Re: Sic transit

[brian whatcott <inet@INTELLISYS.NET>]

I see your google search produced what may be the most comprehensive
list of pendulum texts anywhere, at UMaryland's web site in Section G.
(repeated below)

Wilburforce for Wilberforce is an especially American slip.
Since the American quaker of that name at the time of Independence
 onwards at least, Wilbur has been a not uncommon American name.
It is as far as I can tell from a review of a surname dictionary,
 almost unknown in England, where 'Wilberforce' springs from a placename.

I was surprised to see a reference to a Penguin book by Norman Feather,
"Vibration & Waves". I understood that by one of those restrictive
trade covenants, the uniform editions of science paperbacks published
 at basement prices in the English market under the Penguin imprimator
 were excluded from the American market - where prices in the latter
part of the 20th C., were much higher (a difference that may have
subsided in that now higher priced European venue.)

It happened I have a copy in arms' reach, and I see Feather details
various pendula there: Blackburn's p. (a string and bob suspended on
a horizontal string - providing two orthogonal pendulous periods).

In the English manner, we hear he was in undergrad school with Kelvin,
and later became Prof of Physics at Glasgow for thirty years.

Barton tied on a second string and bob to this arrangement and
explored the considerable properties of coupled oscillators during
three years of his tenure as Prof of Physics at Nottingham.

Feather describes the two inertia bars suspended one from a ceiling
 wire, the next by a wire from the first bar, and held down to the
 floor by a third wire.

 This was thecoupled oscillator, originated by Searle who
demonstrated at the Cambridge lab originally set in place by
 Maxwell and named for Cavendish for most of fifty five years.

 It turns out that the Wilberforce in question taught at the
Cavendish with Searle, before moving to profess physics at
Liverpool in the first 35 years of the new century.

 After this procession of English teachers, Feather rescues us
from that chauvinism with mention of Binet and St-Venant who
brought academic rigor to Hooke's early spring observations.

As you can see, I was delighted you provided the key to an
accessible text.

Thanks
Brian






At 11:54 10/22/00 -0700, you wrote:
> <http://www.google.com/>
>
> search words: wilberforce pendulum
>
> #21   (the third try) yielded:
>
> <http://www.physics.umd.edu/deptinfo/facilities/lecdem/refs/refsg.htm>

> Note: The name "Wilberforce" is sometimes mis-spelled as "Wilburforce."
///
> Press (1990).
> Norman Feather, Vibrations and Waves, pp. 59-67, Penguin Books (1964).

> L. R. Wilberforce, On the Vibrations of a Loaded Spiral Spring, The Fifth
> Series, Philosophical Magazine Vol. 38, 386-392, (1894).
>
> bc

//
> > Was this an on line library cat search?


brian whatcott <inet@intellisys.net>  Altus OK
                Eureka!