Monorails and Robotics
Many years ago, I was working on a gruelling project. I walked past Bernie Victor's place in Pentonville Road every day, and I promised myself that, if I escaped unscathed, I'd buy the red LGB tram in the window. Since I wasn't Bernie's only customer, he sold it before I finished the project. Later, I saw the Lego® monorail system, the one in grey, I was working similarly stupid hours and again I promised myself the set if I finished the project – you could buy points (or, in American, switches) for it and I expected to have lots of fun with it. Naturally, the project was extended by nine months and Lego® withdrew it before I completed.
I first saw the brochures for Mindstorms® in Maplin, buying parts for yet another project that was about to over-run. Since it hadn't yet hit the shops, I figured that I had a few months. This time, the Hobby Gods were with me. The "mission" MM03 – Aerial Tram, hit their web-site just as we went into final system test. Being a long-term fan of railways in general and monorails in particular, my buying it was now a foregone conclusion and, thanks to the nice people in the local Electronics Boutique, I got a copy at the original price, before the sudden hike here in the UK.
Before I got the set, about once a month or so I'd start some modelling project or other. On the bookshelves are a number of model locomotives of various types and sizes, There are a set of moulds for models of stone railway tracks. The display case contains a number of flat wagons made from small strips of wood. Sue is always half-joking that the house is full of long pieces of wood which I cut up and make into short pieces of thicker wood. Mindstorms® has at least alleviated the problem, although there are now the two long pieces of pine along which I run Ria, so it hasn't made too much real difference.
I've always been fascinated by monorails. For me, they're not just a transport system, they're something special. I got a model one for about my eighth birthday: it was modelled on an Alweg, somewhat like the Ria project. All it did was go round in a circle: I spent ages trying to work out if I could make it do more. But it's possible that what really hooked me was this passage, from Arthur C Clarke's "Earthlight" (I have the 1971 copy, it was first published a couple of years before I was born):
"The monorail had now reached the apex of its trajectory through the mountains. Both travellers fell silent as the peaks on either side reared to their climax, then began to shrink astern. They had burst through the barrier and were dropping down through the much steeper slopes overlooking the Mare Imbrium. As they descended, so the sun, which their speed had conjured back from night, shrank from a bow to a thread, from a thread to a single point of fire, and winked out of existence. In the last instant of that false sunset, seconds before they sank again into the shadow of the moon, there was a moment of magic that Sadler would never forget. They were moving along a ridge that the sun had already left, but the track of the monorail, scarcely a metre above it, still caught the last rays. It seemed as if they were rushing along an usupported ribbon of light, a filament of flame built by sorcery rather than human engineering. Then final darkness fell and the magic ended."
...and, as with Sadler, that magic moment has stayed with me for the rest of my life: if Clarke's "Glide Path" was instrumental in my choice of career, then so has been "Earthlight" in my choice of hobbies. Thanks, Arthur.
For the main, though, Mindstorms® and Handy Cricket are ways for frustrated Engineers like me to butcher stuff the way we used to. I don't need to disguise a whole load of bent bits from the boss, but equally I don't need to worry about client relationship management, budget over-runs or year-end appraisals.