I then examined the governor more critically, and made up my mind that its action was hindered by friction in the driving-joints at the top of the spindle. These joints were about 4 inches apart, on opposite sides of the spindle, and were of a character in which the force transmitted through them to drive the balls produced a pinch between the broad faces of the joints. The governor could not act until by change of its speed it had accumulated force enough to overcome this pinch, and then it moved too far. Again I applied to my authorities for some way of getting rid of this friction. They told me that was easy enough. All I had to do was to put a yoke on the governor spindle, through which the governor arms were threaded and by which the driving pressure was applied close to the balls. So for the first time I took their advice and had a yoke put on the governor. I could not discover that this helped the matter at all. The improvement was too trifling to be noticed. I also saw clearly enough why this was so. The pressure applied was lighter than that applied through the joints, but it was also applied at a correspondingly increased distance from the axis, so that the effect in retarding the action of the governor was substantially the same. I saw that if I got any relief I must find a way to it myself. So I began studying the subject of governors. My engineering library at that time consisted of Haswell’s Engineers’ Pocket Book. What little book-knowledge I had respecting mechanics I had learned from Haswell. I turned to Haswell and read what he had to say about governors. I learned that they were conical pendulums and made half as many revolutions in a minute as the vibrations of a pendulum whose length was equal to the height of the cone, the base of which was the plane in which the center of oscillation of the balls and arms revolved, and its apex the point of intersection of the axes of the arms, if produced upward, and that their revolutions varied inversely as the square root of the height of this cone. I did not see that this got me out of my difficulty at all. I then referred to the subject of centrifugal force, with which I had made some acquaintance before, and I read this champion mind-muddler: “All bodies moving around a center or fixed point have a tendency to fly off in a straight line. This is termed centrifugal force.” This did not help me any more, nor interest me much at that time.