Nobody thinks of them as equipment, which is what they are. Here are eleven jobs.
1. Trapping a Layer of Still Air
Most of the insulating effect is not the…
Almost everything that makes a chair comfortable or unbearable was decided by a handful of measurements, and they interact. Here are fifteen.
1. Seat Height Decides Everything Else
The distance…
There is a useful test of how hard something is to make: look at what people did before they had it.
Before metal needles, sewing was done with points made…
There is a tool so ordinary that almost nobody has considered how it works, and the answer turns out to be more particular than expected.
The obvious model is a…
Every surface in a home collects the same grey film, and it is a record of everything that has been shed, tracked in or blown through recently. Here are fifteen…
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…