Richard Spens has been rebuilding antique machine tools for nearly a decade. He is drawn to the ornate architecture and fascinated by the open design that allows you to see inside a machine as it operates. "Working with machines has been a lifelong thing with me," said Spens, now a design engineer. "I started building steam engines when I was 10 years old." What he's working on now, however, is bigger than any steam engine or machine tool. In rural Livonia, Michigan, Spens is converting an old dairy barn into an accurate recreation of a turn-of-the-century, belt driven gear shop. It's an outgrowth of his interest in antique machine tools and, he feels, a way to stem the tide that is costing America so many manufacturing and skilled trade jobs.

No one is quite sure when gears were invented. It's universally agreed, however, that they've been transmitting motion in one form or another for quite a long time.

It's nice to have claim to fame. "We're probably the world's foremost authority on making gears out of ice," says Jeff Root of Virtual Engineering, Plymouth, MI.

The Gear Research Laboratory of the University of Illinois at Chicago is home to a unique tribute to gear pioneers from around the world, the Gallery of Fame. The gallery is the brainchild of the laboratory director, Professor Faydor L. Litvin. The Gallery was begun in 1994 an dis a photographic tribute to those gear company founders, inventors and researchers who devoted their careers to the study and development of gears.

Alexander Deeb Could Have Been A Gear Engineer. "I have always had a fascination with movement and moving parts," Deeb says. "As a boy at Christmas time, I was much more interested in how and why my new toys worked than in what they actually did. That curiosity has never left me."

As we at Addendum have long known, within every gear man (and women) lies the soul of a poet. To prove it, we present the following piece by David B. Dooner.

Come with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear...Ok, this is not the Cisco Kid, but we do have a little game for you. Guess the year the following advertisements and excerpt were printed - they all appeared in a dingle issue of Machinery Magazine.

It should be obvious by now that gears are more than just mechanical components. We have brought you movies with gears and Shakespeare with gears, jewelry made out of gears and so on. Now we, the humble staff at Addendum, are proud to present gears in the world of music.

Every now and then, it strikes us as wise to keep our thoughts to ourselves and let our betters speak for us. Therefore, we present to you a collection of observations on work; science and other items of interest to gear engineers.

In our never-ending quest to bring our readers information about he unusual, the unique and-dare we say it?-the bizarre, the Addendum Staff has traveled for this issue to the wilds of Darkest Tennessee and the Museum of Appalachia. This museum of Appalachian fold art, crafts and history is located in Norris, TN, about 16 miles north of Knoxville. Among the 250,000 items collected by the museum's founder, John Rice Irwin, is a "thing," a "contraption," an "objet trouve"; to wit, Asa Jackson's mysterious machine.