Date – 2300
Place – Kolkata, India
It is rare for an object from this period to have such a well-documented history, but the Kumar Konnector has been as widely celebrated for its political impacts as much as for its engineering utility.
It was developed in response to a communications failure that resulted in thousands of deaths, displacements and near societal collapse in the aftermath of the Indonesian Tsunami of 2300.
Professor Indira Kumar and her team had been studying agricultural and industrial waste in seawater and its effects on deep sea communication cables. She correctly surmised that this toxic cocktail was drastically reducing the robustness of some steel components used on the cables and would eventually lead to a catastrophe.
The outage of the Global Tsunami Warning Network (GTWN) in 2300 and the subsequent devastation brought the work of her team to international attention. The subsequent increased funding enabled the development of a plastic polymer recycling system that could produce almost indestructible components for use in hazardous conditions.
The Kumar Konnector was famously used on vital communication cables bridging the irradiated border between India and Pakistan after the war of 2323 ushering in a new age of cooperation and peace in that region.
In her book, Engineering in Austere Conditions (2359), Naata Nungurrayi says of Kumar’s work, “To create something so valuable from something so worthless was a feat of modern Alchemy”.
Her image and that of the Konnector was featured on banknotes on both sides of the Indian/Pakistan border for many years. The Konnector itself was displayed in a museum in the former Pakistan for several decades before eventually being put into storage in 2437. It disappeared from the historical record shortly after.
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