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Engineering Patents & Inventions books:
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Top Reddit reviews mentioning Engineering Patents & Inventions books:
Read Longitude by Dava Sobel for an excellent history of the development of an accurate clock that could be used at sea. It's truly fascinating both from the engineering perspective as well as the personalities involved. And it clarifies that, prior to this development, navigation at sea (at least in terms of longitude position) could best be characterized as a wild ass guess.
Edit: somehow wrote LATitude when I meant LONGitude! Duh!
Yep, kids on the way; had to sell his home and move in on the couch of another silicone valley investor to finish the first rocket launch that landed his first contracts. Said he was days away from being negative. This is an amazing read <EDIT harmless joke out> https://www.amazon.com/Elon-Musk-SpaceX-Fantastic-Future/dp/006230125X
False. Read up on Elon. He may not be bending the metal to build the rockets, or assembling the batteries that go into Teslas (what CEO does?), but he knows a great deal about the engineering behind all their products.
If you haven't already, I highly recommend you read this.
Jobs, OTOH, had no background in computer science or engineering and never claimed to. His thing was design, which he (obviously) did really well.
> Easy job for her.
Just finished https://www.amazon.com/Liftoff-Desperate-Early-Launched-SpaceX/dp/0062979973
Holy shit, NOT an easy job for the first decade+!
Strongly recommend that book by the way. It reads almost like a techno thriller.
Love these guys. Downloaded.
PS Eric Berger also wrote a book about the early days of SpaceX called Liftoff. I'm in the middle of it and very interesting.
Yeah, Su's not just reading off a script. Her English has come really far; she's at the point of having enough vocabulary to feel like she can express what she wants to express once she picks the right words out of her dictionary. So she still has to do a translation of concepts into a smaller set of words (sort of like the book Thing Explainer) but she's got the confidence to do so.
>He was in the right place at the right time
Incorrect, read the book on him written by Ashlee Vance and you will understand that it was not just so.
My overall view is that he's an increadible, but deeply flawed, person.
He's simultaneously transforming the transportation, space exploration, and energy sectors all at once. He's already accomplished multiple things in aeronautics and transportation areas that nobody else had done before. I honestly think he's possibly the most important person alive, and we're really lucky to have him.
But... he's probably a narcissist, and at least appears to be an asshole.
Like many people who are increadible workers, he demands incredible amounts from the people around him. Often enough that he hurts them. If you read his biography it's replete with stories of Elon hurting people close to him because he doesn't seem to understand how they see the world. His ex-wife, Justine, wrote a really sad article about their divorce back in 2010. This doesn't excuse anything, but his biography strongly suggests he was abused as a child by his father.
He seems to share a lot of traits, both positive and negative, with some of the most successful people in history. It's possible to be that driven that something inside of you needs to be broken, or that you demand so much of yourself that you despise mediocrity in others.
It's outlined in his biography (which is a good read on the details of all these events).
The job was really dangerous and required working in a boiler room and insane temperatures and squeezing between small spaces.
You should read The Perfectionists it's all about the history of precision measurement, telling stories centered around the 'leaps' (now able to measure to .1", now able to... etc.) and how it impacted the world.
There's quite a few details you're missing. There's also nuance with mergers and acquisitions. They're not the same.
I read this book a few years back, which was really interesting.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KVI76ZS/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_glt_9FFT0N90169W1V3VGEKK
All the cofounders put a lot of work into getting it off the ground - that includes musk.
It's not like PayPal was a successful business before the merger.
Check out a book called “The Perfectionists”. It’s about the history of precision tools and things. Really interesting something we take for granted these days Link:
https://www.amazon.com/Perfectionists-Precision-Engineers-Created-Modern/dp/0062652559
Mr. Crabwaffleman, this isn't a stupid question at all. The concept/science of precision is an interesting subject worthy of a thorough answer.
I highly recommend reading/listening to: The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World
There’s a really great book by Simon Winchester about basically this topic. Based on asking this question you’d probably enjoy the book a lot.
https://www.amazon.com/Perfectionists-Precision-Engineers-Created-Modern/dp/0062652559
A Galileoscope and books. I currently like Thing Explainer, which seems really good for that age. Any space book will do though.
Update with Amazon link to book
For anyone interested in the technical history of how we got here, The Idea Factory (Amazon Smile link) is a really fascinating read. It details the major players within Bell Labs (the research division, not business or development) from the 30s up until the 90s/today. While I'm sure the antitrust suit was beneficial for the average person, by the end of the book I was really rooting for Bell Labs to keep the guaranteed funding ensured by the monopoly.
The people who worked in this lab were responsible for the vacuum tube, transistor, solar panel, laser, satellites, cellular phones... the research for all of those breakthroughs was done in a single lab, funded by the monopoly. A huge part of why the modern world as we know it today exists is because of the monopoly that was dismantled in the 80s.
November 24. A few people seem to have early copies though.
Read Lift Off by Eric Berger and hear the answer coming from SpaceX employees themselves. That book helped me a lot to understand what makes SpaceX an outlier. Spoilers: it's hard to exclude the upper management..
https://www.amazon.com/Liftoff-Desperate-Early-Launched-SpaceX/dp/0062979973
His own biography
“While Musk had exceled as a self-taught coder, his skills weren’t nearly as polished as those of the new hires. They took one look at Zip2’s code and began rewriting the vast majority of the software. Musk bristled at some of their changes, but the computer scientists needed just a fraction of the lines of code that Musk used to get their jobs done. They had a knack for dividing software projects into chunks that could be altered and refined whereas Musk fell into the classic self-taught coder trap of writing what developers call hairballs—big, monolithic hunks of code that could go berserk for mysterious reasons.”
From his own biography.
“”While Musk had exceled as a self-taught coder, his skills weren’t nearly as polished as those of the new hires. They took one look at Zip2’s code and began rewriting the vast majority of the software. Musk bristled at some of their changes, but the computer scientists needed just a fraction of the lines of code that Musk used to get their jobs done. They had a knack for dividing software projects into chunks that could be altered and refined whereas Musk fell into the classic self-taught coder trap of writing what developers call hairballs—big, monolithic hunks of code that could go berserk for mysterious reasons.””
Read Liftoff by Eric Berger. It's the story of the first few years of SpaceX from the point of view of the early SpaceX employees.
https://www.amazon.com/Liftoff-Desperate-Early-Launched-SpaceX/dp/0062979973/
Spoiler: Elon Musk was the main project manager (akin to Von Braun's role) and Tom Mueller the propulsion engineer who designed the engine. If you follow Tom Mueller on Twitter, you'll find him often refuting people saying "Musk was not the mind behind it " like you do.
A bachelor in Physics is enough to say he can read engineering textbooks and figure out what they mean without having to go back to study calculus or whatever.
I believe him that he left the PhD because he thought the opportunity to make money on the early internet was too good to miss. And he did make make building and selling zip2.
The people interviewed for Eric Berger's Liftoff (https://www.amazon.com/Liftoff-Desperate-Early-Launched-SpaceX/dp/0062979973) were pretty candid.
Tom Mueller, former head of propulsion at SpaceX, father of record setting Merlin and Raptor engines and possibly the best rocket engineering currently working in the world, thinks that people who say that Elon is not technical are hilariously wrong.
LOL. Wasn't thinking that but that analogy works here too!
It was in reference to Elon Musk being known notoriously to be a bad programmer. "Spaghetti code" in dev-speak means unstructured and difficult-to-maintain code.
From his biography:
>
While Musk had exceled as a self-taught coder, his skills weren’t nearly as polished as those of the new hires. They took one look at Zip2’s code and began rewriting the vast majority of the software. Musk bristled at some of their changes, but the computer scientists needed just a fraction of the lines of code that Musk used to get their jobs done. They had a knack for dividing software projects into chunks that could be altered and refined whereas Musk fell into the classic self-taught coder trap of writing what developers call hairballs—big, monolithic hunks of code that could go berserk for mysterious reasons.
​
Think of reading a text book or novel that has no paragraphs, chapters, subject titles, spacing, references, or punctuation. It'd be a giant block of solid text that's near impossible to read or find the typos in.
His father who owns a share of an emerald mine in Sough Africa, gave he and his brother $25k for their first company, Zip2, which they sold.
He left apartheid South Africa for Canada because he didn't want to participate in the mandatory service.
His biography has a good set of details on his early days.
If von Braun wasn't a major in the SS, lots of things would have been named after him. He is the person who contributed the most to rocketry. Elon Must has created a miracle of a company in SpaceX. It shattered the myth of "it will costs billions of dollars and you will fail anyway because only people who have worked with the people who worked with von Braun can build a rocket that works, if you try without receiving the wisdom of those who worked on Apollo you will fail". Turns out an organization with good leadership and only $100M can build a working small orbital launcher. Since Falcon 1 it has been done a bunch of times, so it wasn't a fluke. Now space has been democratized. But I think nothing will be named after Must, because he's a shit. I used to think he's just immature, but he's a real shit, and it's a pity. Eric Berger's "Liftoff" interviews a dozen people who were there in the early days and Musk really was deeply involved in all the technical details. He didn't lie when he said he's the chief engineer. But he's also an asshole.
Elon isn’t known to be good at efficient programming. From his own biography.
>While Musk had exceled as a self-taught coder, his skills weren’t nearly as polished as those of the new hires. They took one look at Zip2’s code and began rewriting the vast majority of the software. Musk bristled at some of their changes, but the computer scientists needed just a fraction of the lines of code that Musk used to get their jobs done. They had a knack for dividing software projects into chunks that could be altered and refined whereas Musk fell into the classic self-taught coder trap of writing what developers call hairballs—big, monolithic hunks of code that could go berserk for mysterious reasons.
Highly recommend this bio: https://www.amazon.com/Elon-Musk-SpaceX-Fantastic-Future/dp/006230125X?ref=d6k_applink_bb_dls&dplnkId=abf8a3e1-9d07-4541-bbf4-63c8425e19bd
It was written before alot of the recent craziness surrounding him and without his coordination so it's not just jerking him off. Goes really in depth into the inner workings and functionality of how he ran these companies simultaneously, how he leveraged them against each other, the level of competence needed to understand the technical and business sides of every technology. Goes into detail of the early stages of Tesla - yes he didn't start it from scratch, but it was BASICALLY from scratch - anything that you take from almost no valuation to multi billion is impressive...you don't have to be the original founder of something, it's just smart to start with some sort of bones rather than absolutely nothing... Also shows you how involved he is in the operations and the technical aspects of SpaceX - especially in the beginning as well. He's a physicist/programmer by trade who turned into a business mogul by necessity.
He's gone off the deep end a bit recently - but he's on another level than 99.999% of the population - so it's just funny when I hear normal folks try to talk about something they couldn't even begin to comprehend (myself included).
I do not consider myself an Elon fanboy by any stretch but to say he "didn't make the rockets" is actually completely false. Elon is the Chief Engineer at SpaceX and has a TON to do with the actual design and development of their technology. I read the book Liftoff which details his involvement from the beginnings and to say he just leans on his employees is flat out wrong in this case.
I'm highly recommending this book for you OP https://www.amazon.com/Rational-Optimist-Prosperity-Evolves-P-s/dp/0061452068