Practical Attempts
One of the first engineering descriptions of an "Electric Gun" appears in the technical supplement of "Zero to Eighty" by "Akkad Pseudoman", a pen name for the Princeton physicist and electrical entrepreneur Edwin Fitch Northrup. Dr. Northrup built prototype coil guns powered by kHz-frequency three phase electrical generators, and the book contains photographs of some of these prototypes. The book describes a fictional circumnavigation of the moon by a two-person vehicle launched by a Northrup electric gun.
Later prototype mass drivers have been built since 1976 (Mass Driver 1), some constructed by the U.S. Space Studies Institute in order to prove their properties and practicality. Military R&D on coilguns is related, as are also maglev trains.
Read more about this topic: Mass Driver
Famous quotes containing the words practical and/or attempts:
“The idealists dream and the dream is told, and the practical men listen and ponder and bring back the truth and apply it to human life, and progress and growth and higher human ideals come into being and so the world moves ever on.”
—Anna Howard Shaw (1847–1919)
“Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak.... They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)