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Writing a technical paper sometimes requires digging deep in your files for that obscure reference you just know you kept a copy of somewhere. I’ve been collecting books, papers, and magazine clippings for 43 years and remembering where things are after that amount of time and multiple job changes and relocations can be frustrating.
Even more frustrating is finding the sought after clipping and discovering it lacks the information needed to reference it in a peer reviewed paper. Contacting living authors is one thing; getting out the Ouija Board to contact others seems like a long shot.
An unexpected pleasure of this process is finding things I didn’t know I had. Such as a wonderful book (Development of Gear Technology and Theory of Gearing, NASA Ref. Publication 1406) by Prof. Faydor L. Litvin that included short biographies on people he thought were important to the development of gears. There is some impressive mathematical development early in the work that probably accounts for my forgetting that it was in my computer files. Included on that list of luminaries was the author of a book I had open on my desk at that moment, Prof. Earle Buckingham.
I have been a frequent user of Prof. Buckingham’s three volume master work, Manual of Gear Design. If you deal with epicyclic or planetary drives you too probably have pages 126-136 of Section Two memorized. I never bothered to look at other chapters in the book until prompted by another reference. It was a real shock to find that the Professor had taken the time to work out an entire system of high contact ratio gears back in 1935! While I had no illusions that I was breaking new ground with my Fall Technical Meeting paper, knowing that one of the giants of gear engineering had worked on the topic makes me sharpen my outline a little bit.
Have any of you had a similar experience in researching a new topic only to find that some of the hard work has already been done?
Writing a technical paper sometimes requires digging deep in your files for that obscure reference you just know you kept a copy of somewhere. I’ve been collecting books, papers, and magazine clippings for 43 years and remembering where things are after that amount of time and multiple job changes and relocations can be frustrating.
Even more frustrating is finding the sought after clipping and discovering it lacks the information needed to reference it in a peer reviewed paper. Contacting living authors is one thing; getting out the Ouija Board to contact others seems like a long shot.
An unexpected pleasure of this process is finding things I didn’t know I had. Such as a wonderful book (Development of Gear Technology and Theory of Gearing, NASA Ref. Publication 1406) by Prof. Faydor L. Litvin that included short biographies on people he thought were important to the development of gears. There is some impressive mathematical development early in the work that probably accounts for my forgetting that it was in my computer files. Included on that list of luminaries was the author of a book I had open on my desk at that moment, Prof. Earle Buckingham.
I have been a frequent user of Prof. Buckingham’s three volume master work, Manual of Gear Design. If you deal with epicyclic or planetary drives you too probably have pages 126-136 of Section Two memorized. I never bothered to look at other chapters in the book until prompted by another reference. It was a real shock to find that the Professor had taken the time to work out an entire system of high contact ratio gears back in 1935! While I had no illusions that I was breaking new ground with my Fall Technical Meeting paper, knowing that one of the giants of gear engineering had worked on the topic makes me sharpen my outline a little bit.
Have any of you had a similar experience in researching a new topic only to find that some of the hard work has already been done?
