Eric Laithwaite Quotes

Linear motors can be regarded... as the physical result of splitting and unrolling of rotary machines, and there are therefore at least as many types of linear motor as rotary...

Electric motors and generators 'came of age' over almost the same period that engineering was becoming clean and respectable as a profession. Although technology... preceded science, indeed paved the way... scientists were regarded for centuries as belonging to the upper class, the intelligentsia, so closely related to philosophers as to allow overlap. In such a world, technology was not recognised as a subject and engineers... did not appear until there were 'engines' for them to look after. ...Even in the early part of the twentieth century, science as a whole was almost a 'middle class' occupation compared with studies of the classics.

[T]here is still no outright 'winner' in the High-speed Transport Game. Yet Japan Air Lines, Japanese National Railways, Transrapid (in West Germany) and British Rail all made advances in... versions of Maglev and linear motor propulsion in the mid 1970s. ...[E]xciting activities in university departments continued into the 1980s and a great deal of this was an extension of the topological developments of the 1960s. Surely the point of no return was passed..? There could not have been a continuing stream of wrong answers from... research departments... as was forecast by the prophets of doom of the late 1960s.

I'm like a child who's been brought up inside an institution and has never seen the outside world, the sea, or trees in a wood... Coming here was like being taken out of that box and put into the marvelous real world that there is, and I've simply been standing and gazing in wonder at all of the things that there are in the universe. And I'd just like to live to be 200, because one lifetime isn't enough. ...Of course I shall never retire, I mean when, I'm 65 I hope they'll make me Professor Emeritus, but I also hope that they'll let me go on working. ...I'm writing a book on engineering and biology and the last chapter is called "Gazing Wonder", and that's how I can sum it up.

I know no property of a gyroscope that conflicts... with the conservation of energy. ... is in the same state today that as it was in the fifteenth century when Leonardo da Vinci denounced it so properly. ...If you really want to see perpetual motion, look into the sky on a cloudless night and marvel at the size and movement within the Universe.

The universities and the factories were as far apart as the gymnasium and the monastery. ...[T]his watershed inhibited linear motor development for the industrialist would make a linear machine, basing his designs on conventional rotary machine practice, find it to have an efficiency of 20 per cent and a of 0.1, and abandon it for the rest of his career. The reason for the low values of these, in part still fashionable quantities, was not only the lack of theoretical ability but the low speed and small size of applications...

I was telephoned by a man called Alexander Charles Jones, who asked me if he might bring me a box of apparatus which he said when put on frictionless casters and set in motion inside, would displace itself outside its own dimension. Immediately I knew this man was different. ...Any ordinary crank would have said, "How would you like to see Newton's Laws disobeyed." ...So I said... "Does you box contain anything that might loosely be described as a gyroscope?" ...He said, "In the box, there is a gyroscope." I said, "I think you'd better come and show it to me... because I know enough about gyros to know that they're like electromagnetism, and I've studied electromagnetism for thirty years and I know darn well I don't understand it, and I don't understand gyros either, but I can invent new things in electromagnetism once a year. And if you've got something new about gyroscopes I want to see it." And he brought it, and it did. And that was the start of a new line of research for me. And then, about a year later, I met a second enthusiast called Edwin Rickman who added his own brand of instinct that... improved the ideas we'd already got. Let me say of Alex Jones that since I first met him that I've been convinced both of the validity of his argument, and been impressed with his feel for what I'd call the elements of nature. A thing that the more learned acknowledgement of science and mathematics have seldom had, a natural feel for what goes on...

The Jabberwock was a monster with many heads. As such it resembles... the manner in which we divide our science into Physics, Chemistry, Biology, etc., and then Physics into Heat, Light, Sound, Magnetism and Electricity. Often one can spot the various heads as being Laws of Physics, and some of them look into mirrors, see their reflections and think that the total number of their kind is bigger than it really is. Thus they attempt to co-exist with their own shadows and reflections. One of the best examples... is... Laws of Electromagnetic Induction.

Where to begin is obvious—with Michael Faraday... But we must proceed rapidly, jumping 70 to 80 years to [Alfred] Zehden (1902) and to Bachelet, then on to Kemper (1934) (surely the 'father' of Maglev), on again to Bedford, Peer and Tonks (1939) for induction levitation and finally to the Westinghouse 'Electropult' of 1946, the first high-speed linear motor ever to be built.

[T]he mirror really is itself, for it changes hands for you as you go through the mirror and changes the motor to a generator at the same time.

The legacy of rotary machine design can be seen, in part, as an inhibition of linear motor experimentation, even as far as the 1970s. In rotary machines, the tangential direction was the thrust direction and the axial direction was simply a means of increasing power output. Three-dimensional thinking was, in some ways, more advanced in the Victorian era... the Second Age of Topology can be seen as having had its beginnings in the demand for high-speed propulsion, the problem of the long pole pitch and the resulting development of the TFM concept.

I have been told by different people on separate occasions that the first patent on linear motors was filed by the Mayor of Pittsburgh in 1890, and that it was an induction machine applied to loom shuttle propulsion. ...[T]here is certainly a patent with the same objective in 1895. ...[T]he name [flying] given to James Kay's shuttle of 1733 suggests movement without contact and, as with modern transport in which it is proposed to have ground vehicles 'hovering' clear of the ground, Tesla's invention promised immediate success if it could be applied in linear form. ...The... 70-80 years during which progress in linear motors was extremely slow clearly needs an explanation. ...[T]here are many contributing factors, not least that of the 'amateur' status of the textile inventors in the world of electrical engineers.

It is not strange that the engineer fails to produce a unique solution, that his product is seen to be the result of 'art' more than science. ...The product becomes a matter of opinion... and joins the ranks of many other products such as literature, painting and sculpture, and... clothing. It has, in fact, its own history of Fashion.

An engineer is first and foremost a scientist. ...an applied scientist ...whose ultimate objective is the profitable manufacture of articles... Academic engineers may argue that they are as concerned with profitable concepts... To this extent they run alongside the pure scientist... with at least half an eye on the profits and with problems many orders of magnitude greater in complexity... In such a no-man's land he is hand-in-hand with his medical colleague, who faced with a malignant disease must let the patient die or try something.

A plain steel rod does remarkably well because steel... is a conductor of electricity, as well as of magnetism. This tubular motor is not the most efficient of linear induction machines. ...This amazing force of induction ...appears as almost artificial gravity under our control. Now, as an engineer I must try and put this force to good use, and when I do I must be sure that I'm getting the very best out of my machine. Now one of the advantageous of arrangements appears to be to use two flat machines face to face, forming the outside of a sandwich, with the aluminum sheet as the filling. Now this motor is really a most potent device, but still pretty useless... So if we want continuous motion, we must turn this machine over. Let [it] now be the moving part, and let it sit on a fixed rail and run along that... I'm going to raise the voltage slowly and the motor will climb this very steep incline. ...[I]t doesn't need wheels to grip the rail. There are virtually no moving parts, and the motor is capable of developing a very large force. Taking off. I can control the motor for very low speeds, or stop it when it's moving very fast. When used on the horizontal and made in a much larger size, such a machine is capable of developing a very high acceleration. At the Motor Industry Research Association laboratories at , the linear motor is being used to crash test all kinds of vehicles. ...The linear motor to do this job is very small, It's only about three times as big as our model which climbed the rail. ...Red lights flash, and once the final button is pressed, the forces of induction take over.