In the early days of the founding of the People's Republic of China, everything is in a mess.
In that era, China, an ancient agricultural country, this country that missed several times in the industrial revolution and scientific and technological revolution, was striving to catch up with emerging opportunities and unknown opportunities.
At that time, people with insight in our country had already understood that technology was an important productivity. "The whole Party works hard to learn scientific knowledge, unite with non-party intellectuals, and strive to quickly catch up with the advanced level of world science!" In January 1956, at the National Conference on Intellectuals' Issues, Mao Zedong issued a call to " march into science to ".
In that era, magazines such as "Science Pictorial" and "Science Popular " were very popular and became the scientific enlightenment of a generation. On the one hand, these magazines introduce the current technological development technology and development achievements in science and technology, and on the other hand, they also look forward to the future through various forms, providing reference for the development of science and technology application.
After this time, I had nothing to do, I read a few volumes on the bookshelf published in the 1950s and 1960s, and found a lot of interesting content. Looking at people's beautiful vision of science in that era from today's perspective, although time has changed, it is even more shocking.
In the 1960s, people had proposed the idea of "AI synthesized voice" and carried out many practices; people in that era proposed that humans use wind energy to generate electricity in the future to seek new energy for our country; in that era, people began to experiment with "modular building houses", we should know that this concept is quite forward-looking today.
Convenient food, color TV, electric shaver , semiconductor pacemaker, ultra-high-speed wind drill, atomic spectrum lamp... People in that era also had a lot of ideas to create these innovative products.
Of course, there are also many creative ideas that seem whimsical today. For example, some scientific researchers have looked forward to the center of human development and have drawn conceptual pictures.
Today, I extracted the interesting original texts from "Science Pictorial" (1966) and included my comments for readers.
1. AI pronunciation synthesis
Original excerpt: Nanjing University made my country's first "language instrument". This is an important instrument used to analyze the acoustic properties of language. It can be used to study the basic physical properties of language. For example, if a male voice or a female voice or a different person can understand the meaning of the conversation by using Mandarin , and at the same time, you can clearly feel that there is a big difference in tone.
So what are the common and differences between physical properties (mostly what frequency components and their relative strength changes over time) when different people say the same sentence? If we find these basic rules, we may use this as a basis to create artificial synthetic languages, and then manufacture automatic equipment such as language translators and language typewriters, and realize the operation technology of using language to control the machine in production.
Author’s comment: Isn’t the AI synthetic speech technology studied by Baidu, iFLYTEK , Sogou , etc. today?
And what is even more commendable is that in the idea that "the operation technology of controlling the machine with language" was proposed. Today, it has become a reality for us to use "Xiaodu Xiaodu" and "Xiaoai Classmate" to control mobile phones and household appliances.
2. Steel development in the center of the earth
Original excerpt: What will the future steel industry be like? Let’s imagine it boldly.
Scientists say that among the various elements in the heart of the earth, iron and nickel account for a large proportion, accounting for almost 80% of the total. Therefore, the future of the steel industry should start war with the center of the earth, and mankind will one day conquer the earth. At that time, we used the high temperature and pressure at the center of the earth to make the dam spray out from the ground like oil.This liquid metal can be transported in pipelines like petroleum. This pipeline is made of a special resistive alloy. The heat generated after power is turned on will prevent the drain water from being cooled during transportation. Using electromagnetic pump , the drain water can rise, fall and turn in the pipeline. After this metal liquid arrives at the factory, it is purified in a series of airtight containers to remove impurities and unnecessary metals, and add the required elements to make alloy steel of various components and various properties. Here, casting and pressure processing have been integrated, so the required steel can be directly made.
Author’s comment: Jules Verne ’s science fiction novel " Travels in the Center of the Earth " has a great influence in China. Many people are full of longing for the adventures of the Earth and the development of the Earth trunk after reading this novel. However, the low-quality structure of the earth center is complex and the temperature is extremely high. Even today, it is a fantasy to develop the earth center. Now we often hear about the geothermal energy of , which is not even the surface of geothermal development.
3: Convenience Food·Tofu Powder
Original Excerpt: Recently, Shanghai Yimin Food Factory has made a kind of "tofu powder". This tofu powder can be carried around and eaten as you make. Without being ground into water, it can be directly made into soy milk and made into tofu at any time.
Use this powder to make tofu, just add an appropriate proportion of cold water to make soy milk. After boiling, pour in the stirred coagulation agent , stir for a little more so that the calcium ion in the coagulation gypsum coagulates the self-mass in the soy milk. After several minutes, it only solidifies into tofu.
Author’s comment: Back then, in the era of planned economy, due to unbalanced development, people in many remote areas could not eat fresh tofu, so they came up with a stupid way to make soy milk or tofu with tofu powder to facilitate carrying and preservation. Now market economy is highly developed, and it is very convenient for ordinary people to go out to buy a piece of tofu, who can still homemade tofu ?
Of course, this approach at Shanghai Yimin Food Factory is very consistent with the current pre-made dishes. If people who are quarantined at home due to the epidemic cannot go out to buy tofu, prepare some tofu powder that is better at preserving and then make it into tofu and soy milk. This is also a way to improve the quality of life in home isolation.
4. wind power generation
Original excerpt: The varieties of wind turbine in my country are increasing, and naturally showing a broad future for the use of wind energy transformation. The large-scale wind turbine is also being designed, which will create conditions for the use of wind to achieve electrification in remote areas.
When it comes to using wind turbines, people will naturally think of a question: what to do when there is no wind? Can wind energy be stored when there is no wind? Wind energy can be converted into other forms of energy for storage. When a wind turbine is used to lift water in a high reservoir, the wind energy becomes the water level energy, and then the water flow drop can be used to perform work. Use a wind turbine to generate electricity, send the electricity to the storage battery, turn it into chemical energy , which can be used at any time. Using a wind turbine to drive air compressor to turn wind energy into the potential energy of compressed air, which is also a method of energy storage.
A method is now being studied, using wind turbines to generate electricity to electrolyze water , turn water into hydrogen and oxygen and store them separately, and then use them as fuel. If this method can pass the economic level, its significance is not only to store wind energy, but also to enable the wind turbine to be used from fixed operations that can only be used in rural areas and then for field operations. At that time, as long as wind power stations were set up in rural areas to supply fuel from special tractors, all the agricultural power needs could be solved by free wind.
Author’s comment: Today, we generally believe that wind power generation belongs to new energy. Inner Mongolia and Hebei Bashang, continuous wind power generation matrix can be seen in the vast areas of the northwest.Regarding wind energy storage, we will use batteries to store them, and may use to compress air to store energy , and hydrogen energy to store energy.
The above are not separated from the blueprint drawn for us by our ancestors half a century ago.
5. Automatic pig farming
Original excerpt: A person can raise more than 300 pigs! What an exciting news. In the past two years, under the guidance of Mao Zedong Thought and inspired by the spirit of Daqing and Dazhai, employees of the state-owned farms in Shanghai have set ambitions and ambitions, broken through the shackles of the old framework, and carried out scientific experiments. They changed the wet and cooked feed for pigs to dry feed; the single feed was changed to mixed feed; the limited feed was changed to unlimited feed; the manual feed was changed to automatic feed tanks and automatic sinks; and the small group was kept in captivity to large group feed. This new method of pig farming has opened up a new way for large-scale pig farming in state-owned farms.
The upper part of the automatic feed trough is a storage box that can hold 1000 to 2000 kilograms of dry feed. The feed enters the feed trough through the skateboard through the feed port. When the feed in the trough is eaten, the feed in the storage box will automatically sink and replenish it.
The automatic drinking water device is to pass the tap water pipe into the sink, and connect a float-type automatic switch at the end of the pipe. Using the lifting and lowering of the horizontal surface, the floating bridge moves up and down to open or close the water source.
Author’s comment: Now when we mention automation technology, we always think it is an imported product. In fact, many years ago, the working people in ancient my country used their intelligence and wisdom to develop a series of automated or semi-automated tools for industrial and agricultural production.
The automated pig farming practice of state-owned farms in the last century in Shanghai's agricultural reclamation system is just a microcosm of our history in improving agricultural production using automation tools.
6. Build a house like building blocks
Original excerpt: Usually, a five-story building requires hundreds of thousands of bricks to be stacked piece by piece. Recently, four new structures of buildings appeared on Yanji West Road, Shanghai. This kind of five-story building is made of 640 large concrete boards of fly ash ceramic concrete, and is built like building blocks. It is both faster and better than a brick house.
Large-scale fly ash concrete pellet is a new building material. The main raw material is fly ash ceramic pellets. It uses the industrial waste of power plants - fly ash to mix a small amount of clay, and uses the spherical mechanism to make spherical pellets with a diameter of 5 to 20 mm, and calcined into "artificial stones" (fly ash ceramic pellets). This artificial gravel is not as smooth as ordinary gravel, with rough surfaces, and has many pores inside, and weighs only half the weight of ordinary gravel. Mix it with water, cement and sand to make ceramic concrete , pour it into a large flat mold, and you can make large floor slabs and wall slabs, or make stair sections by stamping and forming. The largest wall panel weighs 3.6 tons. A wall panel is a wall of the room, and the general components also weigh 2 tons. When manufacturing boards, various details such as doors and windows, sanitary equipment pipe holes, lamp head boards, wire pipes, mirror hooks in the room and shelves in the kitchen can be installed in advance. After the components are made, they can be transported to the construction site for installation.
Comment: In that era, socialist construction was focused on every brick and tile. "opportunistic" methods like building a modular house seem so "politically incorrect". From "building a house" to "decorating a house", it seems to be a technological breakthrough on the surface, but behind it is the thought that breaks through the constraints.
In 2018, Chongqing issued the "Chongqing Prefabricated Building Industry Development Plan (2018-2025)", which began to realize the imagination proposed by people in the 1960s. The development goals in this plan mention that by 2025, the proportion of the city's prefabricated building area will reach more than 30%. Zhongke Building has become the only national prefabricated building science and technology demonstration project in Chongqing. It was recommended to the demonstration base of the Ministry of Construction. The assembly rate reached an astonishing 80%, truly realizing the construction of a house like building blocks.Because of this, Zhongke has upgraded from traditional buildings to new prefabricated building technology.
In the past two years, CCTV likes to create a form of program, which is to allow modern people to travel together to talk to the past to form a visual wonder. I think CCTV can replicate this form of program into the technological innovation industry, such as developing a "China in Technology" project. The first issue discussed the development of architecture, which would have a historical dialogue between Huang Yifeng (a practitioner of contemporary Chinese prefabricated architecture) and Zhou Kexi (in the 1960s, Zhou Kexi wrote an article that prefabricated architecture is the future development direction) and a big collision on the forward-looking development of prefabricated architecture will definitely be interesting.
