But Eijiro Miyako and his colleague at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology have used battery-powered bubble makers to pollinate a pear orchard.
" Architecturally, they can be landmarks, " says Dr Arianna Brambilla, lecturer in architectural technology at the Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning.
The star lecturer in innovation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the founder and president of the Academy of Applied Science, now had a myth on his hands.
The year is 1878. A 22-year-old Nikola Tesla drops out of Imperial-Royal Technical College in Graz despite being described as a star of the first rank.
If you would like to learn more about light simulations, I have been holding a full master-level course on it at the Technical University of Vienna for a few years now.
Here, for the first time, I came across " mature students" - people who had left school at 16 and, years later, taken A-levels at technical colleges and come to university.