"Isaac Newton was right when he declared "If I can see further than others it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants." And you start counting up Newtons giants... Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Archimedes. You soon run out of ideas. But Newton knew nothing of Faraday even, and Maxwell, Rutherford, Max Planck, Neils Bohr, Geiger, Einstein, Mach. Our list of giants runs in the hundreds. So the opportunities for new inventions and discoveries... were never greater than they are today. And of one thing we can be sure, they will be... even greater next year."
Eric Roberts Laithwaite was an English electrical engineer, known as the "Father of Maglev" for his development of the linear induction motor and maglev rail system after Hermann Kemper.
"West Germany branched... into... another new topology with a large-scale demonstration of the system... Permanent s were used to provide the lift from the underside of a ground rail. Guide wheels were used to control the gap. The philosophy... better to provide a lifting force of 120 per cent of the vehicle weight and run the wheels on a ceiling..."
"When you discover something or observe something for the first time, you... wonder how that works, and then you make one, and you look at it, and you decide youd better find out how it works. ...[Y]ou set about a detailed series of experiments, and eventually, ...you have to do the sums, it wouldnt be respectable without doing the sums... [Y]ou do the sums and then you publish it as a paper in the learned society journal. ...[Y]ou write it as if it was done from the front, as if on morning one you said "I will now invent the magnetic river..." ...[T]his very unfortunate phrase keeps coming in, "Now it is cleat that..." and "Clearly, obviously..." None of it is obvious. It wasnt the day before you started. No, you do it from the back."
"I have been told by different people on separate occasions that the first patent on linear motors was filed by the Mayor of Pittsburgh in 1890, and that it was an induction machine applied to loom shuttle propulsion. ...[T]here is certainly a patent with the same objective in 1895. ...[T]he name [flying] given to James Kays shuttle of 1733 suggests movement without contact and, as with modern transport in which it is proposed to have ground vehicles hovering clear of the ground, Teslas invention promised immediate success if it could be applied in linear form. ...The... 70-80 years during which progress in linear motors was extremely slow clearly needs an explanation. ...[T]here are many contributing factors, not least that of the amateur status of the textile inventors in the world of electrical engineers."
"So there is the first message for all of you as potential inventors. Take your own ideas a little further before giving them up. Keep your experience like a sort of treasure house that you can draw on whenever you like. But never, never let it be your master. Be on the lookout for impossible things, the sort the Red Queen dreamed up before breakfast."
"[T]he mirror really is itself, for it changes hands for you as you go through the mirror and changes the motor to a generator at the same time."
"A plain steel rod does remarkably well because steel... is a conductor of electricity, as well as of magnetism. This tubular motor is not the most efficient of linear induction machines. ...This amazing force of induction ...appears as almost artificial gravity under our control. Now, as an engineer I must try and put this force to good use, and when I do I must be sure that Im getting the very best out of my machine. Now one of the advantageous of arrangements appears to be to use two flat machines face to face, forming the outside of a sandwich, with the aluminum sheet as the filling. Now this motor is really a most potent device, but still pretty useless... So if we want continuous motion, we must turn this machine over. Let [it] now be the moving part, and let it sit on a fixed rail and run along that... Im going to raise the voltage slowly and the motor will climb this very steep incline. ...[I]t doesnt need wheels to grip the rail. There are virtually no moving parts, and the motor is capable of developing a very large force. Taking off. I can control the motor for very low speeds, or stop it when its moving very fast. When used on the horizontal and made in a much larger size, such a machine is capable of developing a very high acceleration. At the Motor Industry Research Association laboratories at , the linear motor is being used to crash test all kinds of vehicles. ...The linear motor to do this job is very small, Its only about three times as big as our model which climbed the rail. ...Red lights flash, and once the final button is pressed, the forces of induction take over."