THE WHOLE EARTH CATALOG

     If you don't know what is  "the Whole Earth Catalog" don't feel bad, you're one more person who haven't heard from this book and it's content. Let me explain, The Whole Earth Catalog was first published by Stewart Brand between 1968 until 1972. This book had from covert the first photo of the Earth from outer space; on this book you could found almost everything, it had reviews of books, articles, products, etc. and the contact information so that if you needed or desired to buy one of those things you could contact them directly. On this book or catalog you could find a great variety of topics, from simple topic like "How to grow plants" (agriculture) or "How to navigate using the stars" (astronomy) to more complex topics like "How build ancient machinery" (engineering), and even random topics like "How to stop a trip from drugs" (some kind of medicine). This book for the people of that age was like the Internet for us nowadays, something where you could look at trying to solve a question you have and getting the answer by buying the article or product that talks about the topic you where doing research on. Steve Jobs said "It was sort like Google in paperback form..." this is proof that the author accomplished his goal which was the idea of a book on which anyone could find information about anything and the contact information so that they could bought the book, article, or object of their interest. 

      During the time I was looking at the WEC I saw a very interesting book called  “Simple Working Models of Historic Machines” the reason why I say "very interesting" is because since I was a kid I found machinery interesting, that is one of the reasons I am becoming an Engineer. I used to disassemble things and try to assemble them again, even today when something breaks in my house I try to fix it myself before getting help from some other people, or when I see and interesting machine I always try to figure out how the mechanism is assemble so that it can do what it does. This book talks about a machine called the “Chinese South-pointing Chariot” (Image 2) a mechanism that was built to point South at all times, regardless of the direction you were walking to. The “Chinese South-pointing Chariot” is basically an old version of a modern compass but it only tells you where is the South, which is enough information to know in what direction are you traveling. Scientist know of its existence since 200 CE so it does have a long history, I don't think you can find it nowadays in a store since compass has being made so accessible and gives more information than the Chinese South-pointing Chariot, but you may find it in some old storage or on a antique shop.  The mechanism works thanks to a very clever way to assemble gears of different sizes in a specific position, in the picture below the gears are represented by circles. 

Image 2. The Chinese South-pointing Chariot

     A lot of people including me think that the Whole Earth Catalog was on the 1970's and 80's what a browser it is to us nowadays, 

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Jose Christian Morris Huerta 

SID: 1131185416