Delta4Embassy
Gold Member
Random thought pops into my head seeing the British flying wing thread just now. A lot of current 'modern' tech is actually quite old. But most don't realize how old.
Lasers for example go back to 1917 when Einstein wrote a paper describing them.
"In 1917, at the height of his work on relativity, Einstein published an article in Physikalische Zeitschrift that proposed the possibility of stimulated emission, the physical process that makes possible the maser and the laser."
Albert Einstein - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nuclear weapons, 1914. "The World Set Free," (1914)
An atomic bomb is “a nuclear weapon in which enormous energy is released by nuclear fission.” According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the phrase atomic bomb was first recorded in the above 1914 work of Wells.
Warp drive. Some question here, but this discussion's fascinating (wink)
First use of the term "WARP" to denote travel/speed?
"I found a reference to an "an interstellar space-warp drive" in Future science fiction: Volume 1, Issue 1, edited by Robert W. Lowndes. That was in was either "Nobody Saw the Ship" by Murray Leinster (my guess) or "The Miniature Menace" by Frank Belknap Long. The publication date was May 1950.
For a more famous story, check out this excerpt from "I, Robot" (by Asimov), also published in 1950:
"You get it, chief?" The general manager was wildly jubilant. "You get it? There isn't any industrial research group of any size that isn't trying to develop a space-warp engine, and Consolidate and U.S. Robots have the lead on the field with our super robot-brains." (p. 145)
(This one was found by searching for "space warp" instead of "warp drive".)
Further edit to add: Clearly the phrase "space warp" was already in use by 1947, Google ngrams notwithstanding, as these notes from a symposium suggest:
The term "space warp" does not mean anything without elaborate explanation.
For an earlier use of FTL travel that does not use the word warp, there's Gray Lensman, written in 1939 by E. E. Smith. He refers to a "5th order drive" that can "voyage anywhere in the universe at millions of times the speed of light.""
Lasers for example go back to 1917 when Einstein wrote a paper describing them.
"In 1917, at the height of his work on relativity, Einstein published an article in Physikalische Zeitschrift that proposed the possibility of stimulated emission, the physical process that makes possible the maser and the laser."
Albert Einstein - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nuclear weapons, 1914. "The World Set Free," (1914)
An atomic bomb is “a nuclear weapon in which enormous energy is released by nuclear fission.” According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the phrase atomic bomb was first recorded in the above 1914 work of Wells.
Warp drive. Some question here, but this discussion's fascinating (wink)
First use of the term "WARP" to denote travel/speed?
"I found a reference to an "an interstellar space-warp drive" in Future science fiction: Volume 1, Issue 1, edited by Robert W. Lowndes. That was in was either "Nobody Saw the Ship" by Murray Leinster (my guess) or "The Miniature Menace" by Frank Belknap Long. The publication date was May 1950.
For a more famous story, check out this excerpt from "I, Robot" (by Asimov), also published in 1950:
"You get it, chief?" The general manager was wildly jubilant. "You get it? There isn't any industrial research group of any size that isn't trying to develop a space-warp engine, and Consolidate and U.S. Robots have the lead on the field with our super robot-brains." (p. 145)
(This one was found by searching for "space warp" instead of "warp drive".)
Further edit to add: Clearly the phrase "space warp" was already in use by 1947, Google ngrams notwithstanding, as these notes from a symposium suggest:
The term "space warp" does not mean anything without elaborate explanation.
For an earlier use of FTL travel that does not use the word warp, there's Gray Lensman, written in 1939 by E. E. Smith. He refers to a "5th order drive" that can "voyage anywhere in the universe at millions of times the speed of light.""
