Talk:Outline of machines

Rename proposal for this page and all the pages of the set this page belongs to
See the proposal at the Village pump

The Transhumanist 09:21, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

Guidelines for outlines
Guidelines for the development of outlines are being drafted at Outlines.

Your input and feedback is welcomed and encouraged.

The Transhumanist 00:31, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

The "History of" section needs links!
Please add some relevant links to the history section.

Links can be found in the "History of" article for this subject, in the "History of" category for this subject, or in the corresponding navigation templates. Or you could search for topics on Google - most topics turn blue when added to Wikipedia as internal links.

The Transhumanist 00:31, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

Power and Machines
The focus on energy and work in characterizing a machine lacks the important concept of movement. Energy and work are static. Forces applied over a distance is work, and if that distance changes with time it is a combination of force and velocity, which is power. Similarly, energy usage over a period of time is power. Thus, the combination of energy usage and movement in a machine requires consideration of power.

In the late 1800's Reuleaux provided the definition "a machine is a combination of resistant bodies so arranged that by their means the mechanical forces of nature can be compelled to do work accompanied by certain determinate motions.". Recall that forces and motion combine to define power.

More recently, Uicker et al. states a machine is "a device for applying power or changing its direction." And McCarthy and Soh describe a machine as a system that "generally consists of a power source and a mechanism for the controlled use of this power." Prof McCarthy (talk) 04:34, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

Revisions to outline
I have added links to the history section and moved it toward the top. I added the section on machine elements and added lists of mechanism and structural components. I also added a section on machine theory which lists links to mathematical articles useful in machine analysis. Prof McCarthy (talk) 13:48, 24 November 2011 (UTC)

Challenge to Definitions
I'd suggest that rather than suggesting the screw and pulleys/gears are variations of the fundamental machine types they are better described as *combinations*. The screw, as a rotary inclined plane, is a combination of the inclined plane and the wheel. Gears are better considered as cascaded levers (this leads to a better understanding of why gears multiply forces even when static) which are made possible by comining a lever with a wheel. Pulleys can similarly be considered as "an infinite series of cascaded levers" (and thus a combination of wheels and inclined planes) for similar reasons. Pete Rieden - Jan 2013 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.199.141.132 (talk) 15:46, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

Quick explanation of Wikipedia outlines
"Outline" is short for "hierarchical outline". There are two types of outlines: sentence outlines (like those you made in school to plan a paper), and topic outlines (like the topical synopses that professors hand out at the beginning of a college course). Outlines on Wikipedia are primarily topic outlines that serve 2 main purposes: they provide taxonomical classification of subjects showing what topics belong to a subject and how they are related to each other (via their placement in the tree structure), and as subject-based tables of contents linked to topics in the encyclopedia. The hierarchy is maintained through the use of heading levels and indented bullets. See Outlines for a more in-depth explanation. The Transhumanist 00:07, 9 August 2015 (UTC)