Today, the New York Times Magazine has published its fourth annual “Year in Ideas” issue — in which it surveys the most innovative, thought-provoking, and just-plain-weird inventions and trends that defined 2004. I contributed seven essays to the issue, so for posterity’s sake I’m blogging all of them here in seven separate entries. The first one is pretty surreal:

The FanWing

by Clive Thompson

When you first see the FanWing, you think: there’s no way that thing is going to fly. After all, it looks less like an airplane than a big, lumbering combine harvester that has somehow strayed from its wheat field. It has a hollow cylinder where its wings ought to be, and when it trundles down the runway, it moves barely faster than a bicycle. But then it lifts off, angles up and — whoa — soars up into the sky.

”People think it’s a hoax, even when they see it for themselves,” says Patrick Peebles, the inventor. Peebles is a former ice-cream-machine-repair instructor and amateur pilot. About 10 years ago, he had an idea for how to radically redesign the airplane so that it would not use wings. Wings, of course, keep a plane aloft in part because of their curved upper surface, which creates lower air pressure above than below, thereby pushing the plane upward. Peebles envisioned something different: he would replace the wing with a tube filled with blades that rotated like the water wheel on a Mississippi riverboat. If the blades spun fast enough, he reasoned, they would reduce the drag on top, allowing the plane to fly. He spent five years tinkering in his living room until he finally got a tiny model airborne. By this year, he was flying a prototype with a 10-foot span, which he introduced to the public at the Farnborough International Air Show in Britain.

Compared with a traditional airplane, the FanWing can fly at much lower speeds and with much greater stability. It can take off from a relatively small runway and cruise at the leisurely pace of a car. If it ever catches on, the FanWing would make a good air taxi, ferrying people on short hops from city to city, or out to airports. It is more fuel-efficient than a helicopter and potentially safer than a normal plane, since a FanWing cannot stall, no matter how sharply it points up or down. The only real danger is if the fan blades jam and cease spinning — then, Peebles admits, ”it drops like a rock.” Peebles is currently talking to military experts in the United States and Britain about using FanWings as unmanned surveillance vehicles, since they could stay aloft for eight hours on one tank of gas. But whatever the FanWing’s commercial success, Peebles can already claim one singular achievement: he has created one of the few truly new aircraft since the Wright brothers.