[.ca] Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements: Embracing ... (ISBN 1879335638)

A relic of another age...:
The full title of this book is _Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements, Embracing All Those Which Are Most Important In Dynamics, Hydraulics, Hydrostatics, Pneumatics, Steam Engines, Mill and other Gearing, Presses, Horology, and Miscellaneous Machinery: and including Many Movements Never Before Published and Several Which Have only Recently Come into Use. At least that was the full title of the seventeenth edition of 1893; the book itself dates back to 1868. This book is a joy to browse though. It is a little gold mine of ideas for the mechanical designer. Yet, anyone with mechanical aptitude should enjoy it. The many crisp line drawings are presented with a minimum of explanation and no dimensioning. You see, it was assumed back in those days that a person with natural mechanical aptitude could look at a diagram, or a machine, and figure it out. Not only that, but it was assumed that once you had the idea, then you could work out all the details for yourself without having to be told everything down to the last screw size. While there is a descriptive paragraph indexed to every drawing, most of the time you don't really need it. This book comes from an age when engineers and designers had to have the talent and the knowledge to use the mechanical principles of levers, linkages, cams, gears, etc. to produce a given motion- and to link together many such elegant little mechanisms to get a bigger job done- reliably. This isn't done much anymore. Now most machines are huge, cobbled-up, Rube Goldberg devices of pneumatic or hydraulic cylinders, screw actuators, or servo motors- all interconnected by electronic controllers. The whole thing is controlled by software of even more dubious reliability. Up to the "digital revolution", this book shows how it was always done- it's how I learned it. Of course, once upon a time, a mechanical designer actually had to understand machinery, and the basic principles of physics, and not just how to write code....

Interesting to read, well "look at", but poor...:
This book is interesting, but IMHO, it has too many similar mechanical ideas/pictures and the picure quality is poor. I understand those picture/diagrams are very old, and the printing itself is not the problem, but still, they could resize the diagram little bigger.

Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements:
Excellent soruce of lots of mechanical ideas. Even though they are from the 1800's, this a wealth of info for engineers and tinkers like me. This helps to understand and lay out simple and complex levers, gearing, and control mechanisms that would be difficult to find anywhere else. A most valuable tool for any engineering/design/shop library!

Don't waste your money:
This book, actually just a collection of poor small line drawings and brief descriptions, is hardly worth anything. Impressive title though...