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You Can't Become Rich In Your Pocket Until You Become Rich In Your Mind | ||||
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You stand on a small platform spread between two wheels that perform like your feetInnovations That Are Transforming Society Realize, Capitalize, Customize Comes to Air Travel As is the case with most Americans, we live anywhere from 15 to 40 minutes away from airports we cannot fly out of. Instead, we drive 90 minutes to a large international airport. The airports that are 15 minutes from our home have been deemed too unprofitable to service by most major airlines. The ones that are 30 minutes away are too small to accommodate large jet aircraft. There are between 5,000 and 6,000 underutilized airports like this in North America.22 Once we have driven the 90 miles to an airport we can actually use, we spend at minimum another 30 minutes parking the car and getting to the gate, where another one to three hours will be wasted before we get on the plane. Arriving at our destination, the process repeats. Securing transportation will take at minimum 30 minutes. And once on our way, we are between 90 minutes and four hours, on average, from our intended destination. (We travel a lot and have kept track.) The fact is, Americans are still being subjected to air travel that is to the twentieth century what covered wagons were to the nineteenth. Air transport should operate like limo services. One travels in a plane with a handful of people, all with destinations within the same general area. What is required is smaller, faster, economical jet aircraft that can take off and land at all the underutilized small airports around the country. Aprivately owned company called Eclipse Aviation Corporation is manufacturing such a plane. The company was founded by Vern Raburn and Sam Williams. Raburn, now in his early 50s, spent 20 years as an executive at computer software companies like Microsoft, Lotus, and Symantec. Always interested in aviation, he bought a Lockheed Constellation from John Travolta and invested $1 million in its restoration. In the mid 1990s he met Williams, who is now 82. A mechanical engineer, Williams has spent his life creating powerful and practical new engines. His company, Williams International, located near Detroit, Michigan, has designed products that have revolutionized weaponry. In the 1970s the military required a way to carry warheads hundreds of miles. For a missile to accomplish this task, a small, light, fuel-efficient engine is necessary. Pratt and Whitney, General Electric, and other major manufacturers said that it would not be possible to produce such an engine. Williams did not agree. He designed and manufactured thousands of the powerful and efficient little engines that power cruise missiles. Williams turned his creative energy to the problem of commercial aviation. As he saw it, civilian transportation problems could be solved like the militarys with powerful, smaller engines. By 1997, in a joint effort with NASA, which also wanted such an engine, Williams succeeded in producing his economical and powerful aviation breakthrough. Williams met Raburn at an air show in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where the new engine was first demonstrated, and the historic alliance was formed. By January 2001, the third round of wind-tunnel testing on the new aircraft containing the revolutionary engine was completed. In March 2001 expansion began on the companys manufacturing and assembly plant in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The new plane is called the Eclipse 500. It cost less than a quarter of what the least expensive jet being delivered today costs, claims the Eclipse Aviation Web site. The operating cost is only 56 cents per mile, and the plane has a range of 1,300 nautical miles. It requires only one pilot. The Swedish company Aviace AG ordered 112 new planes in the spring of 2002. Aviace AG is capitalizing on the new European phenomenon of flying clubs. Five different membership types are offered depending on a customer s needs. Aviace says that with the new Eclipse 500 planes, they can provide point-to-point, on-demand jet travel at reasonable prices throughout Europe. First deliveries of the aircraft are scheduled for 2004. Because the new planes have the lowest cost of ownership ever achieved in a jet aircraft and are safer and easier to operate, it is not hard to visualize pilot-owners of small fleets of planes dotted throughout North America. Need a ride? Call or e-mail a central dispatcher with computerized tracking and scheduling systems that can calculate the cheapest and fastest way to get you where you want to go. Around all of the 5,000 underutilized airports, a new universe of businesses would spring up to service the new influx of travelers. Flying from New York to Los Angeles would still require a large commercial airliner. But fewer people would be using the large airport hubs, and the large airlines would no longer own the skies. With more competition we could dare to expect better and better prices. The greatest benefits are likely to be those that we cannot conceive of today. Personalized Mobility You stand on a small platform spread between two wheels that perform like your feet. You think about heading briskly to the store a mile and a half away the machine takes you. You see something you want to look at and think about stopping the machine stops. Someone bumps into you you do not fall over. Think about going faster, slower, right, left, uphill, downhill and over any sort of terrain it will take you. It is an extension of your feet that will do what you wish all day long for only 5 cents worth of electricity. The machine is called a Segway and is built by the Segway Company in a 77,000-square-foot factory near Manchester, New Hampshire. During 2001, orders for the new transportation device were placed by the Postmaster General, who tested them for letter carriers, and the National Parks Service, who could use them for police and park rangers. According to an article in Time,23 the Department of Defense is considering the vehicle for use by special forces. In April 2002 GE Plastics completed the first round of testing the machine and purchased 10 of them for secondary testing in three of its largest plants. Results of our initial test revealed potential double digit productivity gains, showed improvement in multiple worker process and have generated additional thoughts on how the SegwayHT can make a positive impact on the way we do business.24 Gary Powell, vice president of global manufacturing for GE Plastics On June 4, 2002, Postmaster General John E. Potter announced that second-phase testing of the Segway was to begin: The feasibility tests were conducted to determine if we could use this device to deliver the nations mail. The results of the tests were promising. The early test results have been compelling enough to warrant expanded testing.25 The innovative machines were invented by Dean Kamen, who won the coveted Lemelson-MIT prize for inventors in April 2002. This is not the 50-year-old Kamens first accolade. The college dropout, selftaught physicist, and multimillionaire holds several honorary doctorates. His vision was to put a human being into a system where the machine acts as an extension of your body.26 A computer network of gyroscopes, sensors, 10 microprocessors, and diaphragms gives the users the sense that their minds are being read. In a way, they are. The Segway is entering the marketplace first through major corporations, universities, and government agencies. Orders there could keep the company busy for years. But ultimately, Dean Kamen has his eye on capturing a portion of the $300 billion a year transportation market. John Doerr, the venture capitalist behind Netscape and Amazon.com, and one of the financiers of Segway, thinks the impact of this machine could rival that of the Internet.27 When the machines go on sale to the general public, the cost will be around $3,000, about the price of computers when they exploded onto the marketplace in the early 1990s. Consider the effect of this. They could replace automobiles in towns and cities. Downtown parking garages could be replaced with more productive office space, retail centers, libraries, or entertainment centers. Cars, taxis, and buses would no longer clog busy downtown streets. Noise, congestion, pollution, and energy consumption would be dramatically reduced. Just as GE is seeing a possible doubling of its corporate productivity through the use of the Segway, personal productivity could be improved as well. We would have the ability to get places faster, cheaper, and with less stress. Ten years from now we could see a reconfiguration of communities and the businesses that serve them. Just as shopping malls and tract housing were the children of the automobile, machines like the Segway will inevitably alter where we want to live, where we want to shop, and how we choose to be entertained. Nanotechnology When we build from the ground up, we put bricks and mortar together to create any sort of edifice we desire, limited only by our imagination. Nanotechnology is putting atoms and molecules together to create whatever material object we can imagine. We can create devices with extraordinary properties. In the spring of 2002, the U.S. Army selected MIT to create lightweight molecular materials to equip foot soldiers with uniforms and gear that can heal wounds, shield them from projectiles, and protect them against chemical and biological warfare.28 The new clothing can have a multitude of properties. Some of these are camouflage material with a chameleon-like response to changing terrain, cloth that will become a rigid cast to support a broken limb, and paperweight chain mail made of molecular materials. Scientists at Rand29 explain that semiconductor manufacturing will eventually reach a ceiling where limits to the degree that interconnections or wires between transistors may be scaled could in turn limit the effective computation speed of devices because of materials properties and compatibility, despite incremental present day advances in these areas. Thermal dissipation in chips with extremely high device densities will also pose a serious challenge.30 In other words, in the quest for faster processing of data, computer chips as we know them today will become too packed with material to function. As long ago as 1999, Sematech, the leading consortium of semiconductor manufacturers, called for development of nanoscale semiconductors. Although implementation of organic computers for widespread use is several years off Rand estimates 2015discoveries are likely to be made along the way that could have ancillary benefits. For example, Rand foresees that by integrating nanotechnology with current materials technology, synergies will be uncovered that will drive applications for drug discovery and genomics, as well as the basic understanding of many other phenomena.31 Only a single new develop ment, such as nanosatellites (this would recreate wireless communication), would be enough to revolutionize business. A handful of such innovations would change how we see the world. Japan, the United States, and Europe are the major international competitors racing for dominance in the field of nanotechnology. Funding for the U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative was $495 million in 2001. The lure of minute, disposable computers computers that could be injected into humans to diagnose or fight disease and then self-destruct or computers that could clean up the environment, assemble consumer goods, and reinvent space travel is behind the race for countries to dominate this new science. With the stakes so high, the intensity of the competition could bring us some of the benefits of nanotechnology sooner rather than later. |
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