Eric Laithwaite Quotes

There are all kinds of people thinking about all kinds of things all of the time. That sentence sums up what I would describe as the ultimate deterrent to oppose the urge to invent. It is the feeling that it's all been done. Someone must have done this. I was born too late. All the good pickings are in the last century, and other such rubbish.

The whole idea of modern electrical machine theory... is based on this idea of the two independent axes, co-existing, co-related but nevertheless identifiably separate. We deal with complicated matters when we deal with rates of change of current, matters that require not only the Special Theory of Relativity, but the General Theory (the world of relative accelerations)... Might there not exist a similar complexity also in the , if rates of change of acceleration are involved? ...Work on rates of change of acceleration (American scientists have called it 'surge') is very sparse.

So there is the first message for all of you as potential inventors. Take your own ideas a little further before giving them up. Keep your experience like a sort of treasure house that you can draw on whenever you like. But never, never let it be your master. Be on the lookout for impossible things, the sort the Red Queen dreamed up before breakfast.

I built my first linear motor in 1948 and wrote my first paper on the subject in 1954. The Gorton experiment took place in 1962. The first model of a tracked hovercraft was publicly demonstrated at Browndown in the summer of 1966. We... conquered the long pole pitch problem in 1969. We were on the track of very far-reaching experiments with the emergence of a 'magnetic river' following Transpo 72 in May of that year. We were aware of the feedback amplifier type of magnetic suspension and of the cryogenic method (superconductor).

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.

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.

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...

Perhaps it was World War II which came to the rescue again when the ridiculous Professor became almost indistinguishable from the 'Back Room Boy'...It reminded me of a young lady who was quite accurately described as 'long and lanky' until she inherited half a million pounds and overnight became 'tall and stately'. The image of a Professor 'stumbling across ideas' was transformed into the Scientist making 'inspired guesses'. 'Men ahead of their time' became a common compliment to those whose ideas were so abstract that they could not be understood.

West Germany branched... into... another new topology with a large-scale demonstration of the '' system... Permanent s were used to provide the lift from the underside of a ground rail. Guide wheels were used to control the gap. The philosophy... better to provide a lifting force of 120 per cent of the vehicle weight and run the wheels on a 'ceiling'...

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.

A great deal of literature and much pontification have emerged... on the subject of specialization—or rather on its opposite, the 'broadening' of education. Since 1960 I have watched... the inroads which the educationalists, many of which never did any research in science per se, have made into educational institutions and their traditions... Perhaps it had its origins in the 'Science makes War' movement which followed... Hiroshima and Nagasaki... But I think not. [Some] broadeners... felt a need to compete with their University colleagues who were more gifted in the art of research. Others were genuine crusaders with a deep sense of responsibility for the Destiny of Man. ...[T]he broadening process overgrew itself like a neglected greenhouse plant... [A]ny attempt to mingle Sociology and Atomic Physics will spell disaster for those who participate and for the organisations whose members have been so taught. ...I am merely exercising ...the right of a historian... to write his own 'slant' into his train of facts.

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.

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.

[T]here can be no electromagnetic machines before Faraday's discovery of the laws of induction in 1831. To this extent it is surprising that the earliest linear electric motor emerged as early as 1838, for it then took over a century for any linear machine to make a substantial commercial profit.