Free download How Things Work: The Inner Life of Everyday Machines by Theodore Gray. Photographs by Nick Mann. Published by Black Dog & Leventhal. English | 256 Pages | EPUB | ISBN: 0316445436
Description
Million-copy bestselling author of The Elements, Molecules, and Reactions Theodore Gray applies his trademark mix of engaging stories, real-time experiments, and stunning photography to the inner workings of machines, big and small, revealing the extraordinary science, beauty, and rich history of everyday things.
Theodore Gray has become a household name among fans, both young and old, of popular science and mechanics. He’s an incorrigible tinkerer with a constant curiosity for how things work.
Gray’s readers love how he always brings the perfect combination of know-how, humor, and daring-do to every project or demonstration, be it scientific or mechanical.
In How Things Work he explores the mechanical underpinnings of dozens of types of machines and mechanisms, from the cotton gin to the wristwatch to an industrial loom.
Filled with stunning original photographs in Gray’s inimitable style, How Things Work is a must-have exploration of stuff—large and small—for any builder, maker or lover of mechanical things.
PEOPLE ARE MESSY
They’re complicated and unpredictable. They can hurt you, and sometimes they hurt inside. Machines are not like that. They are what they are. They don’t lie or cheat or turn the screw just when they know it will hurt the most. (Except printers. Printers are the psychopaths of machines.) Machines follow the rules.
Even if you don’t understand those rules at first, once you learn them, they will never change. They will remain true and the same, forever and always. This is especially true of machines you make yourself.
Other people’s machines, complex manufactured things, can be frustrating and difficult to master. (Hence the existence of shooting ranges in Las Vegas where you can bring your printer and shoot at it with pistols, assault rifles, sawed-off shotguns… you know, whatever it takes.) But a thing you’ve made yourself is an open book.
As you design it and bring it into existence, the machine reveals its nature to you one step at a time. In the end, it exists because of you, and you will always know it better than anyone else. You know not only its final form, but all the roads not taken, the other shapes and ways of being it could have embraced.
When a manufactured thing breaks, it can be nearly impossible to fix, but when a machine you made breaks, well, you made it once, you can make it again.