"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."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Lecture 6 - It's my own invention, 02:36.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eric_Laithwaite
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
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 wit
37 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Eric Laithwaite →
Related Quotes
"A plain steel rod does remarkably well because steel... is a conductor of electricity, as well as of magnetism. This …"
"There are all kinds of people thinking about all kinds of things all of the time. That sentence sums up what I would …"
"Isaac Newton was right when he declared "If I can see further than others it is because I stand on the shoulders of g…"
"I make most of my inventions when I'm talking to other people. ...I drag them from their interest into mine, and then…"
"I was telephoned by a man called Alexander Charles Jones, who asked me if he might bring me a box of apparatus which …"
"So there is the first message for all of you as potential inventors. Take your own ideas a little further before givi…"
"Linear motors can be regarded... as the physical result of splitting and unrolling of rotary machines, and there are …"
"[T]here can be no electromagnetic machines before Faraday's discovery of the laws of induction in 1831. To this exten…"
"[T]he textile men who dabbled in linear motors made a real contribution... and while they were probably unaware of ea…"
"I'm like a child who's been brought up inside an institution and has never seen the outside world, the sea, or trees …"