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Employee holds plate closed. Discovered by Christina Paik of Dr. Terry Harpold’s University of Florida course Paratexts.
From the back matter of A Description of the Mermaid, Now Offered to the Inspection of the Public, which was Found on Board a Native Vessel in the Archipelago of the Malaccas, and Carried to Batavia in a Dutch Ship (date unknown). Original from Oxford University. Digitized May 18, 2009.
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Most people know Nikola Tesla, the eccentric and brilliant man who arrived in New York City in 1884, as the father of alternating current, the form of electricity that supplies power to almost all homes and businesses. But Tesla was a prodigious inventor who applied his genius to a wide range of practical problems. All told, he held 272 patents in 25 countries, with 112 patents in the United States alone. You might think that, of all this work, Tesla would have held his inventions in electrical engineering — those that described a complete system of generators, transformers, transmission lines, motor and lighting — dearest to his heart. But in 1913, Tesla received a patent for what he described as his most important invention. That invention was a turbine, known today as the Tesla turbine, the boundary layer turbine or the flat-disk turbine.
Interestingly, using the word “turbine” to describe Tesla’s invention seems a bit misleading. That’s because most people think of a turbine as a shaft with blades — like fan blades — attached to it. In fact, Webster’s dictionary defines a turbine as an engine turned by the force of gas or water on fan blades. But the Tesla turbine doesn’t have any blades. It has a series of closely packed parallel disks attached to a shaft and arranged within a sealed chamber. When a fluid is allowed to enter the chamber and pass between the disks, the disks turn, which in turn rotates the shaft. This rotary motion can be used in a variety of ways, from powering pumps, blowers and compressors to running cars and airplanes. In fact, Tesla claimed that the turbine was the most efficient and the most simply designed rotary engine ever designed.
If this is true, why hasn’t the Tesla turbine enjoyed more widespread use? Why hasn’t it become as ubiquitous as Tesla’s other masterpiece, AC power transmission? These are important questions, but they’re secondary to more fundamental questions, such as how does the Tesla turbine work and what makes the technology so innovative? We’ll answer all of these questions on the next few pages. But first, we need to review some basics about the different types of engines developed over the years.
it said tesla. i got excited. i do not regret my actions.
Posted on November 1, 2012 via HowStuffWorks.com with 509 notes
Source: howstuffworks
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Plate left folded.
From p. 108 (?) of An Introduction to the True Astronomy: or, Astronomical Lectures, Read in the Astronomical School of the University of Oxford by John Keill (1739). Original from Ghent University. Digitized January 22, 2008.
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Plate left folded.
From A Treatise on the Ananas or Pine-apple by Adam Taylor (1769). Original from Oxford University. Digitized May 15, 2006.
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Moiré in color spectrum charts.
From The Theory of Color and Its Relation to Art and Art-Industry by Wilhelm von Bezold (1876). Original from Harvard University. Digitized April 15, 2008.
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Foreshortening of the body when a plate is left folded; fracturing the body with the page gutter.
From A System of Anatomy for the Use of Students of Medicine, v.1, by Caspar Wistar (1835). Original from Harvard University. Digitized November 27, 2007.
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Neon moiré.
Throughout “The Miami Aquarium and Biological Laboratory”, reprinted by National Geographic Magazine (1921). Does not include metadata indicating library of origination or date of digitization (but does include Stanford University library artifacts).
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Plates left folded through digitization.
Throughout Nature Displayed in the Heavens and On the Earth by Simeon Shaw (1823). Original from Oxford University. Digitized July 11, 2008.
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Image transferred from uncovered opposite plate.
From p. 289 of Nature Displayed in the Heavens and On the Earth by Simeon Shaw (1823). Original from Oxford University. Digitized July 11, 2008.
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Turning page.
From p. 124 (?) of The Diseases of Women with Child by François Mauriceau and Hugh Chamberlen (1727). Original from the Bavarian State Library. Digitized November 19, 2009.
