In a series of lectures in 1938, tv inventor Philo Farnsworth explained the need to develop "the tools to make the tools to make the tools" to make high tech stuff. He originated the phrase.
During the early days of the Russian invasion in 2022, it was realized that almost all of Ukraine's redundant offsite backups were in various locations in Kyiv.
In 2016, Clinton spent $576.4 million and Trump spent $332.4 million. In 2024, total spending including PACs was $1.6B for Biden/Harris and $1.1B for Trump. There was less money behind Trump both times.
Interesting that many of the early steam mills used a steam engine to pump water into a water tower, which then drove a conventional water wheel to power the millworks.
Yes, until they were able to get smooth rotation out of the engines, the water wheel was a much smoother source of power. Especially for looms and weaving machines, stable, smooth power was critical. "Power in the Industrial Revolution" by Richard L Hills is a deep exploration of the history there :).
The rivers and streams actually turned into a battleground! This is an excerpt from my beam engine article:
The fight for water
Richard Arkwright's water-powered mill at Cromford opened in 1771, and the factory system that followed created fierce demand for the best river sites. Water-powered mills were also dependent on the weather: a dry season could shut down the factory.
Steam pumping engines offered a solution. An engine lifted the water that had passed beneath the wheel back up the hill, allowing the same water to fall through the wheel again. This kept the smooth turn of the water wheel, but wasted coal moving the water. Watt sold sixteen to twenty horsepower pumping engines to deliver ten horsepower to the machines.
Watt's double-acting engine, beam, crank and flywheel let the engine directly turn the line shaft. This met a huge demand from mill owners who wanted to build near workers and materials rather than around a particular stretch of river.11 One problem remained, though: every time a machine was turned on or off, the load on the engine changed.
Early electric mills replaced their big centralised steam engine with a big centralised electric motor. And the first web browser was a program running within a non-web-based operating system.
Yeah, saw one house that was this kind of "electric mill" originally - electric motors were expensive so it made perfect sense to just have one big motor and transfer the power using leather transmission belts. Not to mention all the machines needing power at that point expecting it to come from a belt drive.
The big motor and most of the machinery was long gone but you could still see where the belts went through duento various holes and cutouts, now usually closed by wooden blanks.
That reminds of those old belt-driven ceiling fan systems. You'd have a single motor and a system of belts arranged on the ceiling to drive an array of ceiling fans. I think that'd be a super charming feature to bring back in bars and cafés.
Armchair metrologist here. Did metalworkers back then use 16ths, or 12ths and 24ths? I'm familiar with the use of 1/12th lines ''' and multiples of 1/144th points ''''.
Good question! From my reading, English engineering shops like these used 1/8ths and 1/16ths. Whitworth did push for "decimal inches" (1/10, 1/100, etc). It seems like the 1/12th and 1/144th were more common in watchmaking and optics.
Ditto the makers of scientific instruments, and the manufacturers of moveable type. The printer's ligne was 1/6 of a continental inch, and the typographic pointe was 1/12 of a ligne.
From the 1500s, there were large numbers of Irish mercenaries called 'Wild Geese' who served in continental armies, and there have been communities of ethnic Irish people there for centuries. In particular a large number of Jacobite refugee families settled in Normandy after 1691. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_of_the_Wild_Geese
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