Intellect PlusMachinery and tools
329 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 6 of 6.
Engine shares a root with ingenious, and the first fire engines were just pumpsThe word engine comes through Old French from Latin ingenium, the same source as ingenious. Before factories, it meant clever war machinery: catapults, trebuchets and battering ra…
Two hundred billion a year: the humble fastener and its counterfeit problemAmericans get through more than 200 billion fasteners every year, and carmakers alone account for 26 billion of them. In 1988 a congressional subcommittee discovered that fake, mi…
Maple teeth, bronze wheels and plastic gears built to break on purposeAs late as 1967, a New Hampshire firm, Thompson Manufacturing of Lancaster, was selling tens of thousands of maple gear teeth a year. Its customers were paper mills and grist mill…
The hammer may be humanity's oldest tool, and its physics is surprisingly cleverNear Kenya's Lake Turkana in 2012, Sonia Harmand and Jason Lewis of Stony Brook University found a large cache of shaped stones used for bashing wood, bone and other rocks, dated …
After the plough comes the harrow, from Han dynasty rakes to concrete-weighted giant discsA plough leaves a field of furrows and big clods, which is useless for planting small seeds. The harrow follows to crumble that rough ground into fine, even tilth. Chinese farmers…- In a Sumerian poem the hoe argues with the plough, and the hoe winsSome four thousand years ago, Sumerian scribes wrote a debate in which a talking hoe and a talking plough trade boasts about which is more useful. The hoe is declared the winner. …
Some chisels are made of beryllium copper so they will never sparkAlmost every cold chisel for cutting metal is hardened steel. But where a single spark could be disastrous, toolmakers use beryllium copper instead. It is one of many small adapta…
A spin extractor can remove more water in two minutes than a dryer in twentyHospital laundries often put wet sheets through a centrifuge before any heat touches them. Spinning far faster than a washing machine, these extractors can shed as much water in a…
Old teleprinters printed each letter with a clutch that turned exactly onceEvery character arriving at a teleprinter tripped a special clutch that engaged the motor for precisely one revolution, drove the print mechanism through a single cycle, and then …
Storing food in containers is a habit no other primate sharesPeople have been carrying and storing things in vessels for 100,000 years at the very least, perhaps for millions. The first were probably natural objects such as hollow gourds, u…
Eli Whitney's cotton gin was meant to save labour and ended up demanding moreWhitney hoped his 1793 machine would cut the work needed to process cotton. Instead, cleaning became so fast that picking turned into the bottleneck, driving demand for field labo…- The rotary tiller was born on an Australian farm using a steam tractorIn 1912 a young Australian named Arthur Clifford Howard began spinning blades through the soil on his father's farm at Gilgandra, New South Wales, powered by the family steam trac…
Indigenous Australians were grinding axe edges at least 44,000 years agoHumanity's first axes had no handles at all: chipped stone hand axes go back roughly 1.6 million years. The leap to polished, ground edges happened first in Australia, where fragm…
Some trucks raise an axle off the road when it isn't neededHeavy dump trucks and trailers often carry a lift axle that can be lowered to spread a load across more tyres, say to cross a weight-limited bridge, then hoisted clear of the road…
Torricelli hid his barometer experiments amid neighbourhood rumours of sorceryWhen gossip spread through Evangelista Torricelli's Italian neighbourhood that he was dabbling in witchcraft, he decided to keep his experiments quiet to avoid arrest. Switching f…
The first ball bearings to win a race were on a bicycle in 1869In August 1869 a Parisian bicycle mechanic named Jules Suriray patented a radial ball bearing. That November his bearings were fitted to the bike James Moore rode to victory in th…
The first mass-produced toothbrush was dreamed up by a man in prisonIn the 1700s William Addis, after a spell in prison, began drilling holes into a handle and gluing in tufts of bristle. It was the first toothbrush made at scale, and the method c…
A Chinese bronze caliper from 9 AD was already marked in tenths of an inchDuring the brief Xin dynasty, Chinese craftsmen made a bronze caliper with a slot and pin, graduated in inches and tenths, and dated by inscription to the first day of the first m…
A working centrifuge can now be 3-D printed for about 25 dollarsOpen-source designers have published a hand-powered centrifuge that spins at more than 1,732 revolutions per minute and can be printed entirely on a 3-D printer for roughly 25 dol…
A chain is a rope when pushed and a rod when pulledCompress a chain and it folds and curves as limply as rope. Pull it tight and it becomes straight, rigid and able to bear enormous loads. That split personality explains why the s…
The chainsaw began as a surgeon's instrument, not a logger'sBefore anyone used a toothed chain on trees, two Scottish doctors in the 1780s used a fine serrated chain between wooden handles as a flexible surgical saw. Decades later a German…
Modern air conditioning was invented to keep ink lined up in a Brooklyn print shopWillis Carrier's 1902 system for a Brooklyn lithography firm was not built for human comfort. It controlled humidity so paper would stop swelling and shrinking, keeping colour ink…
The Archimedes screw may have been watering Babylon's gardens before ArchimedesTradition credits Archimedes with the water screw, supposedly after a visit to Egypt. But one Assyriologist argues that an inscription of the Assyrian king Sennacherib describes b…
How the decline of domestic servants birthed the modern American kitchenThe rise of the self-contained electric appliance was more than a technical feat; it was a social response to a changing workforce. As full-time domestic servants disappeared in t…- The ancient physics of moving the world with a single leverLong before the Industrial Revolution, thinkers like Archimedes realized that force could be multiplied. By using simple mechanisms to trade distance for power, we can lift massiv…
From ancient novelties to the engines that powered the Industrial RevolutionLong before they drove locomotives across continents, steam-powered devices were merely scientific curiosities. What began as an experimental toy in Roman Egypt eventually evolved…- The ancient origins of the modern machine are hidden in a stone hand axeWe often think of machines as complex digital systems, but the first true machine was a simple piece of chipped flint. From prehistoric wedges to programmable 9th-century robots, …
The explosive heart of modern mobility: how internal combustion engines workFrom the jet engines powering flight to the pistons in your car, the internal combustion engine transforms chemical energy into kinetic motion. But how does a controlled explosion…- The brilliant mistake that powered the industrial worldRudolf Diesel set out to build a perfect engine based on the Carnot cycle, but his original design was physically impossible. Instead, he stumbled upon a compression-ignition syst…