Pulp SF's golden age
Dec. 22nd, 2002 11:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_e
I was going through some of my old Astounding Science Fiction magazines that date back to the mid 50s. Gee, there are such treasures there.
I am so privileged to have been raised on such inspiring brain-food. It is a pity I don't do more with the gifts I have.
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no subject
Date: 2002-12-22 03:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2002-12-22 04:53 pm (UTC)I find it sooo hard to part with such things... but that is why moving house is such a terrible ordeal for me. I have thousands of books and magazines. I keep hoping there will be some easy way to scan the important stuff in there for posterity. So much of this stuff is lost to the world. It scares the living daylights outa me.
Some time back my old girlfriend convinced me to throw away a couple of boxes of 1950s issues of New Scientist magazine. Since then I have had reason several times to regret that. You would think that science keeps old info right? But no. It is like all other forms of human endeavor -- it goes through phases and fashions. Some lines of research were begun but never followed through. There are fascinating directions in those old magazines.
A recent example will help to clarify what I mean. Back in the late 60s a new technology was developed called fluidics logic. It used the properties of fluid flowing through small hollow circuits to create logic functions. In this way hydraulic equipment and other fluid mechanical systems could be affected directly by control systems rather than using costly electronics. It was utterly brilliant, but the plummeting cost of large-scale integrated electronic circuits meant that it became much cheaper to use electronics for all control functions. Fluidics almost disappeared overnight. You can still find some examples of it (e.g. http://www.air-logic.com/Summary%20Cat/sum14and15.html ) but mostly it sank without a trace, though there is some renewed interest lately in microfluidics.
If you want to see an experiment that demostrates fluidic logic at its basic level there is an image at http://www.sas.org/E-Bulletin/E-Bulletin.old/17-Aug/FluidFlipFlop.gif that was taken from the Scientific American column Amateur Scientist... I am not sure which year (it would be late 60s). I would look it up in my Scientific American magazines but they are still in boxes, having moved house recently. :(