ARCHIMEDES' BURNING GLASS really could have existed and might have been nothing but highly polished shields, says Greek Engineer Ioannis Sakkas. According to an old but persistent legend (scoffed at by most historians), Archimedes broke up a Roman siege of Syracuse about 214 B.C. by using a "burning glass" on shore to set fire to the attacking ships while they were still at sea. "Not so," says the scoffers, "the Ancient Greeks didn't have the technology to make the giant lens that this legend implies." Sakkas, however, figured that the "burning glass" reported in the story might well be nothing but brightly polished copper shields (something the early Greeks would have had). And he's proven his point...by lining 70 men up on a pier, having them turn such shields so that they all reflected the sun's light onto a small boat anchored 160 feet away...and then watching that vessel burst into flame within two minutes.
PHYSICIST-INVENTOR-BUSINESSMAN NICOLAUS LAING
president of Germany's Laing Institute, feels that some of his ideas can reduce fossil fuel consumption by 90% within 16 years. Dr. Laing foresaw the energy crunch nine years ago and began an all-out development program to solve it. Among his many breakthroughs: "super black" materials that absorb solar radiation and retain 20 times more heat than a perfect black body, "super white" sheets that stay cooler than a perfect reflector, heat-rectifying roofs, vastly improved insulating materials and heat storage units...and an automobile that runs on latent energy. Don't laugh. A prototype car has already been operated, the roofs were tested in the Sahara Desert in 1970 and Laing has a long record of delivering what he promises...already a billion dollars worth of other Laing-designed products are sold annually.
GRAHAME CAINE (see MOTHER NO. 20) is not the only Englishman who plans to live in an "eco-house". An engineer, a chemist, a zoologist and an architect have now teamed up and expect to start building a completely self-contained life support structure during the summer of 1974. About 50% of the eight-sided home's warmth will come from the sun during the winter and the rest from heat pumps that extract warmth stored in the soil. Water will be collected on the roof and a windmill (also on the building's roof) is expected to produce two kilowatts of power. Humans will be housed on the structure's first floor and animals underneath. All waste will be circulated through a digester and transformed into methane for cooking and composted fertilizer for a garden. Spent fluids from the purification of this sewage will be filtered through diatomite and reused for drinking and cooking purposes.
INDEPENDENT POWER DEVELOPERS , an alternative energy firm founded in Montana one year ago, is now ready to help "anyone with any aspect of becoming self-sufficient, especially in the northwest area of the U.S. and Canada". William H. Delp II, owner and manager of IPD, says the company is a franchised dealer for Quirk's Victory Light windplants and the James Leffel hydro-turbines. IPD also has the tools, information and ability to custom-build water wheels and turbines that Leffel no longer manufactures. it looks like these guys mean business and you can contact Delp by writing to Independent Power Developers, P.O. Box 618, Noxon, Montana 59835.
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