Well, that's delayed me by 20 minutes! I'm not sure whether it's the content (I knew some but not all of that), the presentation style (I've always liked the use of analogy in teaching), or mere nostalgia that made it so engaging, but I found it impossible to stop watching that, and now I want to know more - particularly to see if those developments were applied to the passenger carrying vehicles of today.
I wonder if a video made today would be as straightforward in presentation, and also how it would look to a 45 year old in 2062? (coincidentally this was made in the year of my birth)
> "A good engineer knows when to use an analogy, and where it breaks down"
If you learn nothing else, learn this.
I listened to a conversation where a senior person was explaining something with an analogy. The junior person kept having problems with the edges of the analogy, where it breaks down, and the senior person just kept trying to explain the analogy.
Analogies, parables, shortcuts all have breakdown points, you have to know them, or they will bite you.
The link above skips the modern fluff at the beginning. Shive uses a mechanical transverse wave machine to demonstrate the concepts involved in transmission lines, including reflection, standing waves and impedance matching.
There are some old-school black and white videos on gun mechanisms that explain everything from the basics to how automatic/semi-automatic machine guns work, and they use large-scale wooden models.
There is a little fluff at the beginning, but the style is very much the same and has similar models to demonstrate everything.
Huh. His obituary says he retired from IC in 1986, but I _distinctly_ recall him giving an electric motors course in my first year in 1994! I'm doubting my own memory now, but have vivid recollections of a classmate talking about the patents he had, and his ideas for launching to space using a maglev track up the side of a mountain.
I wonder if a video made today would be as straightforward in presentation, and also how it would look to a 45 year old in 2062? (coincidentally this was made in the year of my birth)