# Where Is My Flying Car?  ## Metadata - Author: [[J. Storrs Hall]] - Full Title: Where Is My Flying Car? - Category: #books ## Highlights - Edison had inspired Tom Swift, who in turn inspired Kelly Johnson. Johnson would become the first team leader of Lockheed Skunk Works and one of the 20th century’s most celebrated aeronautical engineers. Johnson was famous for high-end military aircraft, such as the F-104 Starfighter and SR-71 Blackbird. But he also introduced the first airliner with retractable landing gear and the first pressurized airliner to go into widespread use. By 1960 he and Lockheed had introduced the first dedicated business jet, the JetStar. The flying car didn’t seem that far off. ([Location 59](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09H478XG4&location=59)) ## New highlights added November 6, 2024 at 9:33 PM - Power is our only lack. We generate all we can with the materials and knowledge at our disposal, but we never have enough. Our development is hindered, our birth-rate must be held down to a minimum, many new cities which we need cannot be built and many new projects cannot be started, all for lack of power. ([Location 493](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09H478XG4&location=493)) - Without the disruption of global war, we might very well have produced a landscape of aviation considerably different from the one we got. Private aviation essentially vanished for the duration of the conflict. ([Location 680](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09H478XG4&location=680)) - Pitcairn had developed the technology that made helicopters possible, and this was common knowledge in the aeronautical engineering world; the key patent was referred to simply as “582.”40 But, in a patriotic gesture, Pitcairn substantially reduced the royalties charged to any of the several new helicopter companies—Sikorsky, Piasecki (later renamed Vertol), Bell—that were building helicopters under government contract. Under the terms of his agreement, the waiver expired in 1946. ([Location 685](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09H478XG4&location=685)) - No runway. Point A to point B transportation in a single vehicle. So, why aren’t we all in helicopters, one of the cornerstone ideas of the postwar world vision? The main reason the helicopter didn’t catch on to the expected extent is cost. One of the main components of the machine is the rotor hub, which even now is out near the edges of the envelope of technical capability. The hub is extremely complex. It also has to be extremely precise—tiny fractions of a degree or millimeters of position matter—and it is under tremendous stress. The blades pull outward with literally tens of tons of centrifugal force. Imagine trying to build a mechanical clock that had to be accurate to a second a day, and was small and light enough to carry in a suitcase, but which would have railroad cars attached as the hour and minute hands. ([Location 737](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09H478XG4&location=737)) - The duct, which forms an aerodynamic structure known as a Kort nozzle, amplifies the lift of the propeller by some 40 percent. ([Location 750](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09H478XG4&location=750)) - Nanomotors to power a Kardashev Type I civilization (i.e., one that uses an amount of energy equal to all the sunlight that falls on the Earth, equal to 10¹⁷W), would fit in a 500-square-foot apartment (with eight-foot ceilings). ([Location 934](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09H478XG4&location=934)) - To someone who hasn’t been studying the capabilities that can be reasonably predicted for nanotech, that sounds fantastic, ludicrous, insane. It isn’t. You are welcome to obtain a copy of Nanosystems, a high-end workstation, a pile of molecular-simulation software, an encyclopedia of mechanical engineering, and have at it. In 10 years or so of hard work, you will have a much better grasp of the subject. ([Location 965](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09H478XG4&location=965)) - Compare the capabilities of your iPhone—and its price, size, and power consumption—to that of the IBM 1401, which filled a room, rented for $20,000 per month (in today’s dollars), and came fully loaded with 16K bytes of hand-threaded ferrite-core memory. What’s more, the iPhone comes with the equivalent of a movie camera, recording studio, record player, television, several radio stations, accelerometer, global positioning satellite downlink, telegraph office, and a library with thousands of books. That will give you a basis for estimating what physical technology 50 years from now could look like compared to ours. Or, more to the point, it is what physical technology could have looked like right now, if we had listened to Feynman in 1959. ([Location 993](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09H478XG4&location=993)) - One possibility is that there is an Overton window effect in technology, a window into the world of ideas that frames what people are prepared to entertain, where ideas outside the window are not seriously considered. Really revolutionary ideas simply roll off men’s minds like water off a duck. Machiavelli described the effect as “the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them.” Even such a respected and brilliant scientist as Feynman couldn’t get people to take him seriously. ([Location 1018](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09H478XG4&location=1018)) - I discovered, to my amazement, that all through history there had been resistance—and bitter, exaggerated, last-ditch resistance—to every significant technological change that had taken place on earth. Usually the resistance came from those groups who stood to lose influence, status, money as a result of the change. Although they never advanced this as their reason for resisting it. It was always the good of humanity that rested upon their hearts. ([Location 1297](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09H478XG4&location=1297)) - Note: Said by Isaac Asimov - One of the great tragedies of the latter 20th century, and clearly one of the causes of the Great Stagnation, was the increasing centralization and bureaucratization of science and research funding. This meant that Failures of Nerve and Imagination, which are particularly prevalent among bureaucrats, went from being merely the incorrect predictions of pundits to causing resource starvation and the active suppression of progress. ([Location 1489](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09H478XG4&location=1489)) - In Greek mythology, Cerberus is the three-headed dog who guards the gates of the underworld to prevent the dead from returning to the world of the living. The Cerberus blocking us from attaining the future we were promised has three heads as well. They are: the bureaucratic structure of science and technology, which amplifies the Machiavelli Effect; the ergophobic religion of the Eloi Agonistes; and the strangling red tape of regulation. ([Location 1867](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09H478XG4&location=1867)) - When asked why his Aerocar had failed to “take off,” Moulton Taylor had a ready answer. It wasn’t the size of the nascent market, or his need of a partner with more business savvy or money. Taylor insisted that the problem was government regulation. As late as 1975, he was in serious negotiations with Ford to have the Aerocar mass-produced. It was the Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of Transportation that threw a monkey wrench into the negotiations. Seven years earlier, Taylor had already secured an airworthiness certificate for the Aerocar. Airworthiness wasn’t the issue. He claimed that the agencies turned thumbs down on the Aerocar “because everybody would have one, and we couldn’t handle the [air] traffic.” ([Location 1934](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09H478XG4&location=1934)) - Until the 1980s, property and liability insurance was a small cost of doing business. But the substantial expansion in what legally constitutes liability has greatly increased the cost of liability insurance for personal injuries. The plight of the U.S. private aircraft industry illustrates the extent of these liability costs. Although accident rates for general aviation and for small aircraft declined steadily, liability costs for the industry soared, so that by the 1990s the U.S. private aircraft industry had all but ceased production. ([Location 2014](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09H478XG4&location=2014))