We reach for the stars in the latest instalment of our Compelling Machinery series (previous posts can be found here). Scott Locklin on an increasingly antique achievement. Rocketry is a field which peaked in the 1960s, probably never to improve appreciably. The space shuttle? A flying brick. The attempted replacement for the ... Read More...
More compelling machines (previous ones in the series are here). Today Scott Locklin digs up some Cold War flying dinosaurs. Are they the most fascinating mechanical objects ever built? The Soviets solved problems differently from the West. This wasn’t just because they had different problems to solve, though there is that. Part ... Read More...
How 'small' science can produce big thoughts. The internet is generally a wasteland of cat memes and political invective. Once in a while it serves its original purpose in disseminating new ideas. I stumbled across Boris Ryabko‘s little corner of the web while researching compression learning algorithms (which, BTW, are much ... Read More...
We've done dirigibles, jets, battle ships and steam engines. Today, Scott Locklin introduces us to a crazy machine they called SAGE. While cold war jets are an old interest of mine, almost everything built to fight the cold war fascinates me. All ages are characterized by madness; only a few have that madness captured in ... Read More...
Scott Locklin continues his irregular series on machinery that, in one way or another, is utterly compelling. Today a crazy machine from a crazy time. Aerospace technology became grotesque and beautiful in the 1950s. One of the most grotesque and beautiful creations of that bizarre era of technological excellence was the Convair ... Read More...
Scott Locklin looks back admiringly at an ancient Greek who dabbled more originally, profoundly and variously than pretty much anyone else ever. Εύδοξος ο Κνίδιος It’s a modern conceit that we are the most sophisticated people who ever lived. Much of what we know comes from a bunch of pederasts in ancient Magna ... Read More...
Scott Locklin continues his Compelling Machinery series. It's the turn of the truly epochal and somehow tremendously appealing steam engine. Before computers, before men learned to fly, before the European empires fell apart, there was the age of steam. The age of steam lives on only in rusted hulks and remnants of ... Read More...
We continue today's maritime theme with the latest in our series of aesthetic appreciations of sublime machines… The Battleship is one of the most glorious, evocative and ultimately useless machines ever created by human beings. They’re fast: in their heyday of displacement speed vessels, they were the fastest things on the high ... Read More...
Continuing our series of aesthetic appreciations of sublime machines… No other nations built anything like them, until the Soviets released the Tupolev Tu-20 Bear nuclear bomber in 1955, 10 years after the end of the war (they also copied the B-29). Other nations had bombers in the WW2 and immediately prior ... Read More...
Continuing our series of aesthetic appreciations of sublime machines... My interest in the aesthetics of technology always brings me to early eras of device. In the first generation of a technology, the device physically is at its most pure and evocative. Often times, the implementation is bad, but it is rare that ... Read More...