They Ran Trains Without Coal in 1870 — And That's Why The Compressed Air Technology Was Banned

Between eighteen seventy-six and nineteen seventeen, Paris operated entire fleet of trams powered by compressed air—silent, clean, no smoke, no coal, running commercially for forty-one years carrying millions of passengers. Louis Mékarski French-Polish engineer received patent eighteen seventy-six solving cold expansion problem through bouillotte system: compressed air from storage tanks at seventy-five atmospheres passed through heated water reservoir before entering engine cylinders, preventing freezing while maintaining consistent pressure. Compagnie Générale des Omnibus operated compressed air trams achieving thirty kilometers per hour, ten to fifteen kilometers range between compression station refills, passenger capacity comparable to horse-drawn systems with significantly lower operating costs—forty-one years documented commercial success then completely dismantled nineteen seventeen exactly when oil becoming dominant transportation fuel 

Running out of engineers

By A.D McKenzie

Paris - As Brazil looks ahead to hosting the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics, the country is struggling to line up the technical workers necessary for these projects, officials say.

"We need to triple the number of engineers in the next few years," says Maria Helena Guimarães de Castro, former state secretary of education of São Paolo.

Speaking at a conference here, Guimarães said Brazil needed around 360,000 engineers and technical workers for the global sporting events as well as for oil and gas exploration. The country has a severe shortage of such workers.

Brazil is not alone in this situation. Shortage of engineers in both developed and developing countries is a growing concern as it threatens national progress, says a report published by UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Agency.

"Developing countries are the most affected," says Tony Marjoram, editor of the report and senior programme specialist in UNESCO’s Division of Basic and Engineering Sciences.

"Wealthy countries can hire engineers on the international market, but this leads to brain drain in the poorer countries as many of their engineers go abroad to work," he told IPS. "That’s if they’re still producing engineers in the first place."

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