• @wahming
      link
      English
      510 months ago

      It’s OK to use the name and laugh at his claim to have invented it

    • @SplashJackson@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      510 months ago

      To be fair, Socrates envisioned the TV and Jules Verne hypothesized space travel, yet you don’t see people giving them credit for inventing those things

      • @hperrin@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        1010 months ago

        The vactrain proper was invented by Robert H. Goddard as a freshman at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in the United States in 1904. Goddard subsequently refined the idea in a 1906 short story called “The High-Speed Bet” which was summarized and published in a Scientific American editorial in 1909 called “The Limit of Rapid Transit”. Esther, his wife, was granted a US patent for the vactrain in 1950, five years after his death.

    • @Wanderer@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      410 months ago

      I feel like I’m going fucking mental.

      I was certain for about a year the idea was pneumatic tubes like in a bank but for trains. Which I though maybe, but probably too much friction.

      Then it turned into a bog standard vacuum tunnel that was all over youtube and the Internet before Musk. But everyone acts like that was the original idea.

      • @wahming
        link
        English
        110 months ago

        Pneumatic tubes use a constantly generated vacuum and air pressure to move objects. It would take forever to pump out a tunnel for a single train.

        • @Wanderer@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          110 months ago

          No you have two loops of constantly moving air. The train then goes in and out of that tube at stations.

          It’s a fucking shit idea and trains are great. But I remember that and seem to be the only one. No one ever mentions that idea

          • @wahming
            link
            English
            210 months ago

            Honestly not sure how that would work, but I guess it doesn’t exactly matter. Never heard of it though, maybe you could dig up some article from back then.