• SplashJackson@lemmy.ca
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    8 months ago

    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

    • hperrin@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      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.