What do you see?

What do you see when you look at these pictures?

They are both pictures of traction engines - the location being the village fair at Hollywood, Co. Wicklow.  My eyes are drawn to then centrifugal governor, very obvious in both pictures.

Recently I had reason to describe the principle to a colleague, someone who understands computers so has technical understanding.  So I showed him the two photographs and he was none the wiser.  Apparently he had never come across the device and he did not immediately see how it works. With my Meccano set I learnt about and built such things from an early age - how different people are!

Here is another area where the modern version has been dumbed down.  Compare the modern Meccano site with, for example these instructions or this familiar list-of-parts.  Is it really that folk have less sense now-a-days, or it is just a shift in interest? A reader's letter in E&T July 2012 claims that the word "craft" has now been excluded from the national design and technology curriculum and the school curriculum, to be replaced I suppose by computer expertise. Instead of building complex models people spend their spare time playing computer games. In contrast I remember a book from my father's era that I read as a boy with a title "1001 things for a boy to do".  Included in this number was making a real model steam engine almost from scratch.  For the more demanding parts the child was directed to ask a favour from the nearest machine shop.  Even then times had changed and I could not imagine going to this length.  But now-a-days I cannot believe that the average boy would even thinks about such things.