Nathan's Possibly Interesting web site
Commonsense design blog
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of everyday product design
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