There is a category of invention that is hard to recognise as an invention because it seems like a description of how things obviously are.
Alphabetical order is the clearest…
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…
Light leaves every point of a subject in all directions. A lens collects some of that and reconverges it, and the entire craft is built on the properties and failures…
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…
Almost everything about how a book feels - whether it stays open, how it turns, how heavy it is for its size - was decided during manufacture rather than design.…