Vortex Watt : tools & tool makers
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navigation, contact, access: click ►▼, link & ••• — July 22, 2024
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for legibility, links may be shown as ••• (three dots are always a link to something)
written with OmniOutliner ••• for Mac.
click on arrows to show and hide rows.
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command-shift-click on any disclosure arrow: ►▼ shows or hides all rows (top-level is not hidden).
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complete search of a page requires that all rows be made visible first.
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how to contact us
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Leif Smith
303-778-0880
Explorers Foundation, Inc.
PO Box 9100
Denver, CO 80209
USA
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leifsmith@gmail.com — Important: If we are not already in email communication, please put “*****” at the beginning of the Subject: line of your email. This will assure that we don’t miss the first email you send to us.
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Explorers Foundation ••• home page
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efBegin ••• top level for all outlines
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Vortices ••• list of all vortices
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Threads ••• traces of conversations
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Glyphs ••• list of fragments of Freeorder
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Investments ••• a table of all investments
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freeorder ••• the concept & vision
 
explorersfoundation.org/watt.html — a vortex is a region of Explorers Foundation research and investment — 🔹 indicates new or most recently changed
 
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Log
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22Jul24: Anton Howes: The Age of Invention
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31Jan24: Twigital
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08Apr23: Three websites on innovation: Engines; Heroes; Business
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08Mar23: Swirlds … also: George Westinghouse
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14Mar21: Leemon Baird, Hedera Hashgraph
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30Oct20: Improved the Hopkin Thomas project section
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08Dec19: Space industry review by Greason & Bennett
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24Nov19: 1) NanoDust; 2) American Business History Center
 
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James Watt — biographies by Samuel Smiles, and Andrew Carnegie
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James Watt, by Andrew Carnegie ••• [Gutenberg] tells us as much about the character of Andrew Carnegie as about James Watt.
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University of Rochester once had a Steam Engine Library but it now seems to have vanished.
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Lives of Boulton and Watt, by Samuel Smiles (1812-1904). Principally from the original Soho mss. Comprising also a history of the invention and introduction of the steam engine •••
 
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Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation: A history of the extraordinary society that has touched all aspects of British life ••• [amazon] by Anton Howes
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“From its beginnings in a coffee house in the mid-eighteenth century, the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce has tried to improve British life in every way imaginable. It has sought to influence how Britons work, how they are educated, the music they listen to, the food they eat, the items in their homes, and even how they remember their own history. Arts and Minds is the remarkable story of an institution unlike any other—a society for the improvement of everything and anything.” —from the Amazon page
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The Age of Invention, a newsletter “on the causes of the British Industrial Revolution and the history of innovation ••• [substack] by Anton Howes. The history of salt ••• [July 2024]
 
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Twigital ••• Objects. Digitized. Tokenized.
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“Twigital™ (twin-digital) is a novel application that creates tokenized digital twins. These assets come in the form of 3D objects and will become the building blocks utilized to populate spatial computing environments. Twigital is thrilled to offer the first solution that facilitates the creation of such file types. We view Twigital as a core utility, an integral piece of Web3 enabled infrastructure that will help fuel the tokenized economy. The world will be tokenized, it's time to start tokenizing the world.”
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Available on the IOS (Apple) App Store only. Built with Hedera •••
 
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Peter Beck, Rocket Labs, interview ••• [thanks to James C. Bennett]
 
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Stories of innovation
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Engines of Our Ingenuity •••
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Hero Show •••
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American Business History Center •••
 
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George Westinghouse: Powering the World ••• [goodreads] by William R. Huber, foreword by Gary Hoover, American Business History Center •••
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“George Westinghouse: Servant Leader, Inventor, Captain of Industry” ••• by Gary Hoover | Feb 27, 201
Westinghouse-and-generator
 
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Swirlds ••• “building the trust layer of the internet” … “create a fair and trusted cloud without servers.”
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“Swirlds is a software platform designed to build fully-distributed applications that harness the power of the cloud without servers. Now you can develop applications with fairness in decision making, speed, trust and reliability, at a fraction of the cost of traditional server-based platforms.
“A tech report is available, which is a white paper describing the hashgraph, the consensus algorithm, and the mathematical proofs of Byzantine fault tolerance. A second tech report goes through examples illustrating each step of the consensus algorithm.”
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Leemon Baird, Hashgraph, a digital innovation based on gossip protocol, may become important in the evolving crypto world, especially for tokenized real world assets.
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Leemon Baird’s company, Hedera Hashgraph •••
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What is Asset Tokenization? ••• [Hedera website]
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What is Hashgraph Consensus? ••• [Hedera website]
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YouTube hosts talks by Leemon Baird. Search on “leemon+baird+hashgraph”
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Dr. Leemon Baird's talk: “Tokenization with Distributed Ledger Technologies"
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Originally delivered at Kennesaw State University. I cannot find a good link for this lecture, so it has been copied into our archive. It’s a 500 MB download, but the presentation starts almost immediately. -ls
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Thanks to Dr. Solomon Negash ••• Kennesaw State University.
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http://explorersfoundation.org/archive/baird-leemon-tokenizaion-17mar2020.mp4
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“The Swirlds Hashgraph Consensus Algorithm: Fair, Fast, Byzantine Fault Tolerance” [see “Abstract”] Leemon Baird ••• May 31, 2016, Swirlds Tech Report Swirlds-Tr-2016-01
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“Abstract. A new system, the Swirlds hashgraph consensus algorithm, is pro- posed for replicated state machines with guaranteed Byzantine fault tolerance. It achieves fairness, in the sense that it is dicult for an attacker to manip- ulate which of two transactions will be chosen to be first in the consensus order. It has complete asynchrony, no leaders, no round robin, no proof-of- work, eventual consensus with probability one, and high speed in the absence of faults. It is based on a gossip protocol, in which the participants don’t just gossip about transactions. They gossip about gossip. They jointly build a hashgraph reflecting all of the gossip events. This allows Byzantine agreement to be achieved through virtual voting. Alice does not send Bob a vote over the Internet. Instead, Bob calculates what vote Alice would have sent, based on his knowledge of what Alice knows. This yields fair Byzantine agreement on a total order for all transactions, with very little communication overhead beyond the transactions themselves.”
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vMulligan
 
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“The Economics of Space: An Industry Ready to Launch: Here are cooperative ways for government agencies and the private sector to promote widespread commercialization of space transportation and accelerate the pace of exploration and economic development of space” ••• by Jeff Greason ••• and James C. Bennett •••, June 5, 2019
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“The Economics of Space: An Industry Ready to Launch” - The full study ••• the basis for the above article.
 
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The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention ••• by William Rosen •••
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Mike Lotus comments: Very Anglospheric. Describes the various elements, including law and culture and philosophy as well as science and technology, which led, specifically in England, to the appearance of steam power and what we call the Exit. Good use of comparative method comparing England to France and Germany though he could have done more. Cites to Mokyr. Fully consistent with Alan Macfarlane’s analysis. Written in a breezy style, but substantive.
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Mike Lotus is co-author of America 3.0 •••
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vAnglosphere vArcher
 
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Dan Larimer on the philosophy and design of EOS, a platform on Blockchain for decentralized apps: “EOS as explained by Dan Larimer” •••
 
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The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge ••• by David McCullough — “The dramatic and enthralling story of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, the world’s longest suspension bridge at the time, a tale of greed, corruption, and obstruction but also of optimism, heroism, and determination, told by master historian David McCullough •••” — Quotation at opening of book: “It so happens that the work which is likely to be our most durable monument, and to convey some knowledge of us to the most remote posterity, is a work of bare utility; not a shrine, not a fortress, not a palace, but a bridge.” —Montgomery Schuyler in Harper’s Weekly, May 24, 1883 ~thanks to the Marcy Ayanian
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“Emily Roebling Saves the Brooklyn Bridge” ••• (1-hour) – American history author David McCullough shines a light on Emily Roebling, the true driving force behind the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge.
 
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Captain William R. Jones (1839-1889), legendary steel maker, Pennsylvania.
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The Romance of Steel,  a book authored by R. Hasson documents the development of the steel industry in America in the nineteenth century. Jones’ accomplishments are covered in detail in a segment available here.
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Billy Jones & Hopkin Thomas: “When at the age of only ten, he was apprenticed to the Crane Iron company, of Catasauqua, Pa., in the foundry department, and later was placed in the machine-shop of that company, then under the supervision of Mr. Hopkin Thomas, whom Capt. Jones considers one of the brightest mechanics of his day. Hopkin Thomas was noted for his development of youthful minds, and it was his boast that he never produced a bad mechanic, and in the later years of his life, pointed with pride to the men who occupied leading positions in the mechanical and metallurgical world, who were formerly apprentices under his direction.” —History of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, A. Warner & Co., Chicago, Ill., 1889, pp 284 - 285
 
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The Hopkin Thomas Project ••• written and compiled by John B. McVey
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“The Hopkin Thomas Project has been on-going since 1995. It is a historical research project concerning the activities of a Welsh engineer who emigrated to America in 1834 bringing with him technical knowledge which was instrumental in the development of anthracite-fueled steam locomotives used by the Beaver Meadow and other railroads in the eastern Pennsylvania coal fields. He witnessed the utilization of his expertise related to the iron and coal industries at the Crane Iron Co., Catasauqua, Pa. in the 1850-1870 time period; he trained a cadre of followers who went on to succeed as leaders in the iron and steel industries in the late nineteenth century. He is the patriarch of seven generations of engineers and industrialists who can trace their roots to the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania.” -J.B. McVey
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Table of Contents ••• for the Hopkins Thomas Project
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Coal, Fire, Iron, & Steam - The Development of the Steam Engine •••
 
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The Wild Wheel •••, by Garet Garrett •••, perhaps the most interesting biography of Henry Ford.
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Henry Petroski — great books about engineers and engineering
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Masters of Mass Production, by Christie Borth, 1945: How war goods for WWII were produced. -Mike Lotus
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Sir Henry Bessemer (1813-1898) - inventor of the pneumatic process for the manufacture of steel •••
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The American Business History Center •••
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Gary Hoover has created a personal library of 50,000 volumes devoted to business. His website reflects his interest in adventurers, entrepreneurs, and stories of imaginative and great enterprises. Gary’s library is now the heart of a new (2019) venture, The American Business History Center •••. See also Hoover's World •••
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Dirk J. Struik (1894 - 2000) - author of Yankee Science in the Making — glyph •••
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Maker Spaces : TinkerMill, Longmont, Colorado. -Steve Elliott, Scott Converse
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TinkerMill, The Longmont, Colorado maker space
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A Dynamic Map of World Trade and Shipping •••, showing movement of every commercial cargo ship for a year. Like the first photo of the earth from space this is consciousness altering.
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"A Strategist’s Guide to Digital Fabrication" ••• — "Rapid advances in manufacturing technology point the way toward a decentralized, more customer-centric “maker” culture. Here are the changes to consider before this innovation takes hold." Published by Strategy+Business ••• in 2011, but still a good overview.
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"Notice that this covers not just 3-D printing but also small computer-run conventional fab techniques. Where's the economic advantage of having somebody push the button in China and shipping the product to the USA, as opposed to having somebody (e.g., the customer) push the button in the USA.  It's like having your xeroxing done in China. People are not yet thinking through the implications of this." —James C. Bennett, (see vortex Anglosphere), 3 Sep 11
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Ancient Technology: patreon.com/clickspring
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Glyphs
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510 Sir Henry Bessemer (1813-1898) - inventor of the pneumatic process for the manufacture of steel
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509 Steam Power — Destroyer of Jobs - effect of introduction of steam powered steel nail making machines
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125 Dirk J. Struik (1894 - 2000) - author of Yankee Science in the Making
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508 Makers — The Next Generation - a cartoon Ayn Rand would like
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472 Learning with Fingers & Eyes - Walter P. Chrysler — for some, learning is not best done by reading
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023 James Watt, by Andrew Carnegie — published 1905
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470 Hoover's World, Enterprise & Entrepreneurship — a resource for explorers
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464 Henry Ford & Thomas Edison: Differences of Mind — observed by Garet Garrett •••
.oOo.