself invention concepts, here is a link to the pages of that concept paper, dated March 26, 1972, which I laboriously typed on a old typewriter bought at a thrift store, and copies to NASA and to JPL where I had a temporary contractor job working as an electronics technician.
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/32802637/1972MooncableDocument.pdf
It has been with mixed feelings finding that there is now serious interest in making a Lunar Space Elevator in the past couple of years, proving to me that my ideas are not so useless as so many people indicated about that and many of my other advanced concepts.
Postscript:
Feedback says the above link does not work. Perhaps due to its 10MB file size. So I have both reduced the file size to 2.4 MB and added lots of more related info to it:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/32802637/1972MooncableDocumentRev2C.pdf
This is all ancient history, and has no financial value such as patent potential anymore. Still, since some folks are now working (forty years after this idea-paper info) to physically make a Lunar space elevator through L-1 toward the Earth, possibly someone might find these long-ago documents interesting. The ideas sure got ignored back then; much as the situation now, the dynamic charge of the mass of business folks was forcefully stampeded in a different way than I had proposed, much as my later "KESTS to GEO" electro-dynamic planet-encircling ground to GEO eccentric hoop transportation concepts, which themselves are now already some twenty-three years ignored by aerospace. I understand now, it is lots safer to take tiny baby-steps of innovation, rather than risk going for a really adequate solution to the big problems of civilization.
Sigh. Back to my science fiction writing, getting into my self-created fantasy world where my technological ideas get to play out, and the good folks win and have fun adventures doing it. As I read one lonely lady sadly comment long ago, "sometimes a good fantasy is better than just more hard reality."
As a youth, my goal was to be a scientist-inventor. The bumps and grunts of life too soon interfered with manifestation of that dream, yet still I made lots of effort. Always in near poverty, affording a patent application was out of the question. However, I often attempted to interest my various employers of ideas I had that might be of interest them - naive me.
Most of my documents and correspondence regarding my ideas for inventions have been stolen from my paper and computer files over the decades.
Nonetheless there are a few items that I can still find. Recently I discovered a set of the hardcopies of one of my early Mooncable concept documents that included the two missing pages, Page 2 and Page 3, that contained the two equations I had derived and utilized for the concept, which were the equation for calculating the work done to a mass by lifting it between two specific planetary radii; and the other was for calculating the cross-section along a tapered anchored tether structure which nowadays is called a Space Elevator; this one was to go from the lunar surface through L-1 toward the Earth, balanced across L-1, and be made of space-rated fiberglass.
So in celebration of Inventor's Day and do-it-yourself invention concepts, here is a link to the pages of that concept paper, dated March 26, 1972, which I laboriously typed on a old typewriter bought at a thrift store, and copies to NASA and to JPL where I had a temporary contractor job working as an electronics technician.
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/32802637/1972MooncableDocument.pdf
It has been with mixed feelings finding that there is now serious interest in making a Lunar Space Elevator in the past couple of years, proving to me that my ideas are not so useless as so many people indicated about that and many of my other advanced concepts.
Postscript:
Feedback says the above link does not work. Perhaps due to its 10MB file size. So I have both reduced the file size to 2.4 MB and added lots of more related info to it:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/32802637/1972MooncableDocumentRev2C.pdf
This is all ancient history, and has no financial value such as patent potential anymore. Still, since some folks are now working (forty years after this idea-paper info) to physically make a Lunar space elevator through L-1 toward the Earth, possibly someone might find these long-ago documents interesting. The ideas sure got ignored back then; much as the situation now, the dynamic charge of the mass of business folks was forcefully stampeded in a different way than I had proposed, much as my later "KESTS to GEO" electro-dynamic planet-encircling ground to GEO eccentric hoop transportation concepts, which themselves are now already some twenty-three years ignored by aerospace. I understand now, it is lots safer to take tiny baby-steps of innovation, rather than risk going for a really adequate solution to the big problems of civilization.
Sigh. Back to my science fiction writing, getting into my self-created fantasy world where my technological ideas get to play out, and the good folks win and have fun adventures doing it. As I read one lonely lady sadly comment long ago, "sometimes a good fantasy is better than just more hard reality."
posted by Unknown at
16:10
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