There is a common way of describing chimneys that gets the direction of the mechanism backwards and consequently makes every practical problem inexplicable.
The description is that smoke rises and…
Maya Linton
There is a category of vanished industry that seems impossible in retrospect, and the ice trade is the clearest example.
The proposition was to cut a perishable product out of…
Source: Wikipedia
There is a category of institution that was built on a wrong explanation and worked correctly anyway, and it is worth understanding because the pattern recurs.
The wrong explanation,…
There is a useful exercise in considering how recently an ordinary thing became ordinary, and fire on demand is the most striking example available.
Fire itself is extremely old. Reliable…
There is a way of analysing junctions that makes their differences obvious, and it is not the one most people use.
The usual way is to think about rules —…
The hard part of a clock was never the gears. It was finding something that does the same thing over and over at exactly the same rate, and then extracting…