Adventure Air Cannon Catapult Coil Flamethrowers From Garage Gun Love Pulsejets Rail Technology Tesla Them Underground Warrior Who
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What is the technology underground? According to engineer and technology consultant Gurstelle, it's a community of like-minded amateurs--inventors, mostly, although some of them might more accurately be characterized as daredevils. Men and women who have devoted their lives to the things that conventional science has dismissed as unworkable, impractical, or just plain pointless. Flying cars, for example, or newfangled catapults, air guns, and flamethrowers. Or fighting robots and, of course, LDRS (large and dangerous rocket ships). The author explores not only the people who devise these wondrous new inventions but also the technological wizardry behind them: every chapter features illustrations and technical explanations of the devices discussed within. The writing is a bit scattershot, alternating frequently between clunky ("it is reasonable to outline, at the outset of a conceptualization or a project, the rules of conformance") and the outright funny: after describing an early flying-car design, the author deadpans, "It never got off the ground." But the book's target audience won't be bothered by the prose. They will be looking for adventure, excitement, and really wild stuff. They won't be disappointed. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
What is the technology underground? According to engineer and technology consultant Gurstelle, it's a community of like-minded amateurs--inventors, mostly, although some of them might more accurately be characterized as daredevils. Men and women who have devoted their lives to the things that conventional science has dismissed as unworkable, impractical, or just plain pointless. Flying cars, for example, or newfangled catapults, air guns, and flamethrowers. Or fighting robots and, of course, LDRS (large and dangerous rocket ships). The author explores not only the people who devise these wondrous new inventions but also the technological wizardry behind them: every chapter features illustrations and technical explanations of the devices discussed within. The writing is a bit scattershot, alternating frequently between clunky ("it is reasonable to outline, at the outset of a conceptualization or a project, the rules of conformance") and the outright funny: after describing an early flying-car design, the author deadpans, "It never got off the ground." But the book's target audience won't be bothered by the prose. They will be looking for adventure, excitement, and really wild stuff. They won't be disappointed. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Book Description
The technology base is a thriving, humming, and often literally glittering subculture amateur inventors and scientific envelope-pushers, who dream, design and build machinery, whoosh, rumble, fly and occasionally hurl pumpkins across vast distances. In the process they amaze us with what is possible when human imagination and ingenuity meet natural forces and materials. William Gurstelle spent two years researching the most outpost of the World of Wonders: meetings and conversations with the men and women who care far more according to the laws of physics, when they see the secular topics, such as government regulations and their personal safety.
Adventures in the Underground technology is Gurstelle lively and strangely compelling report on his travels. On these pages we meet Frank Kosdon and others, the control of the FAA, ATF and other federal agencies in their quest for high performance amateur rocket technology, they show up to the impressive and sometimes explosive effect on the annual meeting held in various LDRS remote and uninhabited areas (necessary because the abbreviation stands for Large Dangerous Rocket Ships). Here are the underground technologists, in turn, to the Burning Man festival in the Nevada high desert, including Lucy Hosking, "the engineer from hell" and the creator of Satan's Calliope, aka the World's Loudest Thing, an organ from jet engines. Even with Burning Man is Austin "Dr. Mega Volt" Richard, the brave the arcs, sputtering, six tensions of a giant Tesla transformer in its metal protective suit. Add a trip to see medieval style catapults and air cannons, and supersized catapults into action at the World Championship Punkin Chunkin Competition in Sussex County, Delaware, and forays into the postapocalyptic enclaves of flame builders and the future-noir pits the fight against robots, and you have proof that the age of the invention is still strong.
In the world of science and technology, despite its buttoned down image, there is a lot of fun, humor and sheer miracle to find on the edge. Adventures from the Technology Underground takes you there.
• Launch homemade high-power rockets.
• Catapult pumpkins the better part of a mile.
• Watch robot gladiators saw, flip, and pound one another into high-tech junk heaps.
• Dazzle the eye with electrical discharges measured in the hundreds of thousands of volts.
• Play with flamethrowers, potato guns, and other decidedly unsafe toys . . .
Adventures in the Underground technology is Gurstelle lively and strangely compelling report on his travels. On these pages we meet Frank Kosdon and others, the control of the FAA, ATF and other federal agencies in their quest for high performance amateur rocket technology, they show up to the impressive and sometimes explosive effect on the annual meeting held in various LDRS remote and uninhabited areas (necessary because the abbreviation stands for Large Dangerous Rocket Ships). Here are the underground technologists, in turn, to the Burning Man festival in the Nevada high desert, including Lucy Hosking, "the engineer from hell" and the creator of Satan's Calliope, aka the World's Loudest Thing, an organ from jet engines. Even with Burning Man is Austin "Dr. Mega Volt" Richard, the brave the arcs, sputtering, six tensions of a giant Tesla transformer in its metal protective suit. Add a trip to see medieval style catapults and air cannons, and supersized catapults into action at the World Championship Punkin Chunkin Competition in Sussex County, Delaware, and forays into the postapocalyptic enclaves of flame builders and the future-noir pits the fight against robots, and you have proof that the age of the invention is still strong.
In the world of science and technology, despite its buttoned down image, there is a lot of fun, humor and sheer miracle to find on the edge. Adventures from the Technology Underground takes you there.
• Launch homemade high-power rockets.
• Catapult pumpkins the better part of a mile.
• Watch robot gladiators saw, flip, and pound one another into high-tech junk heaps.
• Dazzle the eye with electrical discharges measured in the hundreds of thousands of volts.
• Play with flamethrowers, potato guns, and other decidedly unsafe toys . . .
If this is your idea of fun, you have a great good time on this wild ride through today's technology Underground.
From the Burning Man festival in Nevada high desert to the latest collection of Large Dangerous Rocket Ship builders Delaware after the annual Punkin Chunkin Competition (a festival of science, radical self-expression, and beer "), make the inspired, the government unregulated, united and unimpeded men and women who are working at the extreme edge of science, technology and wild eyes manual arc welding, the construction of catapults, extremely high voltage electrical equipment, arson artworks, fighting robots, and other machines, which show what is possible if the physics meets human ingenuity.
The hardcover edition.
From the Burning Man festival in Nevada high desert to the latest collection of Large Dangerous Rocket Ship builders Delaware after the annual Punkin Chunkin Competition (a festival of science, radical self-expression, and beer "), make the inspired, the government unregulated, united and unimpeded men and women who are working at the extreme edge of science, technology and wild eyes manual arc welding, the construction of catapults, extremely high voltage electrical equipment, arson artworks, fighting robots, and other machines, which show what is possible if the physics meets human ingenuity.
The hardcover edition.
About the Author
William Gurstelle is the author of Backyard Ballistics, Building Bots, and the Art of the Catapult. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Get this book at amazon.com
Get this book at amazon.com
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