🦺 Nikola Tesla

Welcome to the 32nd edition of Safe For Work. In this edition we continue our exploration of robotics and automation with a story inspired by Nikola Tesla.

You´ll also find a new short film, The Last Caregiver, adapted from issue 18. At the bottom, a couple of safety news stories worth reading.

Electrical Engineering Exam

The wreckage of a small plane, a delightful skeleton, and a perfectly intact boat.

Well, alright, it’s not perfectly intact– nothing is perfectly anything, I suppose. The way I guided my failing aircraft to this tiny island here was not perfectly smooth. The way I skipped along the water right as the engines were finally failing was not perfectly graceful. And this boat is not perfectly intact– a closer look shows me that there’s a pretty big gash in the hull, right below the waterline. There isn’t too much that’s leaked in for now, at least. Should be easy enough to drain and patch– but first thing’s first.

“PhD in Electrical Engineering, and I’m hotwiring a speedboat on a deserted island after a plane-crash,” I mutter. “Oh, how the mighty have quite literally fallen.”

Really, you’d think a PhD would have made me better at this, all things being equal. But this boat’s wiring is old-school– old and old and old. Twenty years? Fifty? A glance at the state of decay of the bones that surely belonged to this boat’s last owner says that long or more. A glance at the boat itself, it even looks old enough to still be diesel-powered– seventy-five years– but no, no, the dashboard shows a battery-dial, not a fuel-gauge. So it’s not that old, at least. This is an electric boat, at least. When I finally get the right leads crossed, though, I immediately wish it wasn’t. Not a spark; not a damn thing– and why would there be? It’s been decades, however many. Of course the batteries are dead– not a damn thing, not so much a flicker from any of the dials on the dashboard– and these are definitely the right two leads I’m crossing– I have a PhD in Electrical Engineering, remember– though at the same time, I suppose I also have a pilot’s license, don’t I?-- and here I am.

But no, no, these are definitely the right leads. And the battery is definitely dead.

At least diesel has the good sense to sit around in a tank and wait for somebody to put it to good use instead of just leeching away over the years.

On the other hand, even a half-tank of diesel wouldn’t be enough to get me away from here to anywhere else worth being, if the completely blank flatness of the horizon is to be believed. An electric boat with dead batteries, I can work with. PhD, PhD, come on.

It’s a funny thing, actually, digging through the wreckage of my plane, I don’t even feel hopeless, like a person is supposed to feel on an island like this– like those bones over there were probably feeling for a good long while. Frankly, I’m just feeling… embarrassed.

After all, he’d managed to get his boat here nice and clean with nothing more than that gash in the hull– not perfectly intact, nothing is perfectly anything, but it’s a good bit better than my plane ended up. Squinting at this tangled mess of metal and hyperplastic, you might think that I’d somehow landed the remains of a tractor here on this island.

Hopefully, nobody else ever sees this. When people ask about my story, I’ll tell them that I landed smoothly on the ocean in a storm and swam to shore while the plane sank after being struck by lightning– no need to come looking for it, nevermind all that, it’s long gone, deep below the surface, no one will ever find it, let’s go back to the harrowing story of my escape, yes? This, here, is the part I would focus on– finding a good length of metal wire– soft enough to bend, and stiff enough to keep its shape once it’s bent. “Where did you get the wire from if your airplane sank into the ocean?” people will ask me.

“I pulled it off of the boat, obviously,” I breathe into the warm late-afternoon air as I struggle to pry a mangled panel off the side of what used to be the fuselage. “Stop asking stupid questions!”

There– that’s the perfect wire. I don’t remember jack-shit of my Morse-code, but I remember this. I don’t know if that’s fantastic or even more embarrassing than the crash.

Slowly, carefully, I bend the wire. God, it’s been what, a decade since I’ve had to do this myself?-- certainly a lot longer than that since I’ve had to do it by hand. When?-- college?-- maybe. Not during my Doctorate, I know that– at that point we were past the simple theory and well onto “practical” knowledge.

“Practical is relative,” I grumble, as I poke myself in the thumb with the end of the wire for the third time in a row– not sharp enough to draw blood, but the skin there is really starting to get pretty raw, and it’s my own fault for being clumsy, I know that, but if I grumble at the wire for a bit, it probably won’t mind.

It takes the better part of forty-five minutes to get the correct shape. I only need about two kilowatts, so I only need to bend to a fractal depth of three, and it’s a little clumsy so I might only be able to pull forty, forty-five maybe from the Wardenclyff Field, but even that should still be enough. I take the two long ends of the wire, far from all my careful bending, and I draw them together, closer and closer and closer, until I can start to see breath-blue lines of current lighting the air between them, jumping from one tip to the other– I can hear the hum, I can hear the crackle.

Somewhere in the world… based on where I’ve most likely crash-landed, it’s the one in Osaka, but I could be wrong– somewhere in the world, a nuclear reactor is outputting several hundred petawatts of power and dumping it through a Tesla-Tower into the air with all the grace of a lewd message in a chat-room, there for anyone to see– and if you’ve got a wire bent into the right sort of shape, like I’ve gotten my wire here bent into this shape, the resonance is all yours to soak up. A hundred-trillion wires bask in the hum and the crackle like a cat in the sun, and they purr life into microwaves and refrigerators and ovens and blenders and juicers and toasters and other places besides kitchens but I really am starting to get hungry– cars and buses and planes and phones and hospital-rooms and lamps and ATMs– and now, right here, in my hands.

I put down the wire for now. I make my way back to the boat. I’m still going to have to patch up that tear in the hull, but one thing at a time– one thing at a time. And the one thing for this time is to crack open the engine compartment and do what we can do. Obviously, the batteries have got to go– I’d thought they’d just gone dead after all this time, but it’s worse-and-a-half than that; they are hopelessly corroded and damaged. I grab them with palm-leaves instead of with my hands, and when I take a look at those leaves after ripping out the last of the three layers of battery-banks and heaving them away onto the sand, I’m glad that I did; the rich green has gone entirely yellow-and-orange with chemical burns.

With the rows and rows of batteries removed, the boat is beginning to twist a little bit this way and that way with the gentle waves, lapping the shore; all those batteries had been a pretty big bulk of its mass. It’ll be faster now. It’ll float easier.

I take my Wardenclyff Resonator, and carefully bind the wire-tips to the terminals where the battery-bank had been connected a few minutes ago. When I try to power on the boat again, the engine immediately whirs into life with so much force that the little vessel very nearly launches itself off of the sand and into the spray before I manage to turn it off again. The last thing I need is to take on more water through that gash in the hull.

That’s going to be a chore to fix, now that I’ve started actually thinking about it. I can probably use some tree-sap in the place of tar?-- or will I have to think of something else?

For a minute, I try to think about using the Field to send a message instead, call for help– but no. Why bother? No need to waste anyone else’s time. I’m fine. I’ve got just what I need.

In Safety News

• The importance of safety culture, not just compliance being demonstrated by South African mine operators in Australia. ´But what we have found is – and I am exaggerating – an intrinsic view that says we will make sure you don’t get killed in the workplace, but you may get injured.´

• Injuries are mounting during construction of Hyundai´s new electric vehicle plant

SFW Films presents: The Last Caregiver

See you next week as we conclude robotics and automation, with our scifi take on predictive technologies. Stay safe.