Unfortunately for Ericsson, ignorance of The Laws is never an excuse, and the engine wouldn’t work, no matter how hard he pleaded with it. The Laws of Thermodynamics-which essentially forbade his near-perpetual motion machine-were not well understood yet. There was just one problem: his heat-traps didn’t actually work. This engine, installed in the prosaically named paddlewheel boat Caloric Ship Ericsson, would only need an occasional small flame to keep it running after the initial firing-up. Ericsson first came to prominence in America, though, with a revolutionary “caloric engine” that recovered the heat lost during operation. He’d created furnaces, desalination machines, and a new type of replacement for the steam engine, the “hot-air engine.” He’d also invented the screw propeller for ships. Born in Sweden in 1803, he already had thirty patents to his credit by the time he immigrated to America in 1839. After Edison and Tesla, Ericsson was probably the greatest American engineer of his era. “I affirm that the concentration of the heat radiated by the sun would produce a force capable of stopping the earth in its course.” His criticism of Mouchot was rude, but Ericsson was a man supremely confident in his own talents: “Archimedes, having completed his calculations of the force of a lever, said that he could move the Earth,” he wrote. “A mere toy,” was John Ericsson’s judgment of the French engine-though the advisability of giving children a 2,000-degree furnace to play with is open to question. With slight modification, solar distillers could make brandy in it and, the morning after, use it to brew themselves a much-needed pot of coffee. It could melt tin, lead, and zinc in a matter of minutes. And so in 1861 Mouchot received a patent for the Marmite Solaire, a burning mirror that focused on a heat-trapping glass jar. The trick was to generate the heat and conserve it: the mirror was very good at the former, and the hot box at the latter. Mirrors could generate intense heat, but most of this energy was then lost. Mouchot’s chances of success initially seemed little better than Cros’s. How else Martians might interpret a heat ray incinerating their land did not seem to occur to Cros. By moving the earth mirror you could, as it were, carve a greeting into a neighboring planet-a geometric shape, perhaps, as mathematics was the universal language. Make your focal point the surface of Mars, and the intense heat of the ray would fuse the Martian desert sand into glass. His solution, outlined in his 1869 book Moyens de Communications avec les Planètes, was bizarrely ingenious: Build a gigantic movable mirror with an extremely shallow parabolic curvature, for the more shallow the angle, the further away your focal point is. Charles Cros spent the same decade pondering how mirrors might be used to communicate with Martians. One of Mouchot’s countrymen was thinking of burning mirrors on a grand scale indeed. A few years later Knap announced plans for an electric hotel in Paris, where a labyrinthine system of periscopes, dictographs, personal elevators, and revolving tables would insure that patrons would never have to lift a finger for anything. Knap’s house, explained Scientific American, even had “‘electric spies’ distributed in all rooms behind the wall paper,” for the benefit of the master of the household. Bedrooms were equipped with personal freight elevators, so that the morning paper might be sent up wordlessly to inhabitants. The kitchen had an electric range, electric dishwasher, an electric churn, an electric meat chopper, even an electric milk dispenser. In 1909, the inventor George Knap designed and built an “Electrical Household” in the heart of Paris, featuring an elevator that delivered plates and tureens up to the diners, and a revolving platform to deliver dishes to everyone at the table, all controlled by push-buttons at the host’s chair. By the turn of the century, it seemed that everything could and should be electrified.
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