There are so many facets to almost any subject... that to tell the who — Eric Laithwaite

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The research director of Linear Motors Ltd told me in the late 1970s that he had then listed over one thousand different applications for linear motors. By this he meant that motors had been manufactured and sold for that number of different jobs. The most common applications included sliding doors, traveling cranes and conveyors. The items that were moved varied from 0.1 mg... to over 5 tonnes."

"Circularity is a powerful concept, the idea of a closed loop even more so. In circular motion there is magic, just as there is in electro-magnetism. But it only manifests itself when it is, like (shall we say for the moment, rather than a reflection of) its neighboring head, truly three-dimensional. ...We can induce current into the one [coil] from the other by means totally unintelligible to us, but to which we give the name electromagnetic induction. But if I place one coil with its axis at right-angles to that of the other, there is no induced voltage. It is as if the two circuits lived in different worlds... What is the meaning of perspective in a four-dimensional space?"