Charlie Rose

Dasmus  08/23/2009 07:05 AM Report

Would sure like to hear this conversation ...

REMant  08/12/2009 02:15 PM Report

When I was a kid playing with my German erector set I made a car, which I imagined had electric motors on all four wheels. I'd have made one too if it had been easy to get electric motors and axles, etc. Erector sets, even German ones, don't have much flexibility either. Probably I saw the idea in Popular Mechanics or something like that, but it might have just come to me as being a lot simpler and more efficient than running all the paraphernalia the usual car sports. The problem until recently was powering something like that and the new batteries have turned the corner. But until fairly recently even the electricity wasn't available in all the places vehicles need to go in this country, which is why we have little in the way of electric trains unlike Europe and Japan.

While electric cars are great, I think we could do a lot more in the way of developing lighter and faster electric rail service. I'm thinking of something more like the size and scale of automobiles, rather than the standard carriages, using the new composites. I suppose the big problem would be "rest" stops, but that could be handled easily enough by providing periodic opportunities for individual units to be detached and reattached if the scale were such as to prohibit moving around inside. However, most airplane cabins are a great deal more compact than train carriages so I see no reason why trains can't be scaled down at least to that level. Most inventions (and nearly everything else) starts out bigger, heavier and more complex than it eventually becomes and I think it is high time we tackled making trains more efficient.

BTW, his explanation for starting out building expensive sports cars was exactly right, but in time if the company wants to expand it must build cars for the general public.

I was surprised about the launch business, but rockets of that sort do involve a lot of money, yet there has been a lot of money in the satellite launching business for some time, which NASA did nothing to exploit, so the Europeans, Russians and Chinese have. On this point, anyone looking into the history of technology realizes that innovations have come only in response to problems posed by actively working with processes, and the conclusion must be that if this country stops doing such things itself, it will lose the ability to invent no matter how much formal education we have and basic research we do.