Angel: The Tale of the Scale

From Scienticity

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Solly Angel, The Tale of the Scale : An Odyssey of Invention. New York : Oxford University Press, 2004. 320 pages.

In 1988 Solly Angel, an urban planner and world-wide advisor on housing development, was finishing a project in Bangkok. One day in his bathroom he was struck by an idea: why couldn't one have a portable bahtroom scale for travelers that was, say, no more than one-quarter inch thick? He saw (naively, he would later think) no good reason that such a thing didn't already exist so he set out to invent one and bring it to market.

This book, which he has written as a diary, tells his story of that process. He combines personal reflection with technical narrative in a far more engaging and illuminating blend that one could imagine from this simple description of the book's theme. Angel at the start was neither an inventor nor a mechanical engineer, but he persevered. Over the course of the ensuing 13 years he became an expert on more engineering subjects than he had imagined, including the design of strain guages, devices that he needed in his thin scale to measure tiny deflections in the scale when a person stands on it. Not finding any available that met his needs, he invented and patented several clever designs that advanced the state of the art.

I felt like an intimate participant in his odyssey of invention, cheering him on at each roadblock and reveling in each new success; just how his tale ends keeps one in suspense.

This is the very rare sort of book that we press into many different friends' hands saying "Here, you should read this -- you'll enjoy it."

-- Notes by JNS