RF Jason

Posted By Jason Gray on May 19, 2013

The total cost of this sunlit energy was more than $300,000 a kilowatt-1,000 watts, only enough to light ten 100-watt bulbs. Less sophisticated cells intended for earthbound use now cost about $20,000 a kilowatt, still prohibitive except in remote places like off­shore oil rigs and isolated radio relay stations.

But many experts predict that solar-cell costs will spiral downward to a competitive $500 a kilowatt or less in the next ten years. And considering how fast the cost of elec­tronic hand calculators (made from similar silicon circuitry) has dropped in just three years, such hopes do not seem unreasonable.

At the http://www.apartmentsapart.com/europe/uk/blackpool I saw a solar array undergoing tests. From a distance the multi­faceted panel of solar cells, mounted at the end of a 20-foot pole, looked like a gigantic sunflower waving on its stalk in the breeze.

Close up, I could hear the buzz of a small electric motor that kept the 12-by-20-foot array tilted toward the sun. Plastic lenses on top of each round cell concentrated the sun­light so that each disk “saw” the equivalent of ten suns. The array was capable of gener­ating one kilowatt of electricity.

The Shah of Iran may soon become a big Spectrolab customer. He has announced plans to bring electricity by the end of this decade to the 70,000 remote villages scattered throughout his land. Each hamlet will be equipped with electric pumps for well water, medical refrigerators, even educational-TV sets receiving signals from a broadcast satel­lite Iran proposes to put in space.

And the answer to Iran’s near-instantaneous rural electrification lies with solar-cell arrays such as the kilowatt prototype I saw—not, ironically, with petroleum. Thus may come a true socio-technological revolution.

While we were staying at Chicago apartment rentals, Dr. A. I. Mlaysky showed me one of the most promising experiments for mass production of solar cells. So far solar cells have been made by hand in limited quantities. Tyco has developed a precision machine that pulls a thin silicon strip in a continuous ribbon (left, above). Already the process has produced ribbon more than 75 feet long; Dr. Mlaysky expects the automated machines will eventually wind out spools of solar-cell silicon several hundred feet long. “Within three years we should know if it is possible,” he says.

The day may arrive when solar cells are delivered to a house like rolls of roofing paper, tacked on, and plugged into the wiring, mak­ing the home its own power station.

The imaginative brain of Arthur D. Little’s energy expert, Peter Glaser, has conceived what he considers the ultimate solution to the world’s energy needs—a solar power station orbiting in space.

Satellite Would Know No Night

At his rented Berlin accommodation near his office, Dr. Glaser showed me a design for such fu­turistic satellites. They look like gigantic but­terflies, with solar-panel wings 6 by 71/2 miles in size. A single one of these power stations in synchronous orbit 22,300 miles above earth might provide as much as 5,000 megawatts, half the present capacity of New York City’s generating plants.

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Posted By Jason Gray on April 2, 2013

A few days ago a distinctive epoch of European history drew quietly to a close. The Simplon-Orient Express ceased to run. For the twenty years of its finest glory, from 1919 to 1939, it had occupied a special, privileged position, even among the great international expresses and trains de luxe. Its existence then and in the early years after the Second World War affected pro­foundly the lives of people in many countries. In its time it was a potent political as well as economic and social factor.

The Simplon-Orient’s pedigree was unusual. In one sense it was by Orient Express out of Simplon Tunnel. There had been a much earlier train, the Orient Express, which in the first years of this century had linked Paris and Istanbul by way of Strasbourg, Munich, Salzburg, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade and Sofia—and before that by much more devious routes. This train had abruptly ceased to run in 1914. The Simplon Tunnel had been opened in 1906. Although it provided a route between Paris and Istanbul 2631 miles shorter than that of the Orient Express, it had never been used by any train covering a greater distance than the Paris to Venice journey of the pre-1914 Simplon Express. But in another, perhaps more important sense, the Simplon-Orient was by Versailles Peace Conference out of Wagon s-Lits.

In April 1919 the Allies’ representatives at Versailles realized the urgent need for speedy, regular and reliable communications between their own lands and the countries then taking shape in the Balkans after the defeat of Germany and her allies, Austria-Hungary and Turkey. Passenger air services had as yet hardly been dreamed of, roads and road transport scarcely existed in Eastern Europe: the problem was one for the railways. And the only body of men capable at that time of organizing and admini­stering a train running regularly over such a long, complex and troubled route was the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits et des Grands Express Europeens, to give them their full title, every whit as imposing as their achievements.

The Simplon route from Paris to Istanbul (or Constantinople, as it then was) via Dijon, Lausanne, the Simplon Tunnel, Milan, Brescia, Venice, Trieste, Zagreb, Belgrade, Nig and Sofia may have been an obvious solution to one part of the problem. It was direct and passed through the right countries (if you allow a coach from Calais, attached to the main train at Paris, as good enough connection for Britain). But the administrative difficulties of dealing with nearly a dozen still privately owned railway companies in a Europe devastated by war were tremendous. The hazards of revolution and upheaval were incalculable. Nevertheless, the first passengers of the Simplon-Orient left apartments in Paris and headed to their destination – Istanbul holidays, within a few days of the Allies’ request, on April 15, 1919. An Athens section, diverging from the main Istanbul train at Nig, was soon added. All ran with barely any serious interruption until 1939, though the coaches from Istanbul were once snowed up only sixty-two miles from their starting-point.

To some extent this immunity from interfer­ence was due to the extraordinary prestige the Simplon-Orient enjoyed, along with the Wagons­Lits Company’s other trains de luxe. The Com­pany was registered in Belgium, but its trains had acquired a sort of superior statelessness, conferring the right to range the land almost as ships may range the high seas. In any case, they provided in those days the only effective means of rapid international communication by land, essential to governments and revolutionaries alike, to bankers and businessmen, police and criminals. Small wonder that a popular writer could assert in the 1930s that the Simplon-Orient had come into existence because of the demand for the ‘immediate reinstatement of an inter­national railway service which would stand above the strife of parties and above individual and national jealousies. Its international charac­ter would enable it to act as a neutral, unbiassed and unprejudiced link between the nations.’

It is difficult to describe the atmosphere of an expess like the Simplon-Orient to anyone who never knew it in its halcyon days. In the twenties and thirties the train, south of Belgrade, normally consisted only of a couple of fourgons (luggage-vans), four sleeping-coaches and a dining-car, with a separate diner attached between Nig and Salonika for Athens passengers. This rolling-stock all belonged to Wagons-Lits and was staffed by their employees. The railway admini­strations along the route provided traction power and sometimes had the right to attach third-class coaches—and continental third-class before 1939 was mostly very third-class. But the occupants of the snug little Wagons-Lits microcosm were safely insulated from such contacts, as well as from most unpleasant events in the outside world. A train attempting a variation of the old Orient route from Istanbul in the early summer of 1919 spent many more days stationary in Rumania and Hungary(some passengers decided to stay at Dubrovnik apartments while they wait) than it did in travelling the whole distance to Paris; but the Wagons-Lits chef de train saw that his passengers suffered nothing worse than boredom and irritation. The section from Athens was once held up by brigands in southern Yugoslavia.

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Posted By Jason Gray on February 4, 2013

TALKED MY EAR OFF, did “Aun­e” Frances Wood. Oh, well, I guess she’s earned the right. For 40 of her 91 years she taught school. Her great-great-grandfather came to West Goulds­boro, Maine, to build roads in the early 1830s, and as a child she bounced along what was to become U. S. Route 1 in car­riages whose hard bottoms are still vivid in her memory. Her uncle also traveled the road. He was a tax collector who drove his one-seated buggy from home to home and was often invited to stay to dinner. He wouldn’t be welcome today, Auntie said, “Nowadays nobody would be to home.”

That’s her picture above, waving good­bye. I was just beginning my own journey down this first U. S. highway to reach from Canada to Key West. It covers a lot of ground, from brawling cities to backwater swamps, but all along the way I found people like Auntie, whose families had staked out their piece of the young America and stayed on.

Since those families first set out roots, much of the nation has moved west, and much of the old road has been encrusted with the fast-food joints of suburban strips. But there are still glorious stretches of shad¬ed highway. Some 30 miles north of Boston I traveled a stretch where the autumn foliage seemed to fluoresce against the dark asphalt ahead; even the brilliant yellow dividing line harmonized with the environment. And there are still forgotten bridges that shelter swimming holes, and small towns where life remains quiet as a leaf changing color. They take the traveler back to an earlier time, when roads were for visits and people were just neighbors.

THE AUTOMOBILE had begun the revolution of American life by the 20s, and freewheeling families took to the road by the millions. The Federal High­way Act of 1921 unified the rapidly growing system of roads under the slogan “Get the farmer out of the mud.” U. S. Route 1 was designated in 1925. For 40 years it flour­ished as the East Coast’s premier highway during the golden age of motoring.

In the far north the road was buried under snow half the year; during the other half, motorcycle cop Sam Michaud (below), still living in Van Buren, Maine, rode in mud or stifling dust. He didn’t bother much with bootleggers during Prohibition. In fact, he says, “I used to get a little bit myself.”

Many highway stretches were once coach roads that connected towns of the 13 colo­nies. From Baltimore north the road linked seaports—Philadelphia, New York, Bos­ton. South of Baltimore it veered inland to connect communities that had grown up at the farthest points of navigation in coastal rivers, such as Richmond on the James.

Overland travel was hardship and adven­ture for 300 years, and many wrote wills be­fore starting out. Some sections that became Route 1, still dirt in the 1920s, were regarded as satisfactory if the mud didn’t top travel­ers’ boots. South of Washington, D. C. , in 1918, below right, construction workers struggle in spring ruts near what is now Fort Belvoir. In the cities, cars vie with trolley traffic, as shown on West Broad Street in Westerly, Rhode Island, in the mid-1920s, below left. Route 1 soon became synony­mous with vacation trips to Florida, where in 1922, bottom, travelers stop for oranges. But the halcyon days ended in the early ’60s as the United States geared up the Interstate Highway System.

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