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.
British electrical engineer (1921–1997)
Eric Roberts Laithwaite (14 June 1921 – 27 November 1997) was a British electrical engineer, known as the "Father of " for his development of the and maglev rail system. He and Fredrick Eastham designed a self-stable magnetic levitation system called (which incidentally appeared in the film The Spy Who Loved Me). Laithwaite derived an equation for "goodness", which parametrically described motor efficiency in general terms, and which he interpreted as implying that motor efficiency increases with size. He made many television appearances, including the to young people in 1966 and 1974. Laithwaite was also a keen amateur entomologist and the co-authored The Dictionary of Butterflies and Moths (1975).
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Eric Roberts Laithwaite
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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.
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.
Circularity is a powerful concept, the idea of a closed loop even more so. In circular motion there is magic, just as there is in electro-magnetism. But it only manifests itself when it is, like (shall we say for the moment, rather than a 'reflection' of) its 'neighboring head', truly three-dimensional. ...We can induce current into the one [coil] from the other by means totally unintelligible to us, but to which we give the name 'electromagnetic induction'. But if I place one coil with its axis at right-angles to that of the other, there is no induced voltage. It is as if the two circuits lived in different worlds... What is the meaning of perspective in a four-dimensional space?
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...
The research director of Linear Motors Ltd told me in the late 1970s that he had then listed over one thousand different applications for linear motors. By this he meant that motors had been manufactured and sold for that number of different jobs. The most common applications included sliding doors, traveling cranes and conveyors. The items that were moved varied from 0.1 mg... to over 5 tonnes.
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.
[In] the first efforts of Fred Barwell and myself to try out the feasibility of linear motor drives for railways... we built an 80-foot track in the laboratories of Manchester University... Having put a seat on this vehicle and given rides to daily newspaper reporters (acceleration 0.5 g), we had all the publicity we needed...
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.
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.
Isaac Newton was right when he declared "If I can see further than others it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants." And you start counting up Newton's giants... Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Archimedes. You soon run out of ideas. But Newton knew nothing of Faraday even, and Maxwell, Rutherford, Max Planck, Neils Bohr, Geiger, Einstein, Mach. Our list of giants runs in the hundreds. So the opportunities for new inventions and discoveries... were never greater than they are today. And of one thing we can be sure, they will be... even greater next year.
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.
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.