• hperrin@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Hyperloop? You mean a vacuum tube train. Hyperloop is Elon Musk’s name for it when he claimed to have invented it over a hundred years after it was proposed.

    • Wanderer@lemm.ee
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      9 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@monyet.cc
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        9 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
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          9 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@monyet.cc
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            9 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.

    • SplashJackson@lemmy.ca
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      9 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
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        9 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.