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!)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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MadMolecule

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.
- beejamin
  
  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…
David

The response is pretty interesting too:
http://libraries.mit.edu/archives/exhibits/curley/index1.html
(scroll down past curley’s letter).
kmoser

Sharks with frickin’ flamethrowers?
RedShirt77

I thought you meant Mit Romney at first.
- Rayonic
  
  Mitt Romney’s personal collection of flamethrowers wouldn’t be nearly enough to defrost all of Boston anyway.
Rayonic

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.
- knoxblox
  
  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.
frankieboy

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.
lecti

Looks out the window in Cambridge.

I guess they said no.
Anonymous

Toronto has been using fire to remove snow for quite a while:

http://citynoise.org/article/8779

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPzMCy533ps
remlee

What’s funnier to me is MIT President Compton’s response letter: http://libraries.mit.edu/archives/exhibits/curley/index1.html#compton
Galadriel

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.
Bill Simmon

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.
Anonymous

So what did they do?
Church

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.
sally599

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

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.
- Anonymous
  
  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.
craigl

Minneapolis used to use a movable machine to melt snow called a SnowTron. More information here:
http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/11475636.html
sally599

http://tinyurl.com/634mjf3

Snow Dragon video + story. They just bought it in December.
AbleBakerCharlie

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!”
Anonymous

Don’t leave us hanging – what happened next?! :)
soongtype

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.
Anonymous

Mit was the Governor of Massachusetts, not the Mayor of Boston.
Just sayin’
mrgoldenbrown

We (Boston) do have a jet engine mounted on a train that clears the tracks for the mattapan trolley line.

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2011/01/23/mbtas_mattapan_line_relies_on_snowzilla_in_worst_weather/
benher

Does anyone else find the suggestion of ‘chemicals’ far more disturbing than flame throwers?
millrick

here’s some jet engine / snow blowers
– if the engines had afterburners would they qualify as flamethrowers?

http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2009/08/jet-engines-on-trucks-for-fun-and.html
millrick

for those of us who can’t be bothered to build our own jet engined snow blowers, you can buy them here…

http://ericksenjetengines.com/products1.htm
- rebdav
  
  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.
  - millrick
    
    …maybe a bit of Plutonium-238 mixed in with salt or sand and then spread by trucks would have worked to clear the streets?
Anonymous

What’s more entertaining, I think, is MIT President Compton’s response letter: http://libraries.mit.edu/archives/exhibits/curley/index1.html#compton
OrcOnTheEndOfMyFork

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

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

- Bill Murray, Ghostbusters
Anonymous

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…
Methusedalot

It reminds me of something from Cat’s Cradle.