After months of communicating with Ben Russell, the mechanical engineering curator at the Science Museum, London, I finally visited and we took a very close look at the micrometer reputedly made by James Watt.
While I can’t say I can necessarily get interested in what some of these fellows are up to, it does speak to core ideas which I try to convey in my work – appreciation and gratitude. So many of the technological wonders we encounter every day, even something as simple as flushing a toilet or endless glasses of clean water on tap, are truly amazing even though they are incredibly ordinary. And that they are ordinary, dull if you will, is a wonderful thing itself.
Inside the 1950s Heavy Press Program which built the giant 50,000 ton presses which helped America win the Cold War.
First of many very high-resolution beautiful photos I”ve found and edited/cleaned up. Click on the title of this post to see them full size.
After learning about Thomas Telford nearly 15 years ago it was a dream of mine to take a narrowboat over his canal. This summer I finally did it.
This video traces the path from Copernicus through Galileo to Foucault in one of the paths of possibly the greatest revolution that’s ever happened – the Scientific Revolution.
The title is a play on the old adage, “Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics”. I was frustrated as I was racing against the clock before I packed up my shop and moved away for a year. When the last sequence ended in a failure I had no choice but to include it in the final video. In a way, I think it makes it stronger as too often I think mistakes are covered up. But literally a minute after the last frame of video I started mothballing the entire shop. It was a bittersweet moment for sure and made very concrete my imminent departure for 5500 miles away
In this video I show how to find the original Public Domain source for Shorpy images and how to easily and quickly edit them with free tools for amazing results.
In this video I look at what I consider to be the world’s first modern lathe – Vaucanson’s 1751 all metal lathe.
If you want any of the historical photos I’m happy to share. They are all from the Library of Congress with edits to make them more attractive.
First build video where I acid etch the micrometer dials