History
The idea of its genesis using links is contained in a letter Watt wrote to Matthew Boulton in June 1784.
I have got a glimpse of a method of causing a piston rod to move up and down perpendicularly by only fixing it to a piece of iron upon the beam, without chains or perpendicular guides and one of the most ingenious simple pieces of mechanics I have invented.The context of Watt's innovation has been described by C. G. Gibson:
- During the Industrial Revolution, mechanisms for converting rotary into linear motion were widely adopted in industrial and mining machinery, locomotives and metering devices. Such devices had to combine engineering simplicity with a high degree of accuracy, and the ability to operate at speed of lengthy periods. For many purposes approximate linear motion is an acceptable substitute for exact linear motion. Perhaps the best known example is the Watt four bar linkage, discovered by the Scottish engineer James Watt in 1784.
Read more about this topic: Watt's Linkage
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“The history of the genesis or the old mythology repeats itself in the experience of every child. He too is a demon or god thrown into a particular chaos, where he strives ever to lead things from disorder into order.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)