One of my all-time favorite coolest inventions is a reflective fresnel solar concentrator invented by a guy named Richard Steenblik. He's a Georgia Tech grad, Jed. This amazingly clever device works like this: You cut a piece of flexible metallized plastic into a spiral and lay it down on a rigid support. You then attach the inside corner of the outside arm of the spiral in such a manner as to allow it to tilt freely. You twist the center of the spiral and then attach it to the support. This automatically forms a parabolic (I think) reflective fresnel.
This is about the damned cleverest thing I ever heard of. If my description is inadequate, and it probably is, you can look up the patent at USPTO under fresnel and Steenblik. This was also described in the Amateur Scientist column of Scientific American. It's on the CD-ROM. This was going to be yet another solution to third world energy problems. But like so many other such devices, such as the wind-up radio, the crickets are still chirping. Another thing he invented that you're more likely to have seen, is Chroma-Depth 3D glasses. More incredible cleverness. You look through them and images become 3D according to their color. In other words, red things look closer and blue things look farther away. This is another fresnel device. The glasses are made of very fine fresnel prisms that amount to a transmission blazed diffraction grating. The net result is a great deal of chromatic dispersion without a lot of image displacement. This produces excellent 3D images. There's a web site somewhere selling this stuff. Ah, but Steenblik is not guy who would be greatly admired by Vorts. One of his claims to fame is that he "debunked" cold fusion for the Smithsonian. Nobody's perfect, I guess. Say, Jed, is he on that Georgia Tech committee you were talking about? M. _______________________________________________ Join Excite! - http://www.excite.com The most personalized portal on the Web!
