Recently I have been down in my basement shop tinkering with the large-scale force table in Fig. 1. The scale can be seen by the 30-cm boxwood ruler once used by a Kenyon student in 1897. In the ’70s of the last century I decided that the three force tables on hand, with circular tops with the edges divided off into degrees, looked too much like specialized laboratory apparatus and I didn’t have enough of them. Instead I got some table-edge clamps and used the entire tabletop as a force table.
In an article from 20021 I discussed the history of the force table, which goes all the way back to 1715! This has long been a favorite experiment in the introductory course. Three or even four forces, all in the same plane, are applied to a small body. Students drew the vectors representing the force(s) and added...