Bumping into “Apple found clever iPhone Air innovation for a thinner USB-C port” a few weeks ago, made me rather do a double take.
Also, it made me rather try to imagine what the engineers that worked on the F-14 Tomcat must have suffered. Electron beam welding a wing box from titanium, along with the more general “How the hell do we even build that” problem, were among the challenges back in the ’60s. A time frame where these solutions were more revolutionary than antiquated. We mostly remember those planes for the swept wings and cool movies, but I bet the engineers who worked on that wing box remembered it as a challenge of a lifetime 😅.
And then fast forward about sixty years, and we have people talking about 3D printing titanium.