20th Century
Space Travel
It was the early evening of January 27th 1967. Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee had been in the Apollo capsule for six and a half hours conducting a full scale dress rehearsal of [more…]
Engineering
Engineering
An Atomic (Alarm) Clock – Part 1
I like to find electronic oddities on eBay and then try to make something interesting out of them. Before the internet I used a company called Greenweld Electronics for surplus and unusual electronic components. In [more…]
Arts
3D Printing – a layman’s guide
The latest thing to grab the keen tinkerer’s attention is 3D printing. This has taken off in a huge way in the USA, and is gaining fans in the UK too. The concept is surprisingly [more…]
Engineering
Space Travel
It is the 7th May 1945 and on this spring morning in the Bavarian mountains, a few days after the death of Hitler, the soldiers of the 44th infantry division that are manning a checkpoint [more…]
Engineering
Return to Brigg
A few weeks back I did a piece on the spectacular Alishan mountain line in Taiwan. One day, I might do something on the Gono line around the wild, craggy northwest coast of Honshu. Or [more…]
Engineering
Space Travel
There are lots of technical problems in designing a liquid fuelled rocket; such as how do you light it, relight it, how do you stop combustion instability shaking the rocket to pieces, how do you [more…]
Engineering
Making A Ruby Laser – Part Five
Melting a hole through steel: The above image needs a little explanation! The Doc messed up his camera settings and under exposed the image. So I loaded it into Gimp and played with the curves [more…]
19th Century
Meet the Anglo-Argentines
By the late 1920s, and after six decades of almost uninterrupted economic growth at around seven to eight per cent per year, Argentine per-capita GDP had reached 80% of US levels. It had surpassed per-capita [more…]
Engineering
The Kursk Disaster
I do like a good Submarine story or film or anything to do with Submarines, their menace and stealth has always fascinated me from a child, and since have held utter respect for the crew’s [more…]