"[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."
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The second age of topology, p. 197.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eric_Laithwaite
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Eric Laithwaite
Eric Roberts Laithwaite (14 June 1921 β 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 wit
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