The future is never what you expect it to be.

My friend Tom the Collector of Everything was always known as a friendly man who threw outrageously good parties. At one party I met Nick a member of an organisation called ART (Artists Resorting to Terrorism). In their manifesto one of their goals was to destroy all art so that a new generation of expression and meaning could rise up without the prejudices and filters of the past. It sounded to much like a Cultural Revolution for the creative class and knowing how bad the Cultural Revolution was for the Chinese -I politely said I wasn't interested.

At another one of Tom's parties I met a group of people that referred to themselves as "extreme historians". They were a truly fascinating bunch of amateur intellectuals and I mean amateur in it's more archaic definition -where somebody does something purely for the love of it. Though I was a little intimidated when the first one looked up from his half finished pint glass of Irish Whiskey and asked "where the hell is my flying car". This lead to a discussion about the "history of the future" or maybe better said how people in the past anticipated what the future will be.  


Later on I was handed a cylinder head. It was about 21/2 inches tall (70mm) and had a 1 inch bore (25mm). It seem too small for a motorcycle and too heavy for a model airplane. I guessed it came from a chain saw

It actually came from a gasoline powered vacuum cleaner, just like the one in the picture on the left. In the early 1900's people thought electricity was only for the cities. Edison had promoted DC electrical power. It had a huge drawback because it could only be transmitted a couple of miles from the power plant before the resistance in the copper wires reduced the current to a trickle. Tesla was yet to win the Current Wars and AC current became the standard, making it possible to bring electricity economically to remote areas.

Even then America didn't start electrifying the country side until the mid-1930's when FDR used New Deal legislation to bring electricity to every home in the country and help stimulate the economy out of the Great Depression. So as bizarre as it seems now, a gasoline powered vacuum cleaner was not so strange a century ago.

And some old ideas still persist, as you see the love for huge over-sized engines and vehicles is still around. But I guess some people will always need to compensate or show off.

I believe the future will belong to the small and efficient. I love art but I'm also intrigued by science and engineering. Each of these things effect the other.  

Norbert Mueller of the University of Michigan has developed a new type of internal combustion engine called a "wave disk" engine. It appears to follow some of the same principals a jet turbine but boasts to have a thermal efficiency of 60% or more with a 90% reduction of of emissions. Also there is no need for a transmission, crankshaft or cooling system. One of these in a Prius would triple the gas mileage, 

The wave disk design isn't the only super efficient engine that might be coming to production in the next few years. This is a Liquid Piston X2 Diesel Rotary Engine. It claims to have a thermal efficiency of 75%.

The average automobile engine has a thermal efficiency of 15 - 30 % which means only 15-30% of the energy in the fuel is turned into mechanical motion and the rest is wasted as heat.

Above is the world's smallest liquid fuel piston engine and it is powerful enough to run a watch for a couple years on only a few drops of fuel. Instead of batteries that run down and are difficult to recycle, the new wave in technology might be a step back with the revival of the internal combustion engine. It's not hard to imagine a tiny engine and few drops of fuel replacing all the batteries I use in my portable electronic devices. These days landfill are loaded with rotting batteries that were not properly disposed. Sometimes being green takes counter intuitive pathways.

From the smallest to the largest internal combustion engines, these engines will probably be with us for another couple of generations. Though as another friend once said "the future never really turns out what you expect it be".

As I'm typing here it could be quite possible the next world changing technology is being created. be it a super efficient electric cell or the mini home fusion reactor. I look at the future optimistically, that we may reach a time when the world will be in balance and there will be enough the material goods and services so everybody will have the time to be "amateurs" -pursuing those things they really love.

250 years ago the world was a place were 90% of the work was done by muscle and 90% of the human population was either serf, peasant or slave.