Things to come – Tower power
First published in Management Today, July 2003Solar power demands direct sunlight, one of the reasons why the Government’s alternative energies are now directed at wind turbines. But now structural engineers Schlaich Bergermann of Stuttgart plan to put turbines and sun together to generate 200MW of electricity even when the sky is overcast.
Place a giant glass disc two to six metres above ground, fix a concrete chimney 1km tall to the centre, so the whole thing resembles the flare of an giant upended trumpet. Fit wind turbines at the base to convert the updraught into electricity. Easy to build and maintain and ideal in desert regions where land is cheap and sun plentiful.
EnviroMission in Australia plans to open the world’s first solar tower of power in 2005. The cost? A cool dollars 800 million.
Innovators I like
Robert Furchgott – discovered that nitric oxide transmits signals within the human body
Barry Marshall – showed that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori is the cause of most peptic ulcers, reversing decades of medical doctrine holding that ulcers were caused by stress, spicy foods, and too much acid
N Joseph Woodland – co-inventor of the barcode
Jocelyn Bell Burnell – she discovered the first radio pulsars
John Tyndall – the man who worked out why the sky was blue
Rosalind Franklin co-discovered the structure of DNA, with Crick and Watson
Rosalyn Sussman Yallow – development of radioimmunoassay (RIA), a method of quantifying minute amounts of biological substances in the body
Jonas Salk – discovery and development of the first successful polio vaccine
John Waterlow – discovered that lack of body potassium causes altitude sickness. First experiment: on himself
Werner Forssmann – the first man to insert a catheter into a human heart: his own
Bruce Bayer – scientist with Kodak whose invention of a colour filter array enabled digital imaging sensors to capture colour
Yuri Gagarin – first man in space. My piece of fandom: http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/10421
Sir Godfrey Hounsfield – inventor, with Robert Ledley, of the CAT scanner
Martin Cooper – inventor of the mobile phone
George Devol – 'father of robotics’ who helped to revolutionise carmaking
Thomas Tuohy – Windscale manager who doused the flames of the 1957 fire
Eugene Polley – TV remote controls
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