There is a problem in the design of any keyboard instrument that strikes rather than plucks, and solving it took a long time.
The problem is that a string only…
There is a failure mode in any signalling system that is worth more attention than the system itself, and lighthouses have an obvious one.
A light works by being seen.…
There is a structure that appears on rivers everywhere, that most people cannot name correctly, and that does something quite different from what it appears to do.
A weir looks…
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…
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…