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This is the story of how private foreign enterprise in the form of
Swedish Lloyd and Swedish America Line, who formed a British
company called 'Hoverlloyd', galvanised the British Government in
to supporting this new concept in transport through the formation
of a British Rail subsidiary called 'Seaspeed'. It is a story, told
by those who were there, of how young adventurous men and women,
most of whom were in their twenties and early thirties, took on the
exciting challenge of getting an operation, in which they all
believed had a great future, off the ground. It tells of the
difficulties and near disasters, through lack of experience, that
nearly wrote off the industry in the early days; the clashes of
cultures between the free enterprise and Government operations; and
why, after so much early promise, the great adventure with the
giant car and passenger carrying hovercraft came to an end. The
story begins with the history of Saunders Roe and their involvement
as a result of the discovery by Christopher Cockerell in 1953 that
big weights could be supported on a cushion of low pressure air and
that the concept could be practically applied. Much has already
been written about Christopher Cockerell, later Sir Christopher,
and the development of the hovercraft by Saunders Roe, as well as
the hovercraft industry to the present day. Those relevant parts
showing the frustrations and disappointments they too suffered are
repeated in this book, together with new material that has come to
light, to provide a comprehensive narrative of the hovercraft
industry and the giant SR.N4 cross-Channel operations.
This is the story of how private foreign enterprise in the form of
Swedish Lloyd and Swedish America Line, who formed a British
company called 'Hoverlloyd', galvanised the British Government in
to supporting this new concept in transport through the formation
of a British Rail subsidiary called 'Seaspeed'. It is a story, told
by those who were there, of how young adventurous men and women,
most of whom were in their twenties and early thirties, took on the
exciting challenge of getting an operation, in which they all
believed had a great future, off the ground. It tells of the
difficulties and near disasters, through lack of experience, that
nearly wrote off the industry in the early days; the clashes of
cultures between the free enterprise and Government operations; and
why, after so much early promise, the great adventure with the
giant car and passenger carrying hovercraft came to an end. The
story begins with the history of Saunders Roe and their involvement
as a result of the discovery by Christopher Cockerell in 1953 that
big weights could be supported on a cushion of low pressure air and
that the concept could be practically applied. Much has already
been written about Christopher Cockerell, later Sir Christopher,
and the development of the hovercraft by Saunders Roe, as well as
the hovercraft industry to the present day. Those relevant parts
showing the frustrations and disappointments they too suffered are
repeated in this book, together with new material that has come to
light, to provide a comprehensive narrative of the hovercraft
industry and the giant SR.N4 cross-Channel operations.
Hi, this book begins in 1963 with me as a child of 9 trying to
understand why my crystal set worked OK with the GPO headphones but
not with my home-made earpiece (or with a loudspeaker) - output
impedance - that's why But it was not until I was 13 or 14 that I
realised this because I did not believe in "output impedance" - how
can something such as a battery have output resistance? It is
supposed to be supplying current, not hindering it This mystery and
others are carefully explained in simple language because this is
the book that I would have craved when I was a kid, but I was not
good at reading and did not understand any algebra at all. We
explain the mystery of the potential divider too (why not just use
rheostats, like my Scalextric hand controllers?) and show that
everything is just a potential divider - even the Scalextric hand
controllers. This is the start of understanding Ohm's Law - input
and output impedances and the potential divider, without using any
maths, the gut feel. Time passes and we get to 11 years old and we
have the chapter on algebra, just enough to understand V / I == R
(we have already learned this by rote earlier) but now we use it,
but with the geeky equals sign and in a programming manner because
..".we are roughly headed in that direction." And although this
book ends in about 1980 we jump ahead here and write some ARM
assembler to make the Raspberry Pi act as a "spark gap transmitter"
using a piece of wire - this is really grown up stuff for kids. The
climax is chapter 8 "TV and Radio Repairman" where I tell the story
of how I learned the "secret" of fault finding at age 23 (its Ohm's
Law and input and output impedance) and also chapter 9 "The Mighty
Click" where we explain "Fourier" without using any maths at all,
just picutures of sinusoids and "common sense" and this ties in
with the spark gap transmitter and one particular fault finding
trick (impulse response) and also the "Dick Parmee" audio test: a
square wave. Now we are ready to start designing "by hacking" i.e.
by fault finding as we go in chapter 10 Amplifier. I show each step
(input and output impedance) and each mistake I make and a
photograph of the rat's nest circuit so that you can build it
without using the schematic if you prefer. The final amplifier uses
bootstrap to get extra gain and we take advantage of the clipping
to use this as our guitar amplifier (it is the one shown on the
cover of the book). The bootstraping ties in with a description of
the gyrator (as described to me by Dick Parmee) and finally ties in
with the Sallen-key filters in chapter 17. But before we do
Filters, we learn about Negative feedback and common mode and
current source so that we can design the classic amplier of chapter
16 and here the output impedance goes down to nearly zero, as we
predicted because of the negative feedback. In other words, this
book is about input and output impendance (Ohm's Law) with a touch
of Fourier Analysis and for the last chapter, a Hint of DSP. But
most of all, it is a Story.
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