Of interest is also 507movements.com, which is trying to provide animated versions of the movements.

Most aren't done yet, of course, but as you click through, you can find some interesting ones:

http://507movements.com/mm_038.html http://507movements.com/mm_123.html http://507movements.com/mm_223.html

That is awesome! Many thanks.

This is a great book, that and Watt's book on steam and others which talk in pretty simple terms about how to make things for your steampunk collection.

If you are looking for fun things to print on your 3D printer you can make a number of interesting clock mechanisms, and from there some interesting pieces for an automaton. Lots of fun.

My favorite btw:

"226. This movement is designed to double the speed by gears of equal diameters and numbers of teeth—a result once generally supposed to be impossible. Six bevel-gears are employed. The gear on the shaft, B, is in gear with two others—one on the shaft, F, and the other on the same hollow shaft with C, which turns loosely on F. The gear, D, is carried by the frame, A, which, being fast on the shaft, F, is made to rotate, and therefore takes round D with it. E is loose on the shaft, F, and gears with D. Now, suppose the two gears on the hollow shaft, C, were removed and D prevented from turning on its axis ; one revolution given to the gear on B would cause the frame, A, also to receive one revolution, and as this frame carries with it the gear, D, gearing with E, one revolution would be imparted to E; but if the gears on the hollow shaft, C, were replaced, D would receive also a revolution on its axis during the one revolution of B, and thus would produce two revolutions of E."

> If you are looking for fun things to print on your 3D printer...

Or using a CNC.

Seems very much like a simple differential (which I always thought could be used that way after playing with them a bit). Page 63 of the text.

Which specific watt's book ?

This is the one I was thinking of : http://books.google.com/books?id=raZKAAAAMAAJ but it's not written by Watt, for some reason I thought it was.

It's baffling that Google requires a captcha to download this book, which prevents anyone (actually no one) from efficiently downloading all of these books, and that google adds a ridiculous page to the front, self-servingly begging the reader not to remove, but really just serving as an ad for Google. I'm not saying Google doesn't deserve credit for digitizing these, but they should not be restricting access or defacing the book. The book is public domain and belongs to everyone. It's not more content for them to use to drive ad revenue. So much for "don't be evil".

A minute of googling and you can find a direct download from other databases, for instance: http://kmoddl.library.cornell.edu/bib.php?m=15 . But yes, that's awful that Google is blocking this stuff -- in my country it is even entirely blocked becuase "Google Play does not offer books yet".

I thought the same thing, particularly since I had a really hard time getting a readable captcha. It is somewhat ironic that google invented a device for automatically digitizing a book and then prevents people from automatically downloading them. I'm less concerned about their front piece - they do deserve credit for the preservation effort. I also don't mind eg, the Internet archive framing their web archive.

I love this book, but I got tired of having to flip through each page to find the drawing I wanted, so I put them all into a giant poster set with every drawing on it. I thought some other nerds might be interested, so it's up for sale here: http://society6.com/RettgerGalactic/Five-Hundred-and-Seven-M...

How does one find such rarities without having prior knowledge about the book or author.

I downloaded a copy for keepsakes

I ran across this book while I was researching the caloric engine. Momentary obsessions can be very rewarding sometimes. :)

Congratulations on a very cool historical find.

A curated link of "interesting books" could be good. You need to throw in some kind of "serendipity". I remember noodling around early wikipedia and finding great articles. That's a bit harder now because there are so many tiny stub articles about towns or bus routes or inconsequential people or fictional characters.

Perhaps an "Ask HN: Books that are not programming" might turn up some handy hints?

I guess now you have this book you look on Amazon for other books that people have bought or looked at?

My recommendation: (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ancient-Inventions-Wonders-Peter-Jam...) - it's pop.sci but entertaining.

There have been quite a few interesting book threads on HN, and believe it or not, not all of them have been about programming. Usually they pop up around the end and beginning of the year (probably due in no small part to holiday gift giving and new year's resolutions). The thing that always gets me about the lists, though, is there is so much to wade through; not bad, necessarily, just verbose commentary, which makes it a slog to actually find titles and/or links.

EDIT: This sort of thing is so common, people have made meta-lists that combine links to lists (which was what I was about to do until I remembered it's been done before). Just one:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4185504

And hey, look, here's one for non-software books:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1226736

One More EDIT: Please, please, please, if you're going to do another AskHN about books, make it very focused, and not covering previous book list topics. The value in these lists is that they clearly identify a good scope, instead of saying "everything that isn't X" and then list EVERYTHING, from pulpy scifi (not that there's anything wrong with that) to interesting treasures (like the one for this article), and end up with a thousand links to random books.

I found a copy while scanning the math section at Barnes and Noble to see if they had anything new. I overshot and ended up scanning into the neighboring engineering section, and saw the Dover reprint of that book there.

Amazon has a reedition. It is quite straigt forward if you are interested on lathes and mills and in fabricating things in general. Old books are still very useful in that area.

I first saw a copy of this at Powell's Technical Books in downtown Portland Oregon. Bookstores are a great place for serendipitous finds, and that one in particular is worth checking out if you ever have a chance.

From the people you hang out with.

I bought the dead tree version of this book a few years ago after hearing about it on one of the hobby machinist forums I hang out on.

Similar book is "Computing Mechanisms and Linkages" by Antonín Svoboda from 1948. He worked on anti aircraft artillery sights which would track moving aircraft. This is probably first book dedicated to practical construction of computers.

For a treasure trove of technical books like this, check out Lindsay Publications:

http://www.lindsaybks.com/

I have a copy of this book which Amazon recommended to me for some wonderful reason. Makes a for great bathroom pondering.

I love this. In fact, it's older age is a boon as it predates the hyper specialization that leads to none of us being able to do anything 'on our own'. This is practically a mechanical hackers how-to book -- The stuff you need to know to build stuff on your own.

19th century 'Design Patterns'