The Physics of Superheroes: Spectacular Second Edition (45 page)

Wong-Chu offers Stark a deal: Work in my weapons development lab (this is apparently a pretty well-equipped guerrilla camp) in return for surgery that will save your life. Stark agrees, intending to use his brief remaining days to create some sort of weapon to both save his life and combat his captor. Along with the brilliant physicist Professor Yinsen, also a captive of Wong-Chu, Stark constructs a metal chest plate that, once fully electrically charged, will prevent the shrapnel from reaching his heart. Realizing that he will need offensive and defensive weapons if he and Yinsen are to escape the guerrilla camp, the chest plate becomes part of an iron suit, which contains an array of transistorized weaponry. The suit is completed moments before the shrapnel can claim Stark’s life, though Prof. Yinsen is killed when he decoys their captors away from Stark as the chest plate finishes charging up. Yinsen’s death is avenged, and the other prisoners in the camp are freed as Iron Man defeats the Communist warlord. (The 2008 film
Ironman
would faithfully follow this origin storyline, substituting Middle Eastern terrorists for Communists.) Making his way back to the States through the jungles of North Vietnam (a story not fully told until years later in
Iron Man # 144
), Tony Stark would continue to use his technological suit of armor to defend America against Communist aggression.

And boy, did Shellhead attract the Communist foes! At times he seemed to have a “red magnetism” field built into his suit of armor. Borne out of the Vietnamese conflict, Iron Man would battle more Communist villains in his first four years than nearly all other Marvel superheroes combined. Iron Man would face the Red Barbarian (
Tales of Suspense # 42
); the Crimson Dynamo (
Tales of Suspense # 46
and
52
—a Russian power station built in the form of a suit of armor designed to defeat Iron Man); the Mandarin (
Tales of Suspense # 50, 54, 55, 61, 62
—a Chinese warlord modeled after the Sax Rohmer pulp fiction villain Fu Manchu, who possessed ten deadly rings of power); and the Titanium Man (
Tales of Suspense # 69-71
—a Soviet-built stronger version of Iron Man created to defeat our hero in televised conflict, thereby proving to the world the superiority of Communism over capitalism). Throughout all this, Tony Stark maintained the fiction that Iron Man was a separate person, hired by Stark to serve as his body-guard. Given the number of times Communist agents tried to kidnap Stark or steal his research plans, this was not such a far-fetched cover story.

As if the constant battles with costumed villains were not distracting enough, Stark was continually called to testify before Senate committees, who insisted that it was his patriotic duty to turn the Iron Man technology over to the military. Little did Senator Byrd (not the long-serving senator from West Virginia), who led the investigations into the connections between Iron Man and Stark Industries realize that the secret of Iron Man’s success—the transistor—was already in the public domain. The transistor was developed by three physicists in 1947 at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey—the research lab of utility Bell Telephone. In order to facilitate the adoption of this new technology, Bell Labs ran seminars for other firms interested in using transistors, instructing them in the details of the new field of solid-state physics. It’s not enough to build a better mousetrap; you must also make sure that the mice know about it!

Following his first appearance, Iron Man’s suit would undergo nearly constant modifications, both cosmetic and significant. The suit was gray in
Tales of Suspense # 39,
but by the very next issue, Stark decided to change the color to gold, so as to make more of an impression on women. You would think that a multimillionaire industrialist who looks like Errol Flynn (the model upon which artists based their drawing of the mustachioed Tony Stark) would not have to worry about whether his secret identity as Iron Man was attractive to the ladies, but it is presumably just such attention to detail that brought Tony Stark his success. Within a year, the suit would be redesigned again, now as a more form-fitting yellow-and-red ensemble shown in fig. 39 that, with minor variations, would persist to recent times.

The weapons that were distributed throughout the suit would also undergo near-constant upgrades. Initially Stark had “reverse magnetism” projectors in the palms of his gloves, but these were soon modified to “repulsor rays” that were essentially “force beams.” A large recessed disc on his chest housed a “variable power spot-l ight” that evolved into a “uni-beam” (I’m not really sure what this did). He originally had a radio antenna extending from his left shoulder, but improvements in wireless transmission and reception technology enabled this function to be incorporated within the body of his iron suit.

Fig. 39.
Panels from a bonus section “All About Iron Man” in
Tales of Suspense # 55,
providing a schematic of the 1960s Golden Avenger, and a tutorial stating that the charge to power supplies feeding his transistors is depleted the more he uses them.

The armor itself is still quite heavy, even in its more flexible, streamlined form. The only way that Stark is able to walk in this iron suit, and to lift objects weighing up to several tons, is through the application of “tiny transistors within his armor which increase his power tremendously!” And he’s going to need this extra power. In order to estimate how much the armor weighs, assume that the Iron Man suit is one eighth of an inch thick and has the average density of iron, which is roughly 8 grams per cubic centimeter. The surface area needed to make the suit can be approximated by taking Tony’s trunk as a cylinder, his head as another, smaller cylinder, and his arms and legs as smaller, longer cylinders. If Tony is about six feet tall and his suit jacket is a 50 regular, then his total surface area is roughly 26,200 square centimeters. The volume of iron within his suit is found by multiplying the surface area by the armor’s thickness of ⅛ inch, or 0.32 centimeters, yielding a total volume of metal of roughly 8,400 cubic centimeters. To determine how much it weighs, we multiply this volume by the density (8 grams/cm
³
) and obtain 67,000 grams, or 148 pounds, excluding the weight of all of the transistorized circuitry. Tony Stark would frequently carry all of this in his briefcase (with one dress shirt covering the armor as camouflage (see
Tales of Suspense # 55
), except for the chest plate, of course, which he wore constantly in order to keep the shrapnel from worming its way to his heart. Consequently, simply by lugging nearly 90 pounds of armor around in this briefcase, Tony would have developed considerable upper-body and bicep strength as a side benefit of being Iron Man.

The suit’s weight leads to the question of how his jet boots enable Iron Man to fly. If the suit weighs nearly 150 pounds, and Stark himself tips the scales at 180 pounds, then his boot thrusters have to supply a downward force of 330 pounds (equal to a mass of 150 kg), just for Iron Man to hover in the air. Presumably, these jets use a chemical reaction to violently expel the reactants from the soles of his boots. As every action is balanced by an equal and opposite reaction, this downward force leads to an upward push on Iron Man, keeping him aloft. If he wants to accelerate, then his boots have to provide even more force, as only the force in excess of his weight provides an acceleration (
F
=
ma
).

Tony would frequently need to travel from his Stark Industries plant on Long Island to Avengers Mansion in the heart of Manhattan, a distance of approximately fifty miles (as the Golden Avenger flies) in a time of ten minutes. This corresponds to an average speed of 300 mph, which is nearly half the speed of sound! (In the film
Ironman,
he dueled with fighter jets traveling at least twice that fast!) Ignoring the energy that Shellhead must expend to push the air out of the way as he travels at this speed, this implies that for a kinetic energy (½)mv
²
at this speed, his armor requires at least 1.37 million kg-meters
²
/sec
²
of energy. When Iron Man needed to travel great distances, he would eschew the boot jets and make use of motorized roller skates that were built into his boots. Not only would it be more fuel efficient, since energy does not have to be expended counteracting gravity to keep Shellhead in the air, but whenever he is decelerating, he can use the rotational energy and an alternator to recharge his internal batteries, as in an automobile. In this way, Tony Stark anticipated recent hybrid-engine automotive technology.

In the seventies, Iron Man had gone green, and his armor was now coated with a thin layer of solar cells, enabling him to recharge whenever he was in direct light. The energy from the sun on an
average
day in the United States is roughly 200 kg- meter
²
/sec
²
per second over an area of 1 meter
²
. We have just calculated the surface area of the Iron Man suit to be 26,200 centimeters
²
, which means that the amount of energy per second striking Iron Man is 262 kg-meter
²
/sec
²
(at any given moment only half of his available surface area can be facing the sun) while his jet boots require an expenditure of power of more than a million kg-meter
²
/sec
²
. If the solar cells are 50-percent efficient in converting the energy of the sun into stored energy in Tony’s battery packs (and most commercially available solar cells have a conversion efficiency of only about 10 percent), Iron Man would need nearly three hours to soak up enough sunlight for this one trip. We have considered neither the energy needed to run the suit’s internal air-conditioning unit (pushing air out of the way at 300 mph will make any person inside a metal suit a tad sweaty), nor whether he has to fire his repulsor rays during the flight. In the normal course of a typical day in the life of Iron Man, he will expend energy much faster than he can recharge his storage batteries using solar cells.

To give the writers of the Iron Man comic credit, their concern with mechanisms for Tony Stark to recharge his armor’s storage batteries implies recognition of the Principle of Conservation of Energy. From his very first appearance in
Tales of Suspense # 39,
it was always acknowledged that running the mechanized Iron Man suit required large amounts of energy and that the greater his expenditure of power, the faster the drain on the energy reserves he might carry on his person. Not only was a ready supply of electrical energy necessary to animate his jet boots and activate the servo-motors that enabled him to move in the suit and that increased his strength, but his chest plate needed electrical energy as well in order to protect his heart from the shrapnel he carried with him ever since that fateful day in Vietnam. The 1960s Iron Man would occasionally have to drag himself dramatically along the ground after a particularly energy-exhausting battle, searching for an electrical outlet in order to recharge his battery reserves.

Even after he made the transition to solar-powered battle armor, Stark’s suit could run dry in an emergency. In
Iron Man # 132,
Tony drained every last erg of energy (one erg is one ten millionth of a kilogram-meters
²
/sec
²
) from his suit in an exciting, no-holds-barred battle with the Incredible Hulk. Tony focused all of his suit’s stored energy into one final punch, and accomplished what had previously been impossible: Iron Man knocked the Hulk unconscious. But the cost to Stark was high. With absolutely no power to move his suit, Stark was trapped, unable to move within his now rigid shell of armor. To make matters worse, the protective covering over his eye and mouth slits had been engaged, to shield Stark from a previous explosion. Tony therefore faced suffocation once the air contained in the suit was used up. It would take all of the following issue for Ant Man, forcing his way in through the exhaust port in Iron Man’s boot jet, to travel the length of the armor, avoid the suit’s internal protective mechanisms, and disengage the faceplate’s protective covering.

Of all of Iron Man’s weapons, the most effective are his “repulsor rays,” which are fired from discs on the palms of his armored gloves. Back in his first appearance in
Tales of Suspense # 39,
the first version of this glove-based repulsion weapon was a “reverse magnetism” ray used to fight his way out of Wong Chu’s prison camp. Wong Chu’s guards, finding that small-arms fire bounced harmlessly off the iron suit that the intruder wore, responded by preparing to shoot bazookas and throw grenades at the Yankee invader. Fig. 40 shows that as they fetch the heavy weaponry, Tony takes the time to “reverse the charge on this magnetic turbo-insulator and use a top-hat transistor to increase its repelling power a thousandfold!” As the rays are emitted from his hand, deflecting the weapons, he exclaims, “There! Reverse magnetism—it works like a charm!” In fact, it would have to work like a charm, because there’s no way it could work using solid-state physics.