/ Cory Doctorow / 9:02 am Wed Feb 2, 2011

When the Mayor of Boston asked MIT for anti-snow flamethrowers


In this 1948 letter from the MIT archives, Mayor James Curley of Boston asked MIT President Dr. Karl Compton to task his engineers with designing an anti-snow technology, using flamethrowers or whatever else they had handy.

1948 Mayor to MIT: Use Flamethrowers to Melt Snow? (Thanks, MITAA!)

 

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    1. Mitt Romney’s personal collection of flamethrowers wouldn’t be nearly enough to defrost all of Boston anyway.

  3. There are a few Youtube videos of people using flamethrowers on snow, but it seems slow and impractical.

    I wonder how a microwave gun would work on snow. I can’t find any examples online, but it sounds like it’d be effective and/or dangerous.

    Alternately, I have a parabolic heat dish that I’ve been meaning to test on the snow. I should really get around to trying it out.

    1. I was thinking more along the lines of forced air blown over heater coils mounted on a wheeled push-cart type of apparatus, but I think it would be too much of an electrical hazard.

  5. I have a friend who has a small flamethrower she uses for weed clearing. She tried it on her porch and walkway, once, for clearing snow. She melted the snow, but it froze right back immediately, leaving it slick ice. Oops.

  7. Many cities use a variant of this idea. It’s not for on-the-spot application, but rather a way to clear away dumped snow. “Snow Melters” is, I believe, the term of art.

  8. My long, sloping driveway is cleared by hand (mine) right now, and many hours have been spent pushing snow and dreaming of a heat-based solution. I don’t yet have a solution, but I have some ideas. One problem is what to do with the water that is created when the snow is melted; this is related to another problem, the operating temperature. Steam could quickly form ice which is no better. And a lot of water is created by melting snow. The local university has been putting heat devices into all new steps and sidewalks which melt the snow as it falls, which seems to keep up with the evaporation problem. I am going to go by this afternoon and see how they worked with our 6-9 inches of blowing snow we received overnight. If I come up with a practical, portable prototype, BB readers will be the first to know.

    1. At first I misread your post as saying “My long, sloping driveway is cleared by land mine right now…” Which seemed interesting, if rather excessive.

  10. Anyone else detect hilariously anemic shades of Anathem? “Look, an institution of higher learning, impenetrable to the mental powers of us slines. Quickly, save us from the snow, with your magic fire sticks!”

  12. Here in Boston some areas are cleared with the help of snow melting trucks. Snow goes in the top, and the meltwater gushes out the bottom.

    1. Ah the J79 of F-4 Phantom fame, that is a bad ass snow truck that mounts one of these, I wonder if it has the afterburner attached.

      1949 only four years into the open atomic age, I imagine this mayor hoping they can somehow detonate a special neutron bomb type device that leaves the people and houses alone but nukes the snow away.

      1. …maybe a bit of Plutonium-238 mixed in with salt or sand and then spread by trucks would have worked to clear the streets?

  18. If I could clear my driveway with a flamethrower, I’d never complain about shoveling snow again. At least until my house burned down.

  19. “*THAT* will teach you to fuck with a guy with a linear accelerator on his back.”

    – Bill Murray, Ghostbusters

  20. Here in Minneapolis we have a giant snowblower truck that dumps the snow into an adjacent dump truck. It’s probably the most useful solution since any other solution would require terraforming levels of heat to “flush” the water out of the state…

  22. When a NASCAR race has to stop for rain, they can’t start again until the track is dry, for obvious reasons. So they use truck-mounted jet engine dryers to dry the track off quickly.

    As you can see in the linked video, those suckers are extremely powerful and sometimes cause mishaps. I.e., they are awesome and I want one.

    1. Bloody hell – as if NASCAR wasn’t already enough of a horrific waste of fuel, they also dry the track with a jet engine? Some people just shouldn’t be allowed to play with valuable natural resources…

  23. Big ups to Mayor Curley for thinking out of the box. Blue skying, run it up the flagpole, throw it at the wall and all that. Send it over to the boys at MIT and see what they can do with it.
    It’s this kind of thing that made America great, and I’m only half kidding.

  25. I give you: The Sno-Melter!
    http://www.paleofuture.com/blog/2010/12/16/the-sno-melter-1960.html

    Snow piles and drifts on highways and turnpikes may soon be a thing of the past. Esso Research and Engineering Company has already devised a system for clearing urban roadways that is reported to be cheaper than under-pavement steam or electric coils. A trough is built alongside the road and kept half-filled with water which is heated by oil and air fed units at the bottom. Snow channeled into the trough melts instantly.

    Variations of this system can be evolved for cross-country roads. Flame-belching snow-melting highway equipment is even now on the drawing boards.

  26. Even better Minneapolis has something called a snow dragon. It melts the snow and also purifies it so it can go into storm drains.

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