nzeldes This Barometer was made in Florence some 100 years ago, and served my late grandfather, first in Italy, then in Israel; it ended up on my wall, a family heirloom to delight the heart of any engineer. It is a large (23 cm across) Aneroid Barometer, an instrument to measure atmospheric pressure by means of … Read more
I was sitting in the lobby of the Shaare Zedek hospital in Jerusalem, and I noticed on the chair next to me a small booklet someone had discarded there. An idle look turned to admiration as I examined it and realized what it was. The cover reads “EEG test – the Institute for Neurological Diagnosis“, … Read more
New on my Possibly Interesting web site: Cloning a Vibroplex bug, where I describe the venerable Vibroplex semi-automatic telegraph key – and the improvised clone I made as a young radio amateur. Enjoy!
Form follows function! Here is a row of anchors, which I photographed in Greenwich in the UK. You’ll note the one in the foreground has a single fluke (as the pointy ends of an anchor are called). The sign says this anchor is from around 1820. So why would they produce an anchor with only … Read more
See the mechanic working on my Renault Clio. Do you know what he’s doing? Looks like he’s trying to squeeze his arm into a tiny space between some metal beams in the engine compartment frame. Why is he doing that? Because he wants to replace a burned out light bulb in the headlamp assembly. Actually … Read more
Robert Owen Wynne-Roberts, MICE (Member of the Institution of Civil Engineers), FRSI (Fellow of the Royal Sanitary Institute), was a talented civil engineer. He passed away in 1935, but at least one result of his engineering talent abides: the Wynne-Roberts hydraulic calculator, a specialty circular slide rule for computing flow in water pipes and sewers. … Read more
Form follows function; but often both must follow the available materials. Consider the image that comes to mind at a statement like The great king raised his mighty sword to smite his enemies. Surely, you imagine a sword structured something like this: Photo courtesy Søren Niedziella, shared on flickr under CC license. This, after all, … Read more
Back from vacation, having flown a Boeing 737. This lacked the personalized screens seen in longer haul craft but it had a headset jack and a set of volume and channel controls for each passenger. The controls were set in the armrest, in easy reach of the passenger, like this: Cool, huh? Not cool. The … Read more
For some reason, inventors in the first half of the 20th century thought that incorporating a slide rule into a mechanical pencil was a great idea. In reality, these combination devices were of dubious utility, gives their low precision as calculators… but they are certainly ingeniously designed. I describe three of them, including one extremely … Read more
Evolution has crafted some amazing design solutions to the problems of life, and I never have enough of their elegance. Take the crocodile’s heart. Crocodiles have a special bypass short circuiting blood flow to their lungs. Specifically, although they have the same four chambered heart configuration as us mammals, which pumps the blood first to … Read more
