Hardware Beyond the Hype
Speaking of rocket belts, I just put up a piece I did for Discovery Online in 1997, for their Alt.Tech column, which I contributed to for awhile.
Called “Blow Your Socks Off,” it tells the story of the development of the original Bell Rocket Belt. There are even a couple of nifty short movies, with that kind of “Gee Whiz, Jimmy” ”60s space age narrative that we all know and love.
Today’s Make Podcast features Andrew Filo’s tour of his in-progress rocket belt that he was showing off at the Maker’s Faire.
Here’s a link to the Rocketbelt website which has tons of history, tech, links to builders’ pages, etc.
By Gareth Branwyn
April 20th, 1961. Next to the taxiway of the Niagara Falls Airport, engineers from Bell Aerosystems have set up equipment for an altogether new kind of flight. A young engineer, Harold Graham, straps a bulky contraption called a rocket belt onto his back. As Graham engages the belt’s throttle an immense blast of steam erupts from the rocket nozzles. Out on Niagara Falls Boulevard a driver does a double take and wheels into a ditch as the world’s first rocketman pops out of an immense steam cloud and shoots into the sky.
Originally conceived in 1953 by a wildly inventive Bell engineer named Wendell F. Moore, the rocket belt was part of an Army contract to create a “small rocket lifting device” that could improve soldier mobility and maneuverability. While the April 20th test flight and hundreds that followed were promising — especially as jet engines replaced rockets — other defense and aerospace priorities of the 1960s grounded further R&D.
Harold Graham demonstrates an
experimental rocket lift.
A funky thing built mainly from scrap and off-the-shelf parts, the rocket belt consisted of fuel tanks, handlebars, a control throttle and a pair of rocket nozzles. Hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) fuel was fed over fine silver mesh, which acted as a catalyst to produce 1,400-degree steam. The steam was then forced through nozzles to unleash 330 pounds of thrust and 135 decibels of brain-rattling sound.
Inventor Wendell Moore observes a test run.
The belt offered a surprising degree of maneuverability — its pilot could fly, hover, spin, negotiate tight turns and make pinpoint landings. But it was not without problems. Bill Suitor, one of the original belt pilots, recalls that during an early tether flight the control stick snapped off in his hand. He hung on for dear life as spotters yanked control ropes to keep him from crashing.
The biggest stumbling block was limited fuel capacity. The belt’s recycled Air Force oxygen tanks could only hold enough H2O2 for a fleeting, 23-second flight. During one show, rocketman Suitor accelerated too quickly and discovered to his horror that he couldn’t slow down. “I was at 114 feet when I looked at the fuel gauge and saw I had only a few seconds to land. I was about 3 feet off the ground when the fuel ran out.”
Anatomy of a hydrogen peroxide rocket belt
Despite James Bond’s pronouncement in the movie Thunderball that “no well-dressed man should be without one,” the rocket belt never caught on. Four copies of the original Bell belt were made. Three of those are now in museums; one ended up on the scrap heap.
Nevertheless Hollywood was intrigued. A version inspired by the original Bell model and crafted in the late ’60s by inventor Nelson Tyler — who Bill Suitor says is a dead ringer for the mad scientist in Back to the Future — saw celluloid action with Suitor, who did 007’s stunt rocketeering and appeared in dozens of commercials, TV shows, movies and special events such as the 1984 Olympics. Noted Hollywood stuntman Kinney Gibson has also used the Tyler belt.
Despite James Bond, the rocket belt never took off.
Brad Barker of American Flying Belt recently unveiled a further modified design. He’s published a technical manual and video about his RB-2000, and has offered to manufacture a rocket belt for anyone who cares to bankroll one. Though Barker’s belt burns five seconds longer, Suitor and others say its advances are minor.
Still rocket belt veterans know that there’s plenty of room for improvement. Rumors abound of inventors developing a new generation of jet-powered belts. “You can get up to 30-minute flights with a jet engine,” says Suitor, “which could offer all sorts of uses for search-and-rescue, fire inspection, law enforcement, flying camera operators and so forth.” Bell Aerospace actually licensed a jet-powered version of the belt to Williams International in 1970, but development of Bell/Williams “small lift devices” was halted after Williams’ small jet engine — the only engine of its kind — was earmarked for exclusive use in the cruise missile.
Bill Suitor lands during the 1984 Olympics.
“It was technology 50 years ahead of its time,” sighs Suitor, his voice carrying no small amount of nostalgia — and a little bit of hope for the future of this tech.
Rocket Belt Movies
[This article originally appeared on Discovery Online in 1997, as part of their Alt.Tech series]
Pictures: Arnold Sachs/Archive Photos | UPI/Corbis-Bettmann | Dean Conger/National Geographic Society | Courtesy of William P. Suitor | Springer/Corbis-Bettmann | Jacques Cochin/Vandystadt/Allsport |
Video: Archive Films | Courtesy of Pabst Brewing Co./Collection of William P.Suitor/Rocketman Enterprises |
Copyright © 1997 Discovery Communications, Inc.
A user on the Tivocommunity forums discovered an undocumented feature in the latest release of TiVo Desktop for the Mac (1.9.3). If you add a line of code in the OS X Terminal program, you can get videos on your Mac to show up on your Now Playing list on your networked TiVo. Cool! Details of how to do it in the discussion topic linked above.
[Via PVRBlog]
Researchers in Singapore have developed a battery that runs on urine. A single drop o’ wee can generate 1.5 volts, the equivalent of a single A-size battery. The technology is first being developed to power medical tests that involve testing of urine (such as for diabetes), but developers say that uses could expand beyond that to such applications as powering mobile phones or other devices during emergencies. Emergencies, hell! If my pee can be used to power my digital so-called life, laptop catheter, here I come.
More details and links here.
Just because internal combustion technology is some 140 years old doesn’t mean there isn’t still room for improvement, does it? The Scuderi Group, an engine development company in Mass, claims it’s done just that. Its Scuderi Split-Cycle Engine makes use of tandem compression cylinders to “supercharge” the combustion cylinders. Sophisticated valve timing gets maximum efficiency out of every compression/combustion cycle. The company claims that the result is an engine that is almost twice as fuel efficient as today’s engines with emission reductions by as much as 80%. The company will be firing up their wares at the Engine Expo in Germany next week. The DoD has already cast their vote of interest in the form of a US$1.2 million grant.
[Via Gizmag]
Lifehacker has a decent list of printer tips and tricks. Like the laptop battery list, it’s a lot of common sense stuff, but at the very least, it should be a reminder of what you can do. Like, I almost always print out entire Web pages, wasting ink on all those color ads, graphics, and photos. You can just select the text you want to print and choose “Print Range” or “Print Selection,” or whatever it’s called in the program you’re in. And you can always cut down on ink usage by printing in Draft mode and/or ganging more than one page on a single sheet of paper (if you don’t mind reading tiny print).
Just when digital photography had finally gotten decent on just about anybody’s budget, some dude decided it was time to start dumbing them down. This quick n’ dirty project uses an old lens cap, a film canister, and some Dremeling to turn a digital camera into a faux-Holga film camera.
The Holga is an el cheapo comrade camera from China, which was a favorite in communist countries before catching on among the low-fi set in the West who liked its funky effects, light leaks, distortions, and other proletarian charms.
Oh, BTW, you need a Holga for this project, too. You can get them online for a whopping US$20.
[Via hackAday]
Laptop Magazine has a short list of tips for increasing the life of your laptop battery. You may know some of them, but maybe not all of them. Like, did you know that you can increase battery runtime by some 10 minutes per level of brightness you dim the screen? Or that you should disable the Wi-Fi radio, Ethernet adapter, Infrared transceiver, Bluetooth module, and other devices you’re not using, in the Device Manager (Windows)?
All Chris Szarek wanted was to have the latest game box in the form of a Microsoft Xbox 360. What he got was a lemon, and then another one, and then another. Along the way, he had to endure a lot of the customer service frustrations we can all relate to when our tech goes bad and we’re forced to deal with clueless and/or surly “customer care representatives,” dropped hold calls, inadequate replacement gear, and all the rest of it. The difference here is that Szarek went online with his beefs and found an all-ears audience on Xbox forums and blogs. Things snowballed right on up to the top of MS’s Xbox division, with an eventual call from Xbox chief executive, Peter Moore. Szarek is now on his fourth 360 and hoping for the best.
A great story for anyone who’s had to deal with problems like this and wanted to shout out (or has): “I’m going to go online, go to the press, and tell so many people about this, I’m gonna smoke yo ass!”
Read the gory details here.