Engineerguy videos & audio

Bill takes apart an incandescent light bulb to how how the filament is made. He shows extreme close-ups of the filament, and he discusses the materials processing need to make the ductile tungsten

Bill reveals how "queueing theory" - developed by engineers to route phone calls - can be used to find the most efficient arrangement of cashiers and check out lines. He reports on the work of Agner Erlang, a Danish engineer who, at the opening of the 20th century, helped the Copenhagen Telephone Company provide the best level of service at the lowest price.

The amazing everyday wristwatch: We never think about it, but only because engineers have made it so reliable and durable that we don't

need to. At its heart lies a tiny tuning fork made of the mineral quartz. In this video Bill takes apart a cheap watch and shows extreme

close-ups of the actually tunings fork. He explains how the piezoelectric effect of quartz lies at the heart of the watch's

operation.

Bill shows how a transistor works by examing a replica of the first one ever build: The Bardeen-Brattain point contact transistor.

Bill opens up a vintage "black box" from a Delta airlines jetliner. He describes how the box withstands high temperatures and crash velocities because it is made from Inconel: A superalloy steels that is used in furnaces and others extreme environments. The flight data recorder he shows is a Sundstrand FA-542 and was likely used on a DC-9 in the 1970s, although it could have been used as late as 1988 on a Boeing 727.

To engineer an object means to make choices. Bill illustrates how the choice of having a single heating element made an engineer find a creative way to pump water with no moving parts.

Bill uses slow motion video to show the ingenious engineering design of the apparently simple tab of a pop can. To create a tab with the least amount of material it changes from a 2nd to a 1st class lever while opening the can.

Early calculating devices and computers used mechanical digital to

analogue converters. This video describes one based on an arrangement

of metal bars called a "whiffletree" - also sometimes called a

"whippletree." It shows, briefly, the whiffletree used in IBM's

revolutionary selectric typewriter and then illustrates the principles

of a whiffletree converter by showing the simplest one - one that

encodes digital impulses into two bits of information. (This videos is

an appendix to Bill Hammack's video about the operation of the

Selectric Typewriter.)

Using slow motion video Bill Hammack, the engineer guy, shows how

IBM's revolutionary "golf ball" typewriter works. He describes the

marvelous completely mechanical digital-to-analogue converter that

translates the discrete impulse of the keys to the rotation of the

type element. (This is the typewriter featured on the television series Mad Men.)

Bill moves a piece of sewer pipe into his office to show how important the ancient material concrete is to our modern world. It, of course, wreaks havoc on his office. The video also includes an index to all videos in the series and some outtakes.