elief that a
textbook contained all that was known of the subject; and I was not
disabused of my belief by my own textbook or by my teacher. I think I
detect in several recent books a fresh, less final, and less tidy
treatment of the kinematics of mechanisms, but I would yet recommend
that anyone who thinks of writing a textbook take time to review,
carefully and at first hand, not only the desk copies of books that he
has accumulated but a score or more of earlier works, covering the last
century at least. Such a study should result in a better appreciation of
what constitutes a contribution to knowledge and what constitutes merely
the ringing of another change.

[Footnote 114: _Mechanical Engineering_, October 1942, vol. 64, p. 745.]

The author of the contentious article that appeared in _Mechanical
Engineering_ in 1942 under the title "What is Wrong with Kinematics and
Mechanisms?" made several pronouncements that were questioned by various
readers, but his remarks on the meagerness of the college courses of
kinematics and the "curious fact" that the textbooks "are all strangely
similar in their incompleteness" went unchallenged and were, in fact,
quite timely.[115]

[Footnote 115: De Jonge, _op. cit._ (footnote 78).]

It appears that in the early 1940's the general classroom treatment of
accelerations was at a level well below the existing knowledge of the
subject, for in a series of articles by two teachers at Purdue attention
was called to the serious consequences of errors in acceleration
analysis occasioned by omitting the Coriolis component.[116] These
authors were reversing a trend that had been given impetus by an article
written in 1920 by one of their predecessors, Henry N. Bonis. The
earlier article, appearing in a practical-and-proud-of-it technical
magazine, demonstrated how the acceleration of a point on a flywheel
governor might be determined "without the use of the fictitious
acceleration of Coriolis." The author's analysis was right enough, and
he closed his article with the unimpeachable statement that "it is
better psychologically for the student and practically for the engineer
to understand the fundamentals thoroughly than to use a complex formula
that may be misapplied." However, many readers undoubtedly read only the
lead paragraph, sagely nodded their heads when they reached the word
"fictitious," which confirmed their half-formed conviction that anything
as abstruse as the Coriolis compo