Academics From The United Kingdom

"He did not invent linear motors, but he made them practical and he believed they would provide the ideal propulsion unit for trains. In his most advanced designs the linear motor would propel the train, carry its weight and steer it without needing wheels. In fact the train would move along a "magnetic river"."

"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."

"I shall always believe the force of induction to be sheer magic in its own right!"

"The legacy of rotary machine design can be seen, in part, as an inhibition of linear motor experimentation, even as far as the 1970s. In rotary machines, the tangential direction was the thrust direction and the axial direction was simply a means of increasing power output. Three-dimensional thinking was, in some ways, more advanced in the Victorian era... the Second Age of Topology can be seen as having had its beginnings in the demand for high-speed propulsion, the problem of the long pole pitch and the resulting development of the TFM concept."

"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)."

"[A] world financial recession brought governments into conflict with technological innovation in linear motors in the mid 1970s. Looking back... it will seem amazing that at a time when millions of pounds worth of commercially manufactured linear motors had been sold and had proved their worth, everyone was so slow to appreciate their value in the transport scene, knowing that bigger, faster motors would have enormously superior characteristics to those used for sliding doors, traveling cranes, conveyor belt drives and the like."

"[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."

"West Germany branched... into... another new topology with a large-scale demonstration of the system... Permanent s were used to provide the lift from the underside of a ground rail. Guide wheels were used to control the gap. The philosophy... better to provide a lifting force of 120 per cent of the vehicle weight and run the wheels on a 'ceiling'..."

"I was telephoned by a man called Alexander Charles Jones, who asked me if he might bring me a box of apparatus which he said when put on frictionless casters and set in motion inside, would displace itself outside its own dimension. Immediately I knew this man was different. ...Any ordinary crank would have said, "How would you like to see Newton's Laws disobeyed." ...So I said... "Does you box contain anything that might loosely be described as a gyroscope?" ...He said, "In the box, there is a gyroscope." I said, "I think you'd better come and show it to me... because I know enough about gyros to know that they're like electromagnetism, and I've studied electromagnetism for thirty years and I know darn well I don't understand it, and I don't understand gyros either, but I can invent new things in electromagnetism once a year. And if you've got something new about gyroscopes I want to see it." And he brought it, and it did. And that was the start of a new line of research for me. And then, about a year later, I met a second enthusiast called Edwin Rickman who added his own brand of instinct that... improved the ideas we'd already got. Let me say of Alex Jones that since I first met him that I've been convinced both of the validity of his argument, and been impressed with his feel for what I'd call the elements of nature. A thing that the more learned acknowledgement of science and mathematics have seldom had, a natural feel for what goes on..."

"Perhaps it was World War II which came to the rescue again when the ridiculous Professor became almost indistinguishable from the 'Back Room Boy'...It reminded me of a young lady who was quite accurately described as 'long and lanky' until she inherited half a million pounds and overnight became 'tall and stately'. The image of a Professor 'stumbling across ideas' was transformed into the Scientist making 'inspired guesses'. 'Men ahead of their time' became a common compliment to those whose ideas were so abstract that they could not be understood."

"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."

"I make most of my inventions when I'm talking to other people. ...I drag them from their interest into mine, and then they thank me when they leave, and I feel as if I should pay them a fee, because I feel as if I've used their brain to sort of reflect from."

"Linear motors can be regarded... as the physical result of splitting and unrolling of rotary machines, and there are therefore at least as many types of linear motor as rotary..."

"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."

"Where to begin is obvious—with Michael Faraday... But we must proceed rapidly, jumping 70 to 80 years to [Alfred] Zehden (1902) and to Bachelet, then on to Kemper (1934) (surely the 'father' of Maglev), on again to Bedford, Peer and Tonks (1939) for induction levitation and finally to the Westinghouse 'Electropult' of 1946, the first high-speed linear motor ever to be built."

"Most people regard hierarchy in human societies as inevitable, a natural part of who we are. Yet this belief contradicts much of the 200,000-year history of Homo sapiens. In fact, our ancestors have for the most part been “fiercely egalitarian”, intolerant of any form of inequality. While hunter-gatherers accepted that people had different skills, abilities and attributes, they aggressively rejected efforts to institutionalise them into any form of hierarchy. So what happened to cause such a profound shift in the human psyche away from egalitarianism? The balance of archaeological, anthropological and genomic data suggests the answer lies in the agricultural revolution, which began roughly 10,000 years ago."

"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."

"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."

"Isaac Newton was right when he declared "If I can see further than others it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants." And you start counting up Newton's giants... Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Archimedes. You soon run out of ideas. But Newton knew nothing of Faraday even, and Maxwell, Rutherford, Max Planck, Neils Bohr, Geiger, Einstein, Mach. Our list of giants runs in the hundreds. So the opportunities for new inventions and discoveries... were never greater than they are today. And of one thing we can be sure, they will be... even greater next year."

"[T]here can be no electromagnetic machines before Faraday's discovery of the laws of induction in 1831. To this extent it is surprising that the earliest linear electric motor emerged as early as 1838, for it then took over a century for any linear machine to make a substantial commercial profit."

"[T]he academic tended to dislike the industrialist and the industrialist both distrusted and feared the academic—distrusted because 'theory never works in practice' and feared because the managing director might reveal some chink in his 'armour of experience' when confronted by the academic in the presence of some of his own staff. Had not the 'long-haired Professor' long been a music-hall joke and his caricature the subject of comedy films?"

"[In] the first efforts [1960] of Fred Barwell and myself to try out the feasibility of linear motor drives for railways... we built an 80-foot track in the laboratories of Manchester University... Having put a seat on this vehicle and given rides to daily newspaper reporters (acceleration 0.5 g), we had all the publicity we needed..."

"[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."

"The Jabberwock was a monster with many heads. As such it resembles... the manner in which we divide our science into Physics, Chemistry, Biology, etc., and then Physics into Heat, Light, Sound, Magnetism and Electricity. Often one can spot the various heads as being Laws of Physics, and some of them look into mirrors, see their reflections and think that the total number of their kind is bigger than it really is. Thus they attempt to co-exist with their own shadows and reflections. One of the best examples... is... Laws of Electromagnetic Induction."

"Eric Laithwaite has been aptly called an evangelist for engineering. Like all true evangelists he combined belief and practice with an ability to inspire and enthuse others. Anyone who met him could expect to be given a lucid explanation of the engineering principles behind his current project."

"There are so many facets to almost any subject... that to tell the whole in its proper time sequence would be to lose the reader in a sea of facts and details, some related, others not at all."

"Electric motors and generators 'came of age' over almost the same period that engineering was becoming clean and respectable as a profession. Although technology... preceded science, indeed paved the way... scientists were regarded for centuries as belonging to the upper class, the intelligentsia, so closely related to philosophers as to allow overlap. In such a world, technology was not recognised as a subject and engineers... did not appear until there were 'engines' for them to look after. ...Even in the early part of the twentieth century, science as a whole was almost a 'middle class' occupation compared with studies of the classics."

"An engineer is first and foremost a scientist. ...an applied scientist ...whose ultimate objective is the profitable manufacture of articles... Academic engineers may argue that they are as concerned with profitable concepts... To this extent they run alongside the pure scientist... with at least half an eye on the profits and with problems many orders of magnitude greater in complexity... In such a no-man's land he is hand-in-hand with his medical colleague, who faced with a malignant disease must let the patient die or try something."

"The universities and the factories were as far apart as the gymnasium and the monastery. ...[T]his watershed inhibited linear motor development for the industrialist would make a linear machine, basing his designs on conventional rotary machine practice, find it to have an efficiency of 20 per cent and a of 0.1, and abandon it for the rest of his career. The reason for the low values of these, in part still fashionable quantities, was not only the lack of theoretical ability but the low speed and small size of applications..."

"I'm like a child who's been brought up inside an institution and has never seen the outside world, the sea, or trees in a wood... Coming here was like being taken out of that box and put into the marvelous real world that there is, and I've simply been standing and gazing in wonder at all of the things that there are in the universe. And I'd just like to live to be 200, because one lifetime isn't enough. ...Of course I shall never retire, I mean when, I'm 65 I hope they'll make me Professor Emeritus, but I also hope that they'll let me go on working. ...I'm writing a book on engineering and biology and the last chapter is called "Gazing Wonder", and that's how I can sum it up."

"I have been told by different people on separate occasions that the first patent on linear motors was filed by the Mayor of Pittsburgh in 1890, and that it was an induction machine applied to loom shuttle propulsion. ...[T]here is certainly a patent with the same objective in 1895. ...[T]he name [flying] given to James Kay's shuttle of 1733 suggests movement without contact and, as with modern transport in which it is proposed to have ground vehicles 'hovering' clear of the ground, Tesla's invention promised immediate success if it could be applied in linear form. ...The... 70-80 years during which progress in linear motors was extremely slow clearly needs an explanation. ...[T]here are many contributing factors, not least that of the 'amateur' status of the textile inventors in the world of electrical engineers."

"A great deal of literature and much pontification have emerged... on the subject of specialization—or rather on its opposite, the 'broadening' of education. Since 1960 I have watched... the inroads which the educationalists, many of which never did any research in science per se, have made into educational institutions and their traditions... Perhaps it had its origins in the 'Science makes War' movement which followed... Hiroshima and Nagasaki... But I think not. [Some] broadeners... felt a need to compete with their University colleagues who were more gifted in the art of research. Others were genuine crusaders with a deep sense of responsibility for the Destiny of Man. ...[T]he broadening process overgrew itself like a neglected greenhouse plant... [A]ny attempt to mingle Sociology and Atomic Physics will spell disaster for those who participate and for the organisations whose members have been so taught. ...I am merely exercising ...the right of a historian... to write his own 'slant' into his train of facts."

"It is not strange that the engineer fails to produce a unique solution, that his product is seen to be the result of 'art' more than science. ...The product becomes a matter of opinion... and joins the ranks of many other products such as literature, painting and sculpture, and... clothing. It has, in fact, its own history of Fashion."

"When we think about the diet of early humans, we're often drawn to thinking about meat, but plant foods were more important than the archaeological record gives credit for. The food that could be relied on wherever you were was the plant food."

"We have a brain that just is desperate for . I mean, it's such a fussy organ. That's the only thing it really takes in for energy. Well, meat is not a very good source of glucose. To have a big brain like this, you need to eat something different, and the most efficient way to get glucose is to eat carbohydrates."

"The human mind is extremely limited, and amongst the limits imposed upon it are those of, in early life, connecting an idea, fact, or process, with certain words; and unless two languages, at least, are learnt, and those two are as dissimilar as possible, one is always, more or less, the slave of routine in the perception and in the application of new facts and of new ideas, and in the adaptation of any matter of either theoretical or practical importance. It is great advantage, for linguistic purposes, which are far more practically important than may be generally believed, that the study of Classical languages still holds the foremost place in this country (India); because, however necessary scientific "observation" may be, it cannot take the place of a cultured imagination."

"A good deal of our misconception with regard to the difficulty of the inquiry lies in ourselves that ideas of multitude connected with the peculiar customs of the race that have yet to be ascertained, are at the bottom of the inability of that race to follow our numeration."

"Many disasters can be traced to our linguistic shortcomings. Millions of money and multitudes of men have been sacrificed in order to save the prestige of a mistake in translation committed "by authority.""

"If the man laughs, change the Order."

"I have also rendered the phonic molecular vibrations visible, when produced by the longitudinal oscillations of a column of air ..."

"The instruments and processes I am about to describe being all founded on the principles established by Ohm in his theory of the voltaic circuit, and this beautiful and comprehensive theory being not yet generally understood and admitted, even by many persons engaged in original research, I could scarcely hope to make my descriptions and explanations understood without prefacing them with a short account of the principal results which have been deduced from it. It will soon be perceived how the clear ideas of electro-motive forces and resistances, substituted for the vague notions of intensity and quantity which have been so long prevalent, enable us to give satisfactory explanations of most important phenomena, the laws of which have hitherto been involved in obscurity and doubt."

"... Wheatstone was to become a household name for his work on electric telegraphs, and indeed the Prince Consort consulted him as a parent of the telegraph system. Wheatstone had other claims to fame. He held a Chair at King's College London for 41 years and, although he hardly ever gave a lecture, the College subsequently named a laboratory after him. He invented the concertina and he discovered the principle of stereoscopy. He used his encyclopaedic knowledge of the literature to spread scientific ideas. He designed ingenious electro-mechanical devices and pioneered precise electrical measurements."

"This force of nature, this will, continues to exist when "we" die, and in fact it does already exist in many other forms and ways. This force is active in me, as it is active in you and every other living creature. And to the extent that each of us ultimately is this force, this will to live, we always exist not only in this particular form, which we call our individual self, but also in everything else. When you look into the world with your eyes, perceive it with your senses, live in it with your body and your mind, then I look and perceive and live with you, because you are only another version of myself, just as I am only another version of yourself. Accordingly, when I die I will live on in you, and when you die, you will live on in me."

"In one well-controlled study in a hospital setting, the face mask was as good at preventing influenza infection as a purpose-made respirator. Respirators, which tend to feature a specialized air filter, are specifically designed to protect against potentially hazardous airborne particles. However, when you move to studies looking at their effectiveness in the general population, the data is less compelling - it's quite a challenge to keep a mask on for prolonged periods of time."

"If this (COVID-19) transmission mode is contributing significantly then control becomes increasingly difficult. It's looking like this coronavirus is behaving very differently to SARS and MERS, and this is a big concern."

"Recently, something of an academic counter-revolution... has taken place. Oxford-trained historians have led the way, publishing books repeating the same argument: the barbarian migrations involved real ‘peoples on the move’, which brought down the Roman Empire. This has stimulated traditionalist archaeologists into a backlash against more nuanced interpretations of the material record. Whatever their authors’ politics (though these can be guessed at from their writings and publishing choices) there can be no doubt that these works have—in the most generous interpretation—been written sufficiently carelessly as to provide succour to far-right extremists. What is more, the barbarian migrations have become a popular metaphor among racists and other opponents of modern migration... The Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Behring Breivik’s preferred historical model was the Crusades but it is nevertheless significant that he described the killings as ‘a small barbarian act to prevent a larger barbarian act’,17 the latter being the supposed take-over of Europe by Muslim immigrants."

"The recent use of scientific (or pseudo-scientific) methodologies to examine migration has added an extra, alarming dimension. DNA, whether ‘ancient’ (from excavated material) or ‘modern’ samples (from living populations), is being used to track migration. The danger, barely addressed (at best dismissed as a purely ‘ideological’ objection), is of reducing ethnicity to biology and thus to something close to the nineteenth- century idea of race, at the basis of the ‘nation state’."

"[T]he writing of history is inescapably political, my aim is partly to provide a basis for a more politically and ethically responsible intervention by historians in modern political debate about migration."

"[I'm] (probably) the most significant historian of early medieval Europe under the age of 60 anywhere in the world... [T]hat's not (just) me being cocky, but a pretty sober assessment of the range and quality of my work."

"The first part of the essay calls into question the idea that the Germanic-speaking barbarians shared any sort of unifying ethos or culture that would allow us to conceive of them as a single entity. This section largely summarizes a particular direction in recent work, but the conclusion is still far from generally accepted or integrated in current study and so requires restating... The comprehensive rejection of the idea of a unifying Germanic ethos and identity among pre-migratory Germani removes the classic basis for nineteenth-century views of the German people as rooted in distant history... One inheritance of nineteenth-century (and earlier) notions of pan-Germanic culture is the unlikely notion that all Germani had access to a common range of cultural traits, upon which they could draw at will... Attempts to change this intellectually careless state of affairs are making only slow process."