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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… - Eric Laithwaite
" "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.
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About Eric Laithwaite
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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Additional quotes by Eric Laithwaite
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 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).
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[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.
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