Poetry for Engineers, Part 1
“Perhaps if we had some kind of platform we could attach to the horse? Then it could drag us and our luggage along?”
What a marvellous and clever idea! It would lead to a talk about friction, and why it was that an ice-skater could travel so much faster on a frozen lake than a person without ice-skates. “A platform could carry all of our luggage, but it would be very hard for the horses to drag.”
And eventually, with some prompting, we might think about a rock rolling down a hill. Why is it that some rocks roll freely, but others stay put or slide? And we would talk about roundness, and think about ways we could use this interesting property of rolling to help with our own problem. And hopefully, after a good deal of head-scratching, we would come up with an axle, and a wheel, and a platform, and a horse, and we would have our first wagon. We might tinker for a while, and find that round was the best shape for wheels, and that four wheels on two axles made the wagon stable.
(Source: orderedwords.com)
