In this insightful and incisive essay, Eugene Ferguson demonstrates that good engineering is as much a matter of intuition and nonverbal thinking as of equations and computation. He argues that a system of engineering education that ignores nonverbal thinking will produce engineers who are dangerously ignorant of the many ways in which the real world differs from the mathematical models constructed in academic minds.

This classic work explores the kinematics of machinery, chronicling the discovery and application of principles underlying the controlled movements within machines. Franz Reuleaux, the Father of Kinematics, writes with authority and precision about his original and incisive ideas, which have endured for more than a century.
Developing the subject from its fundamentals, Reuleaux begins with a discussion of the nature of the machine problem. He advances to examinations of such topics as phoronomic propositions, pairs of elements, incomplete kinematic chains and notation, analysis of...