Early tractors were to power belts also, not pull or plow. My 36 John Deere
has a external clutch set up to handle a belt. Ken may remember a party when
we started old Gurdy up by belting to another tractor. ctb
----- Original Message -----
From: "Donald B. White" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, March 04, 2003 4:57 PM
Subject: Belts and pulleys


> Message text written by Bruce Marcham
> >I would
> think that the losses and maintenance associated with spinning all those
> long shafts and belts had to be pretty high.<
>
> Also dangerous--I have read of workmen being killed by a belt or shaft
that
> broke loose.
>
> When I was in 7th-8th grade in Thomaston (Maine) Grammar School, at the
> home of one of my friends was the remains (in the "barn" which there means
> anything bigger than a toolshed) of his grandfather's woodworking shop.
> Most of the machinery was gone but the overhead shaftwork remained in
> place. Apparently the motive power (at least in the shop's final form) was
> a big electric motor. Interesting to consider the change in thinking it
> would take to go from one power source for everything, to individual power
> sources. The actual power source might vary--water, steam engine, gas
> engine, electric motor--but there is a conceptual difference in having
each
> device independently powered. Much the same thing happened with computers,
> which were once so large and expensive that the idea was to have one
> computer doing a lot of jobs, maybe even for a lot of locations at once.
My
> first contact with computers was a terminal at my high school in Maryland
> 1968 (then considered a very modern innovation for a high school to have),
> connecting to a mainframe in North Carolina. Through the 70s, the
> predictions were that we would have such terminals in our homes, or maybe
a
> big computer lurking like a furnace in the basement of the house, which we
> would tap into for all sorts of uses. As with the power sources for
machine
> tools, the change to having lots of small computers doing individual jobs
> was brought about by their decreasing cost and power to size ratio. The
> laptop computer on which I write this has more computing power than the
> most powerful mainframe computer did in 1968, and tiny computers are
> everywhere, it seems in every electronic device.
>
> Incidentally, the earliest internal combustion engines were designed to
> take the place of small steam engines in those stationary applications
such
> as powering machine shops, and the shaft-and-belt systems were the source
> of the earliest forms of clutches, transmissions and other devices adapted
> into the drive trains of the earliest internal-combustion-powered
> automobiles (steam or electric cars do not need clutches or
transmissions).
>
>
>         ----Sign me, Inside the Beltway
>
> --
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