There is an immense amount to be learned simply by tinkering with things.
Machines are to a mechanic what books are to a writer.
He gets ideas from them, and if he has any brains he will apply those ideas. In lectures I will undertake readings of the mill, textile machinery, the steam engine, the factory, the Model T, and the computer. In each case I shall try to elicit from the design of the object itself a sense of what the designers were trying to accomplish and, in particular, what they were assuming about the people who would use it. You may seek assistance from secondary sources for technical details, but information of a broader sort not rooted in the physical design of the artefact will be treated as irrelevant. We are interested not in what others have said about the object, but in what you can see in it.