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[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 … - Eric Laithwaite
" "[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.
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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
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.
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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.
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