I've been trying to put material of antiquarian technological interest online since the late 20th century. Some of this I haven't yet had time to integrate into the format and maintenance structure I'm now using for Circuitous Root. Here, then, are links to some of this older material. Please note that this is copied from old, unmaintained versions of my websites. These are imperfect snapshots; there will be broken links and missing images.
Several collections of scanned material:
In the 1990s, I became quite interested in what I started to call "rolling ball sculptures. These were the early days of the Web and there was little availble online. For a short time, I had the dubious distinction of hosting the largest site in the world devoted to this topic. I have not maintained my activity in this area; it is now much better served by others. Here's what I had online as of about the year 2000.
Historic and artistic water clocks.
For a while I tried to research the digital lettering (not "typography," as I then called it) of the remarkable Dr. Allen Vincent Hershey. This study is unfinished, but here's what I had as of about 2005. Someone really should pick up this research and continue it.
The Varkon CAD program is all but forgotten today, but it should not be so. I would argue that it remains the second most innovative CAD program in history - second only to Ivan Sutherland's "Sketchpad" (which is the origin of all CAD). Why is this so? Starting in the 1980s, Varkon was the first CAD program which represented the model as a Turing-complete computer program. This remains rare - to the point that at least prior to OpenSCAD it was hard to get people to understand it (no, it is not the same as having macros!) Varkon presented itself as a library for creating custom design applications (along with a simple but complete exmpale application). Most importantly, Varkon allowed both the coding of a model-as-program and the drawing of the model (which then automatically generated the required code). To this day, no other CAD program has accomplished this - especially the last goal. Our CAD today is flashier, but in terms of underlying sophistication it has not matched what Dr. Kjellander accomplished in the 1980s.
This is an incomplete and obsolete tutorial for an older version of Varkon. It will not be of any particular use to anyone.
For the North American Model Engineering Society (N.A.M.E.S) Exhibition in the year 2000, the Metro Detroit Metalworking Club presented a simple oscillating engine intended to be run from the pressure supplied by a regular toy balloon. It was designed by Jim Mudge with modifications by club founder Bob Lorenz. They graciously permitted this design to be freely distributed and built. I simply drew up 2-D CAD plans for it. These plans should, in the distribution here, be considered to be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution license, version 4.0, with Jim Mudge and Bob Lorenz credited as designers and Dr. David M. MacMillan credited as draftsman.
TO DO: Add animation of involute gear geometry
TO DO: Add scan of Grant on gears
TO DO: Add scan of Nicholson files
I cannot now recall the exact circumstances, but I contributed scans of two publications to Marcus Rowland's pioneering role-playing game "Forgotten Futures." (See: http://forgottenfutures.co.uk, http://forgottenfutures.com, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgotten_Futures ) Back when webspace was much more expensive, I had promised Rowland that I would keep these online on my lemur.com website. They are there (or will be, once I move lemur.com to a competent web hosting service), and here they are here.
[TO DO: check old web2 for more. Frodsham? Airy? Kempe? Shute/LiteraryMachinist. Etc.]
All portions of this document not noted otherwise are Copyright © 2009, 2022 by David M. MacMillan.
Circuitous Root is a Registered Trademark of David M. MacMillan.
Singing Lemur is a Registered Trademark of David M. MacMillan.
lemur.com is a Trademark of David M. MacMillan.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons "Attribution - ShareAlike" license, version 4.0 International. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ for its terms.
Presented originally by Circuitous Root®
