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Other firms have been seeking ways to obtain cheap energy by harnessing the power of the sun or wind. The Boeing Company of Seattle is working on a project called Powersat, which involves assembling a nine-mile-long solar-heat collector in space; once assembled, it can ride along in orbit beaming the sun's power back to earth. On a more mundane level, Boeing has a contract with the Energy Research and Development Administration to develop a 10 million-watt power plant using heliostats—mirror-like reflectors that would catch the sun's rays and reflect them to a central receiving tower where their heat would be used to drive a turbine.
Varian Associates of Palo Alto has also come up with an idea to tap the sun as a source of power. The firm has developed a gallium arsenide solar converter only one-third of an inch in diameter that can produce 10 watts of electricity from the sunlight reflected from a concentrating mirror.
Innovation has also revolutionized the computer industry.
The pioneering vacuum-tube computer built by RCA in 1953 occupied an area the size of a football field and required 300 tons of air-conditioning equipment to keep it operating. But the invention of the transistor and integrated circuits did away with the tube and made such electronic leviathans obsolete. In 1968 William Hewlett, of Hewlett-Packard, looked at his firm's typewriter-size desktop calculator and asked his engineers to make him one that would fit in his shirt pocket. H.P. Technology Chief David Cochran and his colleagues succeeded, and today several firms make pocket calculators.
Computers are also moving into other areas, thanks to the invention by Marcian E. Hoff Jr., of Intel Corp., of the micro computer, containing tiny (1/6 sq. in.) chips of silicon, now used in cars to control antiskid systems or monitor engine temperatures and in refineries and sewage-treatment plants to control the decomposition of waste and the levels of bacteria. Some engineers are also working on the development of home computer terminals that could give individuals access to whole libraries of information, as well as start a sort of "electronic democracy" in which public opinion on any issue could be sampled almost instantly.
Yet the success of group invention does not mean that the lone tinkerer is extinct. Enormous obstacles—financial, administrative, legal—face the inventor who wants to set up a laboratory in a closet and create new concepts and gadgets. Still, the classic garret inventor has managed to survive. Edwin Link, inventor of the famed "Link trainer" for instrument flight, has managed to move out of aviation and into oceanography, and now explores the underwater world in a clear, bubble-shaped plastic submarine of his own design. William Lear, who has invented radios, airplanes and steam-powered vehicles, is now working with a Canadian aircraft company to develop a small, quiet and highly fuel-efficient jet plane.