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June 8 - September 21, 2018
Thomas Blanchard,
Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations of 1851.
“Whitworth, J & Co,”
The standardized screw on the one hand, and the measuring machine on the other. Both these creations were linked together, literally and mechanically, and both were connected to the sudden new enthusiasm
1859
by 1/1,000,000
Now metal pieces could be made and measured to a tolerance of one-millionth of an inch.
“British Standard Whitworth,”
Bramah lock
all of them based upon the original design of Joseph Bramah of 1797.
So profound was the effect of the Model T Ford on America, so much did it change the nature of the nation . . . its art, its music, its social structure . . . its health and wealth and arrogant insularity, that Henry Ford who was responsible for it all must be seen as the most effective revolutionary . .
Rolls-Royce Silver Seraph one midwinter’s day in early 1998
Rolls-Royce Motors became effectively defunct, and was sold off to the German company Volkswagen.
Henry Royce
Rolls-Royce Camargue,
serious commercial flop,
life were fair, the motorcar Henry Royce created in 1904 would be named the Royce-Rolls, as the latter, Charles Rolls, was little more than a salesman and promoter. In the machine shop, the engineers defiantly called their creations “Royces.”
“I have found the greatest engineer in the world! The greatest engineer in the world!”
hundred thousand Highland miles
Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost,
Stunts that now seem routine were performed for the first time:
More than sixteen million Model T Fords—“Tin Lizzies” in the vernacular—were sold between 1908 and 1927, with the price going down from $850 to $260 thanks to the evolution of ever-more-efficient manufacturing techniques.
steel with added vanadium,
The Model T had fewer than one hundred different parts (a modern car has more than thirty thousand).
Caramba!
$850 in 1908 to $345 in 1916, to a stunningly affordable $260 in 1925.
Johansson
103-piece combination gauge
“The Most Accurate Man in the World,” said one. “The Edison of Sweden.”
Rolls-Royce Trent 900—specifically
almost seventy thousand pounds of thrust and had cost Qantas Airways $13 million—had
Frank Whittle,
“Future Developments in Aircraft Design.”
why not, he thought, employ a gas turbine as an engine, a gas turbine that, instead of driving a propeller at the engine’s front, would thrust out a powerful jet of air from the engine’s rear? An idea that would change the world in unimaginable ways had come to Frank Whittle when he was just twenty-two years old.
true eureka moment.
“every great advance replaces traditional complexities by a new simplicity. Here it was in the iron world of engineering.”
17,750 rpm that would drive a compressor and produce 500 hp, with the outflowing air creating enough propulsive power to fly a small mail-delivery airplane.
Gloster E28/39—the
electrical discharge machining
(from the injection of the losable wax to the growing of single-crystal alloys to the drilling of the cooling holes)
all turned on the performance of one tiny metal pipe.
It should have failed inspection, but it didn’t. It just failed in real life.
“non-conforming”
Qantas was paid some eighty million dollars in compensation; the Rolls-Royce balance sheet for the year after the event showed a net loss to the company of seventy million dollars.
The satin-smooth surface was to be such that if the mirror were the size of the Atlantic Ocean, no point on it would be higher than three or four inches above sea level. If it were the size of the United States, no hills or valleys on its surface would deviate by more than two and a half inches from plane.
a null corrector.
2.2-micron flattening around its edges—the famous one-fiftieth-of-the-thickness-of-a-human-hair deviation from design.
Jim Crocker.
Time is the longest distance between two places.
Doppler effect—the classic example being the change of perceived frequency of the horn of a passing train—and for the first time ever, it was shown by this pair of physicists to be both detectable and measurable in a satellite signal.
