I am now retired after 46 years in engineering and have allowed myself to stray from technical and business writing to less formal forms of expression. I hope PE readers might forgive my nostalgic reminiscence and enjoy my poem remembering my early days, in 1965, studying for HNC. It recalls a lecturer typical of the old school from whom I learned so much. The characters are fictitious, not intended to represent real people.
Springtime
Gentlemen, you’ve studied Statics and nearly understood that.
The syllabus demands that you now study Dynamics.
This’ll almost certainly be beyond you.
But that doesn’t mean you will not pass the exam.
If you practice the proof you will be able
to answer. Understanding will not be necessary.
We will start from first principles. We would start
with something more basic but that doesn’t exist.
The simplest of all dynamic systems is a vibrating spring.
In Statics you derived (actually I derived) an expression
for the deflection of a coil spring. You will now need to know
about Simple Harmonic Motion, SHM.
Not S and M, Wilkes. The first thing you will discover
about SHM is that it is not simple, for you, Wilkes.
If you had complex numbers under your belt,
the mathematics would be easier but the Maths
Department does not feel ready
to bring complex numbers to you until next year.
So you will have to trust me when I give you the form
of the solution to the equations we (I) will derive
from first principles, if I may have your attention?
I can only be grateful we don’t have women
in engineering, Wilkes; I see you are distracted enough
by the log scale on your slide rule.
Using free body diagrams, with which you have become familiar:
the diagrams, Wilkes, not free bodies;
we (I) can, from first principles, derive the equation
for this second order, free, damped system
and this will yield an expression for the natural frequency
of our system, the reciprocal of which, Wilkes, is known as
the ‘period’ or, ‘springtime’. Unlike you, Wilkes, I am no longer
in my springtime but you, unlike me, Wilkes, still have it all to do.
Peter Morley