JOHN WOOD CAMPBELL

1910-1971

 

John Wood Campbell, for thirty-four years the editor of this magazine, was an outstanding influence and leader in the development of modern science fiction. As he shaped and guided the growth of Analog into the respected and unique publication it has become, he shaped and guided as well the techniques of science-fiction writing and of many of the field's ablest au­thors.

Graduated from Duke University with a Bachelor of Science degree in physics, John Campbell became one of the most popular and memorable writers of science fiction, practicing with utmost distinction the craft he fought, edited, prodded, taught, and praised others into practicing with growing skill.

He will be remembered as an innovator, as an exciting writer, as a de­manding editor. He will be remembered best by the uncounted people with whom he worked for the generosity of spirit with which he shared his energy, his ideas, his unstinted friendship, and his great gifts of creative judgment.

John Campbell always thought to the future. He wrote to the future. We are grateful that he left three of his provocative editorials for this and the fol­lowing issues of Analog.

 

Antipollution Device

an editorial

by John W. Campbell

 

That I don't hold a high opinion of some of the massive campaigns being launched by Instant Ecology Experts is fairly clear, I think. So that must mean I don't think any­thing should be done, maybe?

No—but it does mean I'm against doing useless things at great expense, or doing things that in fact make the situation worse, in the glorious name of improving the situation. Like get­ting rid of lead in gasoline—at the expense of introducing a new source of powerfully carcinogenic sub­stances in automobile exhaust. It's not that I like the danger of lead poi­soning—it's just that I prefer a little lead poisoning—which can be treated effectively—to the danger of cancer-causing substances which cause something we can't treat effectively. Sort of, "Which do you prefer, a bro­ken leg or being attacked by ants?"

There are things that could be done—things that need to be done, and do not represent hysterical or political antipollution problems. Most studies have pretty well agreed that the internal combustion engine is the source of most of the most dangerous pollution in the air. Most of the surveys and studies in­dicate that sixty percent of air pollu­tion traces to internal combustion engines—cars, trucks, diesel locomo­tives, road-building machinery, et cetera.

The pollution they produce is real, massive, and seems to be politically untouchable. Most of the hysterical antipollution Instant Experts so dearly love their personal wheels that they forgive their dear beasts any nasty stink they may produce.

Practically every voting American citizen has his own set of wheels—in­cluding the Welfare recipients.

This massive body of voters makes the automotive pollution generator effectively a political untouchable.

Here's a magnificent case of a real, massive, dangerous pollution gener­ator that not even the most fanatical Instant Expert Ecologist groups has dared to attack, and attack head-on. It's real pollution, not hysterical or political—and they walk around it carefully avoiding serious attacks.

Power plants are favorite attack-points. They're Big Corporation properties and therefore, obvious, automatic fair game for everyone with any grudges.

But the fact is that fossil-fuel plants give off relatively harmless fumes; combustion in their furnaces is just as complete as it can be and carried out with an excess of air, and relatively slowly (not millisecond ex­plosive combustion as in internal combustion engines) so that the combustion products are almost completely in equilibrium—CO2, N2, H2O, some SO2 and a little CO.

Every one of those compounds is a naturally-present molecular species; you yourself breathe out CO2, N2, H20, a little SO2 and even a little CO. The ecosystem of Earth adapted to those substances aeons ago. Car­bon dioxide is the mainstay of all green plant "diets"; recent studies show that many soil bacteria and fungi are able to metabolize carbon monoxide quite happily. (One vari­ety of the penicillium family likes the stuff!)

For ages, volcanoes have been ex­haling stupendous tonnages of those substances—a little SO2 in the air has even been shown to be actively ben­eficial to animals. (Remember that one of the favorite cross-linkage mechanisms in proteins depends on a sulfur linkage.)

Automobile exhaust, on the other hand, contains decidedly unnatural compounds—things not found in na­ture, because they're highly unstable products of partial oxidation. When hydrocarbon fuels are forced to burn in a too-limited supply of air, at high temperatures, in thousandths of a second, and are then swept out of the combustion region and cooled very rapidly—against chilled metal walls—substances come out that could not be produced in nature except in a lightning bolt. There, too, substances are heated to enormous tempera­tures in an exceedingly short time, and then abruptly cooled as the heat-source is withdrawn.

The IC engines—diesel or gas-op­erated—produce nitrogen oxides, just as lightning flashes do—but not in the middle of a rainstorm at high al­titude, where they're diluted and washed away to enrich the soil or waters below. Even in great dilution, nitric oxides are poisonous. Hydro­gen cyanide gas is deadly at 5 parts per million in air; nitrogen oxides are about one fifth as poisonous—25 ppm—as that favorite killer of detec­tive-story fame.

The partially burned hydro­carbons are bad—and they get worse when the sun and air goes to work on them; the complex organic sub­stances tend to be far more toxic than inorganic poisons, and a com­bination of solar ultraviolet, partially oxidized hydrocarbons, nitrogen oxides, atmospheric oxygen and nit­rogen, a little ozone and who-knows-­what odd other things—like lead bro­mide, for instance—combine to pro­duce "photochemical smog."

Those compounds are not things Earth's life forms have grown up with for the last billion or so years.

So how can we attack the un­touchable problem of mobile smog-generators?

A fundamental aspect is that (1) manufacturers won't make a product people don't want, and (2) will strive to continue to produce a product people do like.

There is no production electric ve­hicle available in America today—except golf carts!—that the public could buy if they wanted to. Manu­facturers don't produce something for which there's no demand.

Electric cars that we could manu­facture today would have a max­imum range-between-charges of about 75 to 100 miles, would be small, relatively light-bodied, would have a maximum speed of about 60 miles an hour, and definitely would not give zero-to-60 in 6 seconds per­formance. They'd be low horse­power, and, therefore, acceleration would be moderate. No rubber-burning jackrabbit starts!

They would, however, make ideal commuter and in-city transportation; they'd be perfect for the housewife's shopping and social calls.

They would be, that is, if she could buy one, which she can't.

And they produce no pollution. The nuclear power reactors that fueled them with electricity via the power lines would produce no pollu­tion in the biosphere.* (*And if you insist on "thermal pollution" being a prob­lem. remember that because big power plants are far more efficient than automotive engines, the net thermal outpouring of a power plant would be far less than that of all the IC automobiles the electrics would displace! The next time your engine overheats, consider its contri­bution to thermal pollution!). The service life would be many years, reducing the scrap-automobile problem.

The major reasons the electrics are unwanted in the market—and, therefore, not manufactured for sale—are that the public (1) is unfamiliar with what they can do, (2) is accustomed to high performance, high horse­power, large size and (3) holds the big, long, low varOOOm type car as a High Status Symbol.

Some sweet day we may have really good energy storage devices; as of now batteries simply aren't ca­pable of supplying the 400 kilowatt power surges required to match top-performance internal combustion­—IC—engines. They can not supply 80-­mile-per-hour speed to a three-ton automobile for four hours continuously without recharge, as a gaso­line tank can.

On the other hand, electrics are in­trinsically nonpolluting; their ex­haust emissions simply don't exist, and, therefore, do not have to be cleaned up. While IC engines are, by their inherent characteristics, ex­tremely dangerous polluters.

That difference is relevant, impor­tant, and crucial—whatever "in" terms may currently be accepted as meaning "Something's got to be done, and soon!"

It's been demonstrated—in that low-pollution car race a year or so ago—that extremely low-pollution emissions can be achieved with stan­dard piston engines. That laboratory experiment type operation, however, neglected to make clear the two most important factors; such cars have to employ some $800 to $1200 worth of platinum-metal catalytic exhaust oxidizers, and those catalytic devices have to be replaced—at a cost of sev­eral hundred dollars—because they become "poisoned" by various chemicals inhaled with the air or present as trace impurities in the fuel.

Turbine engines have been devel­oped for automotive use; these, be­cause they can burn their fuel in an excess of air, and burn it instead of exploding it, can have very much lower inherent pollution. Large ones using large air bypass ratios, as in modern aircraft jet engines, can nearly eliminate dangerous pollution inherently, not as tacked-on patches to make up for intrinsic faults. The black trail of a jet taking off repre­sents nearly zero pollution—that's a couple of teaspoons of nearly pure carbon; it happens to be intensely black and exceedingly conspicuous, but it's completely nontoxic. Carbon monoxide—which is what makes au­tomobile exhaust such an effective method of suicide—is tasteless, odor­less, colorless, inconspicuous. That, not harmless soot, is real pollution.

However, turbine engines for cars do not look promising; the extremely high temperatures, and enormous mechanical forces to which the turbine blades have to be exposed require the use of "super al­loys"—the very expensive, high nickel, high chromium, tungsten, columbium, et cetera, alloys that can stand up to temperatures above 2,000° F. in an oxidizing atmosphere and still resist the violent mechanical forces of centrifugal force, high-velocity gas streams and erosion.

Heavy trucks and buses could af­ford such engines in the 400- to 800-horsepower class; diesel locomotives could be replaced by 4,000 horse­power turbine engines, and the oper­ation would be economically sound. A $10,000 engine in a heavy-duty long-haul truck is quite acceptable, since turbine engines once properly built keep functioning with very low maintenance costs for a very long time. (Just because the truck wears out after 500,000 miles doesn't mean the engine's used up—move it to a new truck chassis.)

But turbine engines for ordinary cars aren't practical.

Sure—they may be in the future. And also, in the future we'll have a decent energy storage cell. The point is we don't have them now, and we do need relief from IC engine pollu­tion now.

Now let's look at the actual char­acteristics of electric cars we could build now, and see whether they would, in fact, be usable.

First, the only major limitations on them is the 75-100 mile range, the 60 or so mph speed limitation and the low acceleration—the last two due to the low horsepower motors we have to use because of limited battery capacity. The real limitation is only one; limited energy storage—the available batteries "ain't got what it takes."

Way back around 1907 the world's automobile speed record of 107 mph was held by an electric car; it was a great sprinter, but definitely no dis­tance runner! (The next big boost in speed was made by a Stanley Steamer, incidentally, not an IC en­gined car.) There's certainly no in­herent limitation on the speed of electric propulsion!

So a modern electric could move at speeds markedly higher than you can use in either urban or suburban areas generally; 15 to 55 mph is the range of speeds practical in such areas. Well within modern electric-car capabilities.

An electric could actually have about as great a range in in-city driv­ing as a modern IC car; the IC en­gine continues sucking gas while it stands motionless in traffic; electrics don't. And an electric can be de­signed for regenerative braking—it can pump juice back into the bat­teries when it slows down for the traffic light ahead. The IC car simply heats up the brake bands when it slows down, and burns more gas get­ting rolling again. Electrics would make great city taxicabs.

For suburban housewives, the electrics would be great, too. Small, easily manipulated and parked, with more than enough daily range for all her shopping and social calls, quiet and vibrationless ...

The one thing they would not be good for would be interurban and interstate trips involving trips of greater than 100 miles one way. "Presently available batteries" ef­fectively means the lead-acid cell; the nickel-cadmium batteries have marked advantages, and one enormous disadvantage. The bat­teries in the M.I.T. electric car that competed in the transcontinental electric car race—which it lost—rep­resented about $30,000 worth of nickel cadmium cells. The Cal Tech car, powered with a modified lead-acid battery, won. For urban-subur­ban car use, $30,000 batteries are not practical. The even hotter silver-zinc batteries are also even more ex­pensive. The Ford Motor Company's entirely new sodium-sulfur battery is electrically superior to the Ni-Cd or Ag-Zn batteries—but it's still strictly laboratory stuff.

The great problem with the lead-acid cells is that you can't charge them in fifteen or twenty minutes; it takes hours. Oh, you can give a lead-acid battery a sort of hot-shot boost once in a while using a twenty-min­ute charge, but that neither fully charges the battery, nor improves the cell's health any.

That, I think, fairly states the case for the electrics we could build right now.

But you couldn't buy one any­where in the country today; no mar­ket means no production. No pro­duction means no familiarity with them, and hence no demand for them, and that means no production because ...

Makes a nice, tight closed-circuit doesn't it?

Now we might imagine Congress passing a tax law that imposed an unnecessary horsepower tax on all IC-engined cars. Say an annual li­censing tax of $10 per horsepower above 20 horsepower. This would mean that driving around in a super-powered 420 horsepower job would cost you $4,000 a year on horsepower taxes alone. A Volkswagen would cost you about $500 a year.

Most people would not choose to pay $4,000 a year for that—but think what a status symbol that would make it!

And think of the screams of out­rage from the wheels-addicted American voter at the very idea of being forced to accept a small, light, low-performance automobile or pay that terrific soak-the-rich tax!

It's painfully obvious that that would be, politically, absolutely im­possible; no such bill could possibly get through Congress or any state legislature, no matter how tax-hun­gry governments are! Lobbying against it would be every automobile company, automobile club, gasoline company, and every individual car owner, too!

Of course, if you could get it through, the air in our cities would improve rapidly and immensely. And there would, then, be a market for a small, light, low-performance untaxed electric car. Available IC engined cars would also be small, light, and low-powered.

Let's consider a different and po­litically more workable approach. An approach I urgently recommend to the consideration of ardent ecology buffs currently engaged in hysterical campaigns against the wrong targets; this target—automo­bile pollution—is a real one, and the biggest of them all!

Let's pass a bill requiring that all automobile manufacturers produce cars with exhaust treatment devices that give a low, safe level of those deadly pollutants—i.e., cars that are really low-pollution machines. And add one feature not in any present bills of that nature; that the manu­facturer be responsible for keeping the pollution level of his machines low.

What good is a low-pollution de­vice that functions O.K. when it's sold . . . and quits three weeks later?

This proposition is politically salable. It happens to be unreasonable, unworkable, and impossible of fulfillment, but it's, nevertheless, po­litically readily salable.

The campaign would be on the basis of making those big, uncaring corporations make good machines—make 'em do their job right, and sell the common man a machine that not only works right when he buys it, but keeps on working right. The Big Companies, not the poor individual man, should be responsible for all that aerial garbage! Make 'em clean it up, and then make 'em do it right so it stays working.

State inspectors would check on automobile exhaust emissions, and if a car failed the test, the manufac­turer would be required to service and repair the emission control de­vice at his expense in his shops. Make 'em build 'em so they worked, by God!

The Big Companies are always a fair target for any political dema­gogue; the idea of making the manu­facturer responsible for the main­tenance of his car would be popular with every car owner—it should be perfectly possible to get such a bill through on a wave of public en­thusiasm.

Of course, the fact that main­taining those patch-up gadgets is inherently impossible wouldn't stop any normal politician, nor would Johnny Q. Public believe it was anything but reluctance to accept their proper responsibility that made the manufacturers scream it couldn't be done ...

But it would bring out one neces­sary fact clearly: it can't he done. Now, or at anytime in the fore­seeable future.

A temporary patch can be plas­tered on the IC exhaust—but the only circumstance under which a manu­facturer could afford to accept per­manent responsibility for low-emis­sion characteristics would be with an inherently nonemitting machine. One that couldn't produce emissions in the first place. Like an electric car.

Please recognize a basic fact of hu­man nature; the executive manage­ment men of General Motors, or any other major car manufacturer, are business men. Their work is organi­zational, financial, and operational; the president of Corporation X may have been operating a production and sales business for twenty years in the gasoline car business, but he might just as readily be selling ma­chine tools, computers, or yard goods. His work is business organiza­tion—not making material objects.

Such men have no inherent bias toward IC, or electric, or nuclear-powered antigravity cars; their bent is toward smoothly functioning busi­ness organization, whatever that business happens to be producing.

But the engineering staff is entirely different; they've devoted a major part of their lifetimes to the devel­opment and production of the type of engines they're dedicated to—the good, reliable, responsive IC engine. Their investment of training and ex­perience is in that line of production. An "automotive engineer" today means an IC engine expert; he knows next to nothing about elec­trical engineering, motor design, and high-current electrical switching sys­tems.

Asking the research engineers in such a laboratory to evaluate the possibilities of an electric car today will get a negative report because such men inevitably, sincerely, be­lieve there's nothing that can challenge the magnificent potential of the IC engine.

The management level wouldn't in the least mind switching to selling electric packages instead of gas pack­ages; business is business.

But the engineering level most decidedly would object.

So who's going to do a good, thor­ough job of research and devel­opment of practical, workable ur­ban-suburban electric cars?

The big car companies, of course. When, and only when, the situation has made it impossible for them to continue to produce the mobile smog-generators now in production. When and only when they've been made responsible for producing per­manently nonpolluting automobiles.

And like it or not, something per­manently effective has to be done about the automotive pollution. The best cure is not a treatment that patches it up, but a genuine cure. Eliminate the root cause—the IC en­gine.

Steam cars could do it, and so could electrics; perhaps both projects could really take off if the major companies were forced to face the fact that the IC engine cannot be made permanently nonpolluting. (A steam car, like a fossil fuel power plant, can use excess air in the com­bustion chamber, "slow" com­bustion—seconds instead of ex­plosive milliseconds—and turn out essentially "natural exhalations" of CO2, H20 and very little CO or ni­trogen oxides.)

But the best bet for available-in-­1973 models would be an electric; the problem of recondensation of the vapor back to liquid for the steam car—whether it uses water vapor or something like Freon—remains to be licked.

Under the pressure of demand, once the electric cars were being sold by the millions, improvements in energy storage devices would come along pretty rapidly.

The efforts on fuel-cell research suggest that they won't be usable for automobiles for a long time to come, if at all. Huge power plants may use fuel cells eventually—but not small, light, mobile units. A semi-fuel-cell system using a zinc-air cell may turn out to be the answer, where replace­able zinc plates, reacting electrolytically with air, supply the power. These could be "recharged" in minutes by hauling out the old, and shoving in a new set, giving an electric with unlimited range com­parable to present refillable modern gas tanks.

And no pollution; the "exhaust" would be solid zinc oxide, which can readily be regenerated to zinc and oxygen.

But just demand that the engineer who designed and produced the au­tomobile keep it pollution-free, and see if he still insists that the pollution problem can be overcome!

That way we would get rid of the most important pollution problem our cities face.

 

The Editor.