I’ve always been fascinated by mechanical gears. There is something captivating about the way their teeth come together to create a fluid, unified motion:

In this blog post I’d like to look at these simple machines up close. I’ll explain how gears affect the properties of rotational motion and how the shape of their teeth is way more sophisticated than it may initially seem.

Movement is important in this article so most of the visualizations are animated – you can play and pause them by clicking on the button in their bottom left corner. By default the animations are enabled, but if you find them distracting, or you want to save power, you can globally pause all animations, just make sure to unpause them as needed.
Spinning

On a hot summer day you might have enjoyed a cool...

I’ve always been fascinated by mechanical gears. There is something captivating about the way their teeth come together to create a fluid, unified motion:

In this blog post I’d like to look at these simple machines up close. I’ll explain how gears affect the properties of rotational motion and how the shape of their teeth is way more sophisticated than it may initially seem.

Movement is important in this article so most of the visualizations are animated – you can play and pause them by clicking on the button in their bottom left corner. By default the animations are enabled, but if you find them distracting, or you want to save power, you can globally pause all animations, just make sure to unpause them as needed.
Spinning

On a hot summer day you might have enjoyed a cool breeze from a desk fan. Let’s take a closer look at this device. In the demonstration below you can control the fan’s speed using a slider...