Word: flywheel
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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That playful look--dreamed up by DaimlerChrysler and the folks who brought you the Swatch watch--is part of a "visible technology" motif that tries to make a fashion statement out of one of the biggest changes to hit the auto industry since Henry Ford started making flywheel magnetos on a moving assembly line in 1913. The car industry, like the computer and consumer-electronics industries before it, is going modular, and the percentage of a car that is actually manufactured by traditional car companies is getting smaller and smaller as a result. More and more of the cars...
...knows why these cycles occur. According to Bill Gray, a hurricane expert from Colorado State University, one reason may be a phenomenon known as the "Atlantic conveyor." The subject of much recent research, the conveyor is a gigantic oceanic flywheel that transports cold water from the seas off Iceland and Greenland in a majestic, slow current along the bottom of the ocean to Antarctica, where it surfaces several decades later and flows back north, absorbing heat as it passes the equator. The conveyor seems to have kicked into a faster gear lately, bringing warm equatorial water north before...
...year, the Rosens will have spent $13 million on their project. They expect to spend an additional $10 million to $15 million next year, nearly all of it from Ben's silicon-lined pockets. They also plan to begin selling their flywheel to utilities for stationary power generation next year. Says Ben: "By the end of next year, we will have generated enough risk reduction to seek external funding." Eventually they plan to sell shares to the public. They want to build their own plants to make their own power trains and sell them to car companies. In their vision...
...away the field in part because Harold and his team of engineers have solved a set of daunting technological issues just in the past year. Harold is, after all, a rocket scientist. For instance, he has been able to create and sustain a relatively pure vacuum in which the flywheel spins, using such exotic devices as molecular drag pumps and molecular sieves. A better vacuum means less friction, thus better spin. He also has been able to suspend the rapidly spinning flywheel in its unstable environment by using sophisticated gimbals and magnetic bearings--something very few, if any, other scientists...
This is not a vision that anyone in Detroit shares. Instead, the industry is working closely with Rosen competitors like U.S. Flywheel, Trinity Flywheel and Unique Mobility. That's a badge of honor to Harold and Ben, who are clearly thrilled to be working together. When they were younger, Ben was very much the little brother walking devotedly in the older brother's footsteps: he followed Harold to Cal Tech, and then to Raytheon Corp. in the 1950s, when Ben got his very first job working for his brother, building missiles. Their paths diverged when Ben went East...