There is a picture most people have of a watermill that misses the part that mattered.
The picture is a wheel turning in a river, driven by the current —…
Combustion is a push. Everything in an engine exists to convert a series of pushes into smooth rotation, at speed, repeatedly, while managing the heat and friction that produces. Here…
There is a constraint on ships that has no equivalent on land and that determines almost everything about how vessels are shaped and sized.
The constraint is that a vessel…
There is a widespread assumption about roads that is understandable and backwards.
The assumption is that the hard black surface is the road, and that what lies beneath it is…
A moving bicycle with nobody on it can stay upright for a considerable distance, correcting itself when pushed. Working out why took far longer than anybody expected, and the popular…
There is a category of engineering problem that only becomes visible once you think about what a machine has to do over a whole journey rather than at any moment.…