"Robert A. Heinlein - Waldo" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

from one instrument to another. If a man in Monterey wished to speak
to his wife or partner in Boston, a physical, copper neuron stretched
bodily across the continent from one to the other.
Radiant power was then a hop dream, found in Sunday supplements
and comic books.
A concatenation, no, a meshwork of new developments was necessary
before the web of copper covering the continent could be dispensed with.
Power could not be broadcast economically; it was necessary to wait for
the co-axial beam, a direct result of the imperative military shortages of
the Great War. Radio telephony could not replace wired telephony until
ultra micro-wave techniques made room in the ether, so to speak, for the
traffic load. Even then it was necessary to invent a tuning device which
could be used by a nontechnical person, a ten-year-old child, let us say
,as easily as the dial selector which was characteristic of the commercial
wired telephone of the era then terminating.
Bell Laboratories cracked that problem; the solution led directly to the
radiant power receptor, domestic type, keyed, sealed, and metered.
The way was open for commercial radio power transmission, except in
 one respect: efficiency. Aviation waited on the development of the
Otto-cycle engine; the Industrial Revolution waited on the steam
engine; radiant power waited on a really cheap, plentiful power
source. Since radiation of power is inherently wasteful, it was
necessary to have power cheap and plentiful enough to waste.
The same war brought atomic energy. The physicists working for
the United States Army, the United States of North America had its
own army then, produced a superexplosive; the notebooks recording
their tests contained, when properly correlated, everything necessary
to produce almost any other sort of nuclear reaction, even the so-called
Solar Phoenix, the hydrogen-helium cycle, which is the source of the
sunтАЩs power.
The reaction whereby copper is broken down into phosphorus,
silicon29, and helium8, plus degenerating chain reactions, was one
of the several cheap and convenient means developed for producing
unlimited and practically free power.
Radiant power became economically feasible, and inevitable.
Of course Stevens included none of this in his explanation to Grimes.
Grimes was absent-mindedly aware of the whole dynamic process;
he had seen radiant power grow up, just as his grandfather had seen
the development of aviation. He had seen the great transmission lines
removed from the sky -тАШminedтАЩ for their copper; he had seen the heavy
cables being torn from the dug-up streets of Manhattan. He might even
recall his first independent-unit radiotelephone with its somewhat
disconcerting double dial. He had gotten a lawyer in Buenos Aires
on it when attempting to reach his neighbourhood delicatessen.
For two weeks he made all his local calls by having them relayed back
from South America before he discovered that it made a difference
which dial he used first.
At that time Grimes had not yet succumbed to the new style in
architecture. The London Plan did not appeal to him; he liked a
house aboveground, where he could see it. When it became