The closest I’ve ever come to being an engineer was a brief stint on my high school’s robotics team. Me and some friends built a different robot each year, and pitted them against schools from across the country (Canada, in my case). The competition¹ was a great experience for me, and taught me so much about design, electronics, and even being on TV.

We won the competition in my last year, and ended-up getting a spot on the long-now-cancelled TLC show Robotica (check out the awesome website I made for our team - the shiny metal background is quite something).

I had never intended to be an engineer, I was just doing it to have a good time. I moved on to other things, but still kept a distant fascination for construction and design.

507 Mechanical Movements

One of my prized possessions from this period of my life is this book. My copy is a reprint of the 17th edition, which was originally printed in 1893. Each two-page spread features 9 different mechanisms for doing various things. They range from the simplest of gears to complex water pumps, watch mechanisms and governors.

I see a great need for modern designers and engineers to periodically look backwards to older designs which may have been forgotten. This book is a fantastic resource for gazing into the past of engineering.

There are two designs in the book which stood out to me as being particularly relevant even today.

Item 77 is a mechanism designed to turn vibrations into rotational motion. As the lever (c) vibrates, the arms push the wheel around. The diagram is super simple, and there are more advanced models of this in the book, but I included this one because it was the easiest to understand.

This one caught my eye because of similar (an much more advanced) research into turning vibrations into electricity. Something along these lines could be used, in theory, to power a generator and produce electricity from waste vibrations.

Item 484 is a windmill, amazingly designed over 100-years before similar models getting attention now.

1. The idea of having high school kids do competitive robotics was actually begun by Dean Kamen, the guy who would later gain infamy for designing the Segway.