December 10, 2017 Sunday
Bedtime Story
Why Charles Babbage Chose Joseph Clement
This man Clement had an engineering
education from very early on primarily through his father.
Born in 1779, when he was just a small boy
learning to read and write, his father taught him both mechanics and natural
philosophy.
Natural philosophy was then a fancy word
for science.
Even as a child he apprenticed under a
blacksmith working as a weaver, slater and later on as a metalworker.
At a very young age he was interested in
building his own stuff and one of the first things that he himself constructed
was a lathe.
Most of us I am sure have no idea what a
lathe is since most of us have never used our hands for raw constructive work.
A lathe is a type of machine where a
spindle of a sort rotates rapidly around its vertical axis and this rotation is
used for carrying out various mechanical operations such as cutting, sanding, drilling,
deforming, knurling and so on.
If you do not know what knurling is, look
at any of your hand-held direct ophthalmoscopes and look at the fine pattern
criss-cross lines on its handle.
That fine pattern is created on metal parts
by lathing process known as knurling.
Not only did he create lathes but greatly
improved them even going on to win awards for such improvements.
Keep in mind that we are talking of the
year 1828 and many of the working tools, something as banal as screws, that you
now take for granted were still in their infancies.
At this time clement starting working on
taps and dies, which have got nothing to do with water or death.
Taps and dies are special kind of
mechanical instruments that create screw threads.
A tap is a device that creates fine screw
threads in the female portion of the mating pair, such as a nut.
Die on the other hand is a device that
etches out screw threads on the male portion of mating pair such as a bolt.
The process of threading female parts is
done with the tap and hence it is called tapping.
On the other hand, the process of threading
that is done with die is called threading.
Later he developed a more sophisticated
metal cutting machine known as planer that are used to generate very accurate
flat services, cutting slots and many such precise metallic work.
It was this work on perfecting the planers
that gave him a reputation of being an expert craftsman of his day and this got
the attention of Charles Babbage.
The machine that Babbage had conceived on
in paper would require a metallic craftsman and precision engineering of the
highest class.
But as we all know by experience, it is
virtually impossible for two great experts to last together in a venture as
their egos are bound to collide.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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