London to Edinburgh in half an hour. Manchester to London in 18 minutes. London to Stoke in 14 minutes. This is the promise of the Hyperloop, a futuristic mode of transport that was first conceived by billionaire Elon Musk.

As the story goes, Musk was late for a speaking appearance back in 2012 when the idea for a “fifth mode of transport” struck him. A year later, he published a 57-page plan outlining a transport system made up of levitating pods that can travel at speeds of up to 700mph in a vacuum.

Rather than setting up his own company and funding the moon shot idea, Musk proposed a competition and called for entrants to start working on the project. The move was out of character for Musk, whose other radical ideas have led him to found SpaceX and Tesla but he relinquished the germ of an idea to a host of academic and private researchers.

The competition has spawned thousands of start-ups and research groups around the world. From the Silicon Valley venture-backed Hyperloop One, which has raised $160m to date, to the internet group rLoop, engineers who met on Reddit and have developed a prototype with $100,000 and a subscription to the messaging service Slack.