Futurology

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China's hyperloop maglev train has achieved the fastest speed ever for a train at 623 km/h, as it prepares to test at up to 1,000 km/h in a 60km long hyperloop test tunnel. (robbreport.com)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Hyperloop? You mean a vacuum tube train. Hyperloop is Elon Musk’s name for it when he claimed to have invented it over a hundred years after it was proposed.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

To be fair, Socrates envisioned the TV and Jules Verne hypothesized space travel, yet you don't see people giving them credit for inventing those things

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago (1 children)

The vactrain proper was invented by Robert H. Goddard as a freshman at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in the United States in 1904. Goddard subsequently refined the idea in a 1906 short story called "The High-Speed Bet" which was summarized and published in a Scientific American editorial in 1909 called "The Limit of Rapid Transit". Esther, his wife, was granted a US patent for the vactrain in 1950, five years after his death.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

It's OK to use the name and laugh at his claim to have invented it

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I feel like I'm going fucking mental.

I was certain for about a year the idea was pneumatic tubes like in a bank but for trains. Which I though maybe, but probably too much friction.

Then it turned into a bog standard vacuum tunnel that was all over youtube and the Internet before Musk. But everyone acts like that was the original idea.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Pneumatic tubes use a constantly generated vacuum and air pressure to move objects. It would take forever to pump out a tunnel for a single train.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

No you have two loops of constantly moving air. The train then goes in and out of that tube at stations.

It's a fucking shit idea and trains are great. But I remember that and seem to be the only one. No one ever mentions that idea

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Honestly not sure how that would work, but I guess it doesn't exactly matter. Never heard of it though, maybe you could dig up some article from back then.