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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 deterre… - Eric Laithwaite
" "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.
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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
[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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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.
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