Elon Musk, famous for Tesla supercars and private rocket travel, has lately been teasing techies with another transportation idea. This week, on Twitter, he again touted what he calls the Hyperloop, a mystery system that he says will make intercity travel faster, cleaner and cheaper than any other method now in existence.
The tease has to do with the timing. Musk has been talking up the Hyperloop for quite a while, and on Monday he just rattled our chains again, saying the actual details of his project would come out only on 12 August. That makes for an extended drumroll not unlike the one that inventor Dean Kamen orchestrated a dozen years ago for the Segway, a self-righting two-wheeler that was supposed to make intracity travel faster, cleaner, and cheaper than any other method then in existence. (It didn’t.)
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It so happens the Segway was unveiled in New York’s Bryant Park, a stone’s throw from the main branch of the New York Public Library, where you could, at that time, shoot book-order slips up to the stacks via pneumatic tube. It was a relic of a citywide tubular network that once allowed people to send letters, contracts, ham sandwiches and -- in at least one case -- a live cat in a box.
The cat was alive at the end, a fact that of course could be determined only by actually looking into the box. But, I digress.
Musk calls the Hyperloop a cross between “a Concorde, a railgun, and an air hockey table,” one that he thinks will make economic sense but, in any case, “would be a really fun ride.” That’s the same balance of speculative economics and indubitable coolness found in all of Musk’s enterprises.
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Tubularity seems to be the key. A car full of passengers shoots along a tube that -- judging by Musk’s “air table” reference -- provides a nearly friction-free bed of air. The motive force, which he alluded to as the "railgun," would have to be a linear motor. That's essentially an unrolled electric motor whose alternating magnetic field pushes and pulls a passenger car along.
Musk assumes his baby will find its first application in California, displacing the high-speed rail system that the state has, with very great deliberation, finally begun to build, or at least to finance. He has said the Hyperloop would carry passengers from San Francisco to Los Angeles in just 30 minutes. That's half as long as a commercial flight takes.
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