I picked up on Chris.S's comment about indicators and his childhood ideas about turning.
Did you have anything about cars in your childish thoughts.
Never having had a car in childhood, whenever I got to ride in one I always thought that the car was just ' turned on ' by the driver who then, for the rest of the journey, controlled it by using some sort of brake to slow the wheels down when he needed to.
Taking the brake off let it go faster.
I had no conception of an engine or gears.
I recall a period, probably around 12/13 years old when I was completely terrified to be in any moving vehicle, including the bus. I would never go upstairs in case it toppled over. I don't think I ever showed it, just sat there, gritted my teeth and clenched the edge of the seat.
I'll probably be the same in another few years !
Funny how you get your memory jogged on things.
Ted
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When I was young I didn’t understand the concept of gears. I then worked out that you changed to a higher gear when the engine revs increased – but I could not work out at what point you would stop changing gears i.e. you can never go fast enough to indefinitely need to change gears.
That was the concept I could not understand – until of course I got a little older (before my teens I hasten to add) I then caught on the concept of gearing, and car operating in general.
I also remember when I was young (before my teens) during a power cut, asking my mam why cars still had their lights on. My mother explained that cars used batteries , a image of a rack of Duracell’s popped into my head.
Feel a bit of a idiot now thinking like that – but that’s the way I think about things.
But my parents never owned a car until I was a teenager anyway and I had very little exposure to them
Last edited by: Redviper on Wed 9 Feb 11 at 16:04
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Not car related but when I was 8 or 9 I wondered if what we saw as reality was some sort of dream and perhaps the real reality was something else.
Grew out of those thoughts... until I saw The Matrix.
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>> Not car related but when I was 8 or 9 I wondered if what we
>> saw as reality was some sort of dream and perhaps the real reality was something
>> else.
>>
>> Grew out of those thoughts... until I saw The Matrix.
Oh Fenlander, you almost managed to break their control...you could have been The One
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>> Grew out of those thoughts... until I saw The Matrix.
Shut up, you dont exist.
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He does, as long as Fen thinks he does.
Gears puzzled me too but riding a bike amply demonstrated why you might need them.
Of course I'm only another figment of Fen's imagination, so in a way we're all talking to ourselves. :-)
John
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I used to think the gears were just for making the engine quieter. :-)
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No, talking to our otherselves
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Either you've all gone completely mad or I'm just confused.
Pat
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>>>...you could have been The One
Funny thing Mrs F says... you think you're the one but you're not!
Anyway this could all work out. As the years go on I worry what the girls will do with my collection of books, LPs, Dysons, rail sleepers, corrugated iron and old spanners..... much more simple now I know in reality none of it exists.
Last edited by: VxFan on Thu 10 Feb 11 at 00:38
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>> I wondered if what we saw as reality was some sort of dream and perhaps the real reality was something else.
Heh heh... you were confronting the total mystery of existence itself, and the subsidiary mystery (or is it subsidiary?) of consciousness. I too had thoughts along similar but not identical lines at an early age, and suffered the closely related intellectual vertigo. Movies like the Matrix play with this area but distract us from the vertigo with a load of enjoyable schlock violence and special effects. ('Oh, it's just people chopping each other's limbs off with Samurai swords... thank goodness, I thought it was going to be about the Void, endless nothingness for ever and ever...').
That vertigo is what made humans invent all kinds of gods and creators. They had no evidence for the existence of such entities, but it was less frightening to have them than not.
My father used to let me change gear in the Humber Snipe and the boring little Hillman Minx that followed it. He would depress the pedal and I would move the lever. So I had some conception of the function of gear ratios fairly early on. He didn't let me change gear in the Ford V8 that was the first car he had in my lifetime. It had a 3-speed column shift, went like a rocket, rolled and squealed its tyres loudly in any sort of corner and made us children sick. But I still liked it. I'm a real sucker for almost any jalopy however objectively awful it may be. Perhaps thinking about vehicles prevents me from brooding about the Void.
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When I first learned about atoms and molecules and also about astronomy and our solar system I wondered if the sun and its planets were just a nucleus and some electrons in some vast, huge, enormous other universe
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>> I wondered if the sun and its planets were just a nucleus and some
>> electrons in some vast, huge, enormous other universe
>>
Of course they are, it makes the pompous pratts and jobsworths look even more stupid as they don't realise how insignificant they are.
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Until the day I turned 17 I didn't actually know what the clutch was. I know you had to engage it to change gears but I had no idea you had to use it all the time, I had no idea it disconnected the drive system from the engine.
Always been into cars but it is only the past few years I have become interested in the engineering side of it. I think that is probably reflected with my bad luck with cars and the fact I am not very good with getting spanners out!.
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>> Always been into cars but it is only the past few years I have become
>> interested in the engineering side of it.
The engineering is the most fascinating part. I like all engineering , but especially automotive engineering.
The driving part of cars, I can take-or-leave. Actually, I'd love to have a full time chauffeur! :-) SWMBO fulfills the part occasionally.
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When very small I had no conception of what the gearlever did, except theat it was very important.
Sitting in the middle seat of a LandRover I was terrified that I might accidentally knock it and do something awful. The lever was very long, and waggled about so much with vibration that it was impossible to discern any pattern to the driver's movements - it just looked like stirring a pudding with a very long spoon. There was no helpful "H" on the knob.
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I used to think convertibles/2-seaters were for poor people who could not afford a metal roof and more seats.
PS: I still don't like convertibles.
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I used to travel to school in the back seat of a friend's 1968 Triumph 2000. The speedometer needle used to wave about like a sapling in a gale, and I somehow deduced from this that the car moved a bit like electricity, alternating between motion and stillness.
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I had a pretty good conception of how cars worked and what the controls did, from a very early age.
I thought however the clutch was a simple on/off foot switch. A bad idea when I carried this idea over to my first motorbike.
Lots of revs, close the switch, lots of pain.
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>>>I used to think convertibles/2-seaters were for poor people who could not afford a metal roof and more seats.
I've bought my girls up to think that :-)
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Does this mean that Iffy is poor?
John
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>> Does this mean that Iffy is poor?
>> John
>>
He's got a tin roof and a few seats, just not proper ones. :-)
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...Does this mean that Iffy is poor?...
A lot poorer after leaving the Ford dealer in the new CC3 than when I went in with the old Focus.
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on my first driving lesson my instructor went into a sensible explanation of why you needed a clutch and gears
he then got me to drive down the road and said seeing as you have never driven before and this road is a 30mph limit could you please put your foot on the middle pedal to slow us down as you are doing 40
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Ignorance and misconceptions. - Redviper
