“[T]here is still no outright 'winner' in the High-speed Transport Game. Yet Japan Air Lines, Japanese National Railways, Transrapid (in West Germany) and British Rail all made advances in... versions of Maglev and linear motor propulsion in the mid 1970s. ...[E]xciting activities in university departments continued into the 1980s and a great deal of this was an extension of the topological developments of the 1960s. Surely the point of no return was passed..? There could not have been a continuing stream of wrong answers from... research departments... as was forecast by the prophets of doom of the late 1960s.”
“I'm like a child who's been brought up inside an institution and has never seen the outside world, the sea, or trees in a wood... Coming here was like being taken out of that box and put into the marv...”
Eric Laithwaite
“A plain steel rod does remarkably well because steel... is a conductor of electricity, as well as of magnetism. This tubular motor is not the most efficient of linear induction machines. ...This amazi...”
Eric Laithwaite
“There are all kinds of people thinking about all kinds of things all of the time. That sentence sums up what I would describe as the ultimate deterrent to oppose the urge to invent. It is the feeling ...”
Eric Laithwaite
“Isaac Newton was right when he declared "If I can see further than others it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants." And you start counting up Newton's giants... Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Ar...”
Eric Laithwaite
“I make most of my inventions when I'm talking to other people. ...I drag them from their interest into mine, and then they thank me when they leave, and I feel as if I should pay them a fee, because I...”
Eric Laithwaite