engineer guy

Why Its Really, Really Hard to Make Light Bulb Filaments

Continuing his wonderful series of videos on the unappreciated wonders of engineering that surround us here’s Engineer Guy on the truly amazing process required to produce a common incandescent light-bulb filament. As always, Bill displays a fantastic ability to produce short, engaging, entertaining video segments that will appeal to and educate both the totally uninitiated and those who, like myself, are foolish enough to think we know a thing or two. [Thanks, Bill!]

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“Look inside. It’s amazing.”

That phrase could be Bill Hammack’s tagline. This week, it’s the piezoelectric crystal oscillator in a $9.99 digital watch from Target, a device so ubiquitous that it has become “ephemeralized,” as Bucky Fuller put it: Almost any device that runs on electricity is expected to include one. I knew how they worked, in a general way, before watching this video. But here’s one of the many things I did not know: The quartz crystal in the oscillator is only 3mm long and less than 1mm across, yet each one is individually tuned at the factory. Wanna know how they do it? Click away. [Thanks, Bill!]

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Engineer Guy explains the world’s first transistor

Unlike all the other men in my family (and most of my friends) I am not an electrical engineer by training. I’ve spent my life around electrical engineering, and although I’ve known about the historical details of the invention of the transistor since I was a wee lad, I can’t claim to have understood how the first transistor worked until I saw Bill Hammack’s video for this week. So, thanks for that, Bill, on a personal level.

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Engineer Guy vs. the flight data recorder

Bill Hammack’s video confection is especially sweet this week. Bill scored a vintage Delta “black box” on eBay and, in this week’s installment, tears it apart on camera to show you how they built ’em in the old days to stand up to “three-thousand gees and one-thousand degrees.” I just watched it, and I’m having a hard time resisting my ebullient urge to spoil the ending for you, so I’ll just shut up and let Engineer Guy take it away. [Thanks, Bill!]

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The mechanical elegance of the pop-can stay tab

If you’ve been around long enough to have ever actually blown out your flip-flop, stepped on a pop top, you’ve already got one great reason to appreciate the 1975 introduction of the stay-on tab or stay tab: No more little metal razors littering the beaches.

Now, “Engineer Guy” Bill Hammack helps us appreciate the stay tab for another reason: It’s a little gem of mechanical poetry. There’s a lot going on when you pull that little ring. Bill’s video exegesis of that action, like all Bill’s videos, is a little piece of poetry unto itself. I can’t get enough of ’em. [Thanks, Bill!]

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The Mechanical Glory of the IBM Selectric Typewriter

A “whiffletree” is a mechanical digital-to-analog converter. Brilliant science-and-technology documentarian Bill Hammack, professor of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering at the University of Illinois, has produced this fascinating video anatomy of IBM’s classic Selectric typewriter, in which a 7-bit whiffletree is employed to convert keypresses (digital) to precisely coordinated tugs (analog) on the control cables that rotate and tilt the type ball. Doubly awesome is the fact that the video features an appendix (yes, a video appendix) which focuses exclusively on the whiffletree itself, closely illustrating its operation with a simple 2-bit case.

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