The Thing That Is Missing Is Ink
Open a photocopier and there is no liquid anywhere. No reservoir, no cartridge of fluid, no nib, no pad, no ribbon. The consumable…
The Bars Are Not the Code
The intuitive reading of a barcode is that each bar is a symbol, like a letter, and the sequence of bars spells out the…
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…
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…
There is a small category of objects that are fully explained by one diagram, and this is one of them.
A vacuum flask is a container inside another container, with…
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…