On 13/07/2013 11:22, Timothy Murphy wrote:
A story from the past.

When I was a student I attended lectures by Fred Hoyle,
who some may recognize as a Science Fiction writer,
or older people may recall he gave a series of TV programs
about the solar system, where he made the remark that
he had found no evidence for God in his cosmological studies.
This remark caused outrage at the time,
with parsons demanding he be banned from the BBC, etc.

In any case, his lectures purported to be on thermodynamics.
But in fact he was writing a book
about a number of semi-paranoid views he held.
Some are fairly standard, I think:
razor blades could easily be made to last for ever,
but the manufacturers deliberately add impurities
to the steel which make them deteriorate in time;
similarly, electric light bulbs - incandescent of course -
could also be made to last for ever,
but impurities were added to the tungsten
to make sure they only lasted a finite time.

There were half-a-dozen or more such ideas.
But one that I've never seen repeated
was that cars could easily be made to start with torch batteries
in place of accumulators.
Again, there was a plot by accumulator manufacturers -
I think they had bought up the patent of the torch-battery method.

I've forgotten the details of how this was supposed to work,
but I'm sure it would have been plausible.
I wonder if anyone has come across this idea,
and knows how it works or is supposed to work?



Something is niggling away at my memory. Was there a C-cell device that
did as you say? But it worked not by providing the full starting
current, rather by charging up a relatively flat battery so it would be
able to do it. I think these were designed to fit the fag lighter
socket. There again, it could be entirely my brain failing.

--
Rod