There is an idea about sailing that seems obviously true and is only half the story.
The idea is that a sail is a bag that catches the wind and…
Almost every visible feature of a transmission line is a solution to one of two problems: keeping the electricity in the wire, and keeping the wire in the air. Here…
Both of these are recent inventions that look obvious in retrospect and took a very long time to arrive, and both do something more specific than they appear to. Here…
Everything difficult about a watch comes from being small, portable and attached to somebody. The timekeeping principles are the same as a clock; the conditions are entirely different. Here are…
The shaft is not holding the canopy up. A sliding collar pushes struts outward, those push the ribs out, and the fabric between them is stretched tight - which is…
There is a common assumption about early steam power that inverts the actual mechanism, and correcting it makes the whole development sequence comprehensible.
The assumption is that steam pushes. High-pressure…