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| English: A Hoverboard (or hover board) is a fictional hovering board used for personal transportation Français : Le Hoverboard est un skateboard volant du futur (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| English: I drew this diagram using xfig. It's a crude schematic of how to assemble my next hoverboard prototype. I do not have a version posted online. I release this image into the public domain. -- WillWare 18:26, 18 July 2006 (UTC) (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
LOS GATOS, California – A lot of things can hover. There are helicopters. There are hovercraft. But for the last three decades, a generation of engineers and movie fans have been waiting for something else: a hovering skateboard like the one in “Back to the Future Part II.”
The hoverboard is fiction, the vision of screenwriters who created the film about Marty McFly, a teenager who travels from 1985 to 2015, and uses a floating skateboard to flee a gang of bullies.
Ever since, various garage tinkerers and physics professors – and more recently, top engineers at Google – have tried to replicate it.
In California, Greg and Jill Henderson allowed a reporter to stand atop a magnetic skateboard that can float a couple of centimeters above a copper surface. The Hendersons have poured their life savings into the technology and are hoping to create industries based on this science.
Dustin Rubio, 39, an electrician who grew up skateboarding and saw “back to the Future Part II” when he was a teenager, is not thinking quite that big. This year, Mr. Rubio turned “a leaf blower, some plywood, some plastic and duct tape” into a small hovercraft that his daughters used to glide down the driveway at his home in Napa, California. “I was like I’m just gonna make something funny and see if it works,” he said.
But Mr. Rubio’s invention is not really a hoverboard. Bob Gale, who wrote the “Back to the Future” trilogy, said that in his imagination the hoverboard floats on a magnetic field similar to magnetic levitation trains.
This has been extremely difficult, mostly because of Earnshaw’s theorem, which states, more or less, that repelling magnets are tough to balance. One way is to use a track to hold the magnetic skateboard in place.
Last year, Rich DeVaul, a senior engineer at Google X, the company’s research division, and Dan Piponi, a Google mathematician, got as far as a fingernail-size piece of carbon that could hover above a lattice of small magnets.
They remain confident they could have built a board, but are less confident they could have found a use for it. “We weren’t sure exactly what big problem we were solving except for this global lack of hoverboard skate,” Mr.DeVaul said.
It turns out Mr.Henderson was working on this very thing. In the back of his office, there is a copper halfpipe that may be the first hoverboard skate park.
Mr. Henderson became enamored of hover technology in 1989 after the Loma Prieta earthquake, thinking that if you could make buildings float, you could build cities to better withstand earthquakes.
Two years ago, he started his company, Arx Pax, hoping to develop magnetic technologies and license patents. The Hendo hoverboard is not yet for sale. But the Hendersons have started a campaign to raise $250,000 on Kickstarter, the crowd-funding site.
Mr. Gale said that when he and Robert Zemeckis wrote “Back to the Future II,” they envisioned a future of pedestrian-friendly downtowns ad flying skateboards.
Mr. Zemeckis told an interviewer that the technology was real, prompting an avalanche of letters from boys like Dave Mertes.
Mr. Mertes, now a 36-year-old clothing designer in Seattle, said he was crushed when it turned out that Mr. Zemeckis was joking. “I was like, oh, the director just said it was real. How can I get one?”
Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, November 1, 2014
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