skyhook

imaginary items which you usually get apprentices or new workers to look for around the office. It is usual for the person looking for skyhooks to be sent on a wild goose chase from office to office, building to building. A good reply for someone who asks for a sky hook is "how bout's i give you a left hook and a right hook."

A servicable skyhook is actually quite easy to make, but the tools you require are quite specialised. If you can get your hands on a glass hammer, /msg me and I'll tell you the rest.

In Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, skyhooks are, according to Willy Wonka, what hold the Great Glass Elevator in the air. They can be damaged by vermicious knids.

Skyhook has been used as a term for a space elevator. A platform in geosynchronous orbit, tethered to the Earth with a cable. Cars travel up and down the elevator, consuming an infinitesimal fraction of the power required to boost an equal mass to the same orbit. Once the skyhook has been built, zero-gee manufacturing becomes economically practical.

A hook that hangs on (is supported by) nothing. Obviously an imaginary object, but a useful one.

Webster lists the word as coming into existence in 1927, but I don't know who coined it, or for what reason.

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Also, a helicopter mounted with a steel line and hook, used to lift and transport heavy objects.

And also, a tall crane.

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Or a skyhook can also be a surface to space elevator transportation system. (Click the link for a good description). Basically, if you get a long enough cable, centrifugal force will keep it up. Thus far these exist only in works of Science Fiction, but we're keeping our fingers crossed. These would be a very effective way of getting stuff into orbit.

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And finally, in mining engineering, "skyhooks" refers to the practice of driving bolts into overlying rock strata as reinforcement for the mine roof.

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You might also be looking for the band, The Skyhooks

The term sky hook is also used in architecture to describe how a light fixture or interior facet is to be held when there has not yet been anything determined that can do so. It's a sort of catch all in blueprints used as an excuse for something that needs to be in the design, either by command of the person(s) for whom the building is being drawn and/or the firm creating the blueprints but has yet to be given a physical place to be affixed. Kind of like, as in my business ( auto body work), when we need a part but the part isn't given a name per se, we just call it a left-handed smoke shifter. One of those inter-office jokes that shows how often you are working and thinking in a language that is unique to the environment in which it is used.

Skyhooks (Dutch: luchthaak) are also used by Dutch industrial design students as a joke: they enable you to design and construct any shape conceivable, regardless of gravity limitations. Any part of the design threatening to fall off or fall over just gets connected to a skyhook.
Skyhooks can be placed anywhere in the air and can take any weight.

skyhooks actually "exist", at least in the star wars universe. in Shadows of the Empire, skyhooks are mentioned frequently. they are basically sub-orbital "space stations" within the atmosphere of a planet. they appear to hang suspended in the sky. they serve no true functional purpose, as they are merely super-expensive airborne mansions only the rich can afford. a symbol of prestige and wealth, they are somewhat equal to a "summer home" or a palace in "our" 21st century society. informal 'competitions' between owners ensue over new technologies, gardens, just about anything that showed you were richer than the other guy.

Skyhooks were first described in a paper entitled "Satellite Elongation into a True "Sky-Hook"" by John D. Issacs, Allyn C. Vine, Hugh Brander, and George E. Bachus on pages 682-3 of Science volume 15, February 1966. Of the six materials discussed only a diamond was found to be suitable (Carbon fibre might work but was not available at that time). When the paper was submitted many reviewers found it to be lacking in merit, but the editors did publish it with a warning that it was not practical and would be a technology for the future. While the paper discusses the physics of the materials they point out that the construction of a sky-hook would be much more complex.