A working Wave Machine
A mention of
this Scottish company's
site
spawned a long
SlashDot thread, including a claim that this
had first been done in France
("The first power plant of this kind").
That may be true, but there is a cave in Santa Cruz,
near Long Marine Lab, that I was told contained a wave
machine from very early in the 1900's.
To get there, you have to wait for a minus tide,
and go out to
Natural Bridges State Park,
and walk out west (the map-challenged will call this "north")
as far as you can go. The big cave that stops you
from going further is the one that I was told had
housed the wave machine.
A web search turned up familiar
Santa Cruz historian Sandy Lydon's fascinating site,
which has a series from his newspaper column,
with much more
authoritative info about the wave machine than
my hearsay. Perhaps there were more than one.
True, the purpose of this machine was simply to pump water, not generate electricity, but it's still a precedent worth mentioning.
10:06:52 PM
In writing about the Wave Machine, I noticed that the
One of the first times I visited the park
was in the 1970's, and one of those two arches had just recently fallen.
So our name for the state park has always been
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