Eric Laithwaite Quotes

[T]he academic tended to dislike the industrialist and the industrialist both distrusted and feared the academic—distrusted because 'theory never works in practice' and feared because the managing director might reveal some chink in his 'armour of experience' when confronted by the academic in the presence of some of his own staff. Had not the 'long-haired Professor' long been a music-hall joke and his caricature the subject of comedy films?

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...

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.

There are so many facets to almost any subject... that to tell the whole in its proper time sequence would be to lose the reader in a sea of facts and details, some related, others not at all.

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.

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.

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.

[T]he textile men who dabbled in linear motors made a real contribution... and while they were probably unaware of each other's inventions, it seems probable that some of their work was known to later workers in other fields. If only some of the textile men had been aware of the potential for linear motors in those other fields, the 'Second Age of Topology'... might well have started earlier, just as the invention of the induction machine might have occurred in the 1830s had not the inventors of that time been blinded by the demand to generate 'battery-like' current.

[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.

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...

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 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...

When you discover something or observe something for the first time, you... wonder how that works, and then you make one, and you look at it, and you decide you'd better find out how it works. ...[Y]ou set about a detailed series of experiments, and eventually, ...you have to do the sums, it wouldn't be respectable without doing the sums... [Y]ou do the sums and then you publish it as a paper in the learned society journal. ...[Y]ou write it as if it was done from the front, as if on morning one you said "I will now invent the magnetic river..." ...[T]his very unfortunate phrase keeps coming in, "Now it is cleat that..." and "Clearly, obviously..." None of it is obvious. It wasn't the day before you started. No, you do it from the back.

I make most of my inventions when I'm talking to other people. ...I drag them from their interest into mine, and then they thank me when they leave, and I feel as if I should pay them a fee, because I feel as if I've used their brain to sort of reflect from.