Easy to Swap.
Vinayak Syam
London, United Kingdom
Disclaimer
The information shared in this micro design journal is for general informational purposes only, All information provided is in good faith, however, I make no warranty of any kind, express or implied, regarding the accuracy, adequacy and reliability of this information.
- Vinayak Syam -
Springs the AA - batteries of the past.
As an aspiring newbie Industrial designer, I recently felt that we the "modern society" is underappreciating a lot of things that have helped to lay the foundation for the modern tech-driven world we live in today. And one of the most crucial invention we take no notice of is a Spring.
For most people, A spring is a wormlike slinky metal wire coil that used to pop out when we tear apart every little consumer product that was made before the early 2000s. Nothing special just a small piece of metal wire coil right? Except that, it was a revolutionary groundbreaking mechanical part that played a significant role in the tech-driven world we are living in today. Let me explain;
It's surprising how many different types of springs we humans encounter every day without even realizing it. From the suspension systems that make our car rides less bumpy to the clutch pencils that lie around in the abyss of our drawers. A spring or spring mechanism is part of anything or everything from safety pins and tweezers to Guns and door knobs. Probably the oldest spring known to man is the archery bow that was been used 75K years ago. And later many cultures iterated and sprinkled their creativity and took advantage of compliance and properties of a material to provide the functionality to the form, for instance, Tweezers were common in many cultures during the Bronze Age, which demonstrates the sophistication of spring devices.
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Well, what is a Spring? In a one-liner- "A spring is an elastic object that stores mechanical energy".Spring can be manufactured in virtually any shape or size that can be imagined and machined based on its principle.Most springs are either coiled or flat, but there are legions of custom springs in various shapes.
Therefore the inventors started inventing products that were powered by spring winding mechanisms which were significantly smaller in scale and more versatile to iterations hence, making them more appealing to a wider population who could afford them. One fine example of such adaptation and iteration is the Clock- watch , powered by a Mainspring (spiral torsion spring of metal ribbon). An invention that flipped the outlook of humans on time and increased the accessibility to data of time on a personal level where now people can perceive and acknowledge the passing of every single second in a day. For which is equivalent to getting to know of your step counts on a smartwatch -A data we rarely noticed or crucially ever cared about till you saw it on your smartphone or watch for the first time, And a portable spring winded watch was a tool that gave humans access to that raw data of passing of time and needles to say we made marvels with it.
But what makes the spring an"unsung hero " of the past is because how it influenced and catalysed the revolution and innovations of the science of mechanics and practical applications of mechanical engineering that we apply in everyday objects we use every day. And we could technically say "a spring device was the OG AA- batteries of 16 the century.
It opened up the idea of storing kinetic energy as potential energy in a thin metal ribbon or on a metal wire and putting the energy to use for accomplishing a task at any point of time without any additional energy input and for the 16th century time period that kind of innovation was equivalent to release of autonomous cars in 2014. Because this one single innovation in the application of material property led to people rethinking the physical footprint of physical objects that needed convoluted mechanisms powered by manual labour or movement of weights, steam and gravity to work(That's what powered most of the things according to google).
Furthermore,300 years of innovations later our knowledge on material compliance catalysed the transition of manufacturing from hand production method to machine-aided factory production during the Industrial revolution era. Which brought unprecedented changes to the course of world economics, politics,technology, and whatnot .So, next time when you see an analogue watch, safety pin or even a tweezer acknowledge how crucial of a role it played in making the world we live in the present.
