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)
“Society gains nothing whilst a man, not himself renovated, attempts to renovate things around him; he has become tediously good in some particular but negligent or narrow in the rest; and hypocrisy and vanity are often the disgusting result.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)