During the industrial revolution it is said that Newcomen and Watt designed a series of beam engines, giant installations breathing and hissing with steam, rocking to and fro like a sleeping dragon, as labourers stoked the flames and tended to their insatiable need for coal. Complex linkages moved in a hypnotising dance, ensuring the alignment of rising and falling shafts and generating rotary motion.
This dynamic power of rotation was communicated using great belts strung between enormous pulleys into the nearby workhouse where huge steel machine looms shuttled cotton fibers back and forth in a deafening roar of noise to weave their colorful textiles.
Becoming awed by such things kindled a childhood obsession.
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