Re: Electrostatic actuators to move robots legs...

I have noticed that some countries (the USA and the UK especially) have lots of quirkly small electronics companies that do difficult and fun stuff. France and Germany have a few.

The brits pioneered radar, which arguably won WWII.

The core technologies of microwave radar were the cavity magnetron, the klystron LO, the crystal diode mixer, and waveguide technology. Brits get credit for three.

The MIT RadLab and Bell Labs did the heavy lifting to develop radar.

And SCI begat IEEE 896 FutureBus (FB), which also failed in the market, but had a very useful side effect:

The FB Working Group collected all the then approaches to backplane bus design and put them into a common framework, which revealed the gaps, overlaps and missing use cases. This informed all subsequent bus designs.

FB is mentioned in The Art of Electronics, 3rd edition.

Joe Gwinn

No nation has a monopoly on brain power. Bletchley Park did pull in an interesting mix of academic and practical skills - Alan Turing was primarily an academic, though he was also good with hardware.

Tommy Flowers was a telephone system engineer before he went to Bletchley Park. In the early 190's Britain did have its back to the wall, and some of the social prejudice that separated upper-class English academics from middle-class engineers did get repressed (for a while).

People from the colonies also got accepted. William S. Butement - the inventor of the proximity fuse - came from New Zealand. He was my boss for it bit - around 1970 - and I suspect that he would not have been a good choice to get the proximity fuse to work, which is a job the Americans took on.

The MIT Radlab did the heavy lifting on the proximity fuse.

The UK had a working log-wave radar system in place and working when the war broke out - neither the MIT Radlab or Bell labs had anything to do with that.

Airborne centimeter radar (the H2S system) was developed at EMI Central Research and killed their ace engineer - Alan Dower Blumlein - in 1942, when a test flight crashed.

The UK did a lot of the heavy lifting on that system too.

as the actuator moves the capcitance increases, and thus the stored electrical energy (Q^2/2C) decreases.