{"id":5764,"date":"2014-03-08T00:40:40","date_gmt":"2014-03-08T12:40:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=5764"},"modified":"2014-03-08T07:02:37","modified_gmt":"2014-03-08T13:02:37","slug":"proofs-of-concept","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=5764","title":{"rendered":"Proofs of Concept"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><A href=\"http:\/\/online.barrons.com\/article\/SB50001424053111904628504579417663098288726.html?mod=BOL_hp_mag\">Barrons<\/a>: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The first iterations of a new technology can seem astonishingly clunky, at least in retrospect. Often, they are more a proof of concept than a practical device.<\/p>\n<p>The first hydrogen bomb, detonated in 1952, was the size of a three-story house and weighed 82 tons. No airplane in the world could have carried it. Within little more than a decade, however, the thermonuclear warheads atop missiles were roughly the size of garbage cans and weighed less than 700 pounds.<\/p>\n<p>A century and a half earlier, the first steam engines were very large and heavy relative to the power they produced. The big engines that drove the Philadelphia waterworks in the early 19th century &#8212; the largest steam engines in the country at the time &#8212; were built using James Watt&#8217;s low-pressure design. They had 32-inch cylinders with a stroke of six feet. But they only put out 12 horsepower. Even the more-efficient high-pressure engines, independently designed by Oliver Evans in the U.S. and Richard Trevithick in Britain, were bulky, and they were ravenous consumers of coal.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Barrons: The first iterations of a new technology can seem astonishingly clunky, at least in retrospect. Often, they are more a proof of concept than a practical device. The first hydrogen bomb, detonated in 1952, was the size of a three-story house and weighed 82 tons. No airplane in the world could have carried it. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5764"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5764"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5764\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5767,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5764\/revisions\/5767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}