Gossypia, the cotton plant, lets him describe the ingenious machines of his Derbyshire neighbour, Richard Arkwright.
In a few years, he says, these ingenious machines will be able to produce replacement body parts such as teeth, bones and even entire organs.Rapid-prototyping machines are, in effect, three-dimensional printers.
I never tired of the ingenious machines, always beautifully clean and sleek and oiled, or the furnace where the black powder was compacted from a powdery incoherence into dense, hard bars with a gray sheen.
In its early days it sold ingenious machines that enabled Edwardian printers to cast lines of type in seconds; now, as well as the right to use its fonts, it sells software that renders text on screen.
I recently attended a 3D-printer meeting in Atlanta and was thrilled to see a dozen variants of these ingenious machines "printing" locally designed products.Not only are Mendels inexpensive, they are at least in part self-replicating.
Imagine a building packed, Escher-like with conveyor belts and ingenious machines both ascending and descending, whose sole purpose is to receive empty plastic bottles at one end and automatically sort, wash and chop them into pieces the size of corn flakes, and finally create a cascade of falling HDPE flakes.
He's the mastermind behind the world's fastest toilet and the motor board backpack and presents these really quite ingenious machines with a childlike glee.
Georgia Tech alumni, working on the construction of the Panama Canal, were called Ramblin' Wrecks for the ingenious machines that they devised to transport themselves in and out of the jungles of Panama.
The bookwheel, in its most commonly seen form, was invented by Italian military engineer Agostino Ramelli in 1588, presented as one of the 195 designs in Le diverse et artificiose machine del Capitano Agostino Ramelli (The various and ingenious machines of Captain Agostino Ramelli).
