Jake O’Neal’s meticulously researched and lovingly rendered engineering animations are one of the highlights of modern-day Youtube. He’s outdone himself with his recent masterpiece on the SR-71’s innards and outards. The Blackbird is one of the last century’s artistic triumphs and has inspired admirers all over the world. O’Neal dove deeply into the literature and pulls back the covers from beak to tailfeathers. The section on the inlet and J58 powerplant is as accurate as the 2015 benchmark from “Tech Adams.”
O’Neal goes beyond the “glamorous bits.” Pay close attention to the “mixer” that translated pilot stick inputs into precise actuator motions to control a plane flying at Mach 3+. I’ve been following the Blackbird family for decades and I never knew about this.
On top of that, he has just released a behind-the-scenes film on how he created the model and animations using the free Blender program.
Bill Hammack of UIUC built and built-up the “Engineer Guy” Youtube channel into one of the most popular and respected technology-focused sites on the platform.
Then, he disappeared for four years. His audience checked in periodically in the comments section but there was not much information to be had other than hints that he was still with us and might someday return.
But now, he has returned and one hopes to stay, examining the “engineering method” as he describes it. A complement to the much better-known scientific method.
In addition to the steam turbine below, he looks at cathedrals, turbulence, and revisits the microwave magnetron.
The pendulum of modern engineering has swung to asserting that digital models can always represent reality faster, cheaper, and better than any physical manifestation of it. Mockups, prototypes, and test articles are out, “Digital twins” and augmented reality are in. More’s the pity. While much can be represented in CAD/CAM, the compute horsepower required to mimic the real world drains budgets as fast as it drains the power grid. Very few have the savvy to accurately represent the range of physical phenomena in bits and then know when the model can be trusted. The craftsmen who enabled the preceding revolutions are in retreat and in exchange we get ever increasing development times and costs despite the glowing promises of hype men and the C-suites that golf with them.
In that spirit, Oregonian Peter Dibble looks back fondly at Modulex, a Lego spinoff for architects to present concepts to their clients. An ingenious change in dimension yielded bricks ideally suited to metric and Imperial drawing scales. Sliceable parts, slopes, ridges, and custom colors yielded a system that grew well beyond its original intent into project management and signage. A Mark-1 eyeball can look at, around, and into such a physical representation and get some idea of its strengths and weaknesses. Digital design software and Lego’s surprising hostility to the product line unfortunately sealed Modulex’s fate as a modeling tool. The company lives on for signmaking.
Dibble’s channel is a trove of meticulously researched and well-presented histories emphasizing the Pacific Northwest. The Spruce Goose’s move from Long Beach to McMinnville is eye-opening.
Sports Illustrated quoted this Japanese proverb back in 1975 in conjunction with Cal’s championship men’s gymnastic team of that era. The adage abides with the James Webb Space Telescope now in its halo orbit around the Sun-Earth L2 point, its optics and instruments slowly cooling to their ultimate cryogenic temperatures, the better to collect the faint signs of heat from the early universe. Little has been said to the public about the instruments nestled in the big box behind the 6.5-m primary mirror. This is perhaps not surprising. There are no secrets here, just that the real science goals and the optical engineering to meet them are fiendishly complex. Friendly Neighborhood Astronomer Christian Ready tackles the challenge, explaining where the precious photons will go and what will happen to them once they arrive. The comment section clamors for more detail on the MIRI cryocooler which will take the mid-Infrared Instrument’s focal plane array below 7K. Here’s to hoping for a full video on this beast, built across the hall from me, and on which I spent a couple of weeks when the team was shorthanded.
Silicon Valley has reshaped the earth, Hollywood has driven our perceptions of it, and not always for the better. Less well known is the outsized role California has played in understandingour universe. Mt. Wilson, Mt. Palomar, and their astronomers have had a Copernican impact on where we stand in the grand scheme of things. The word ‘vision’ gets bandied about a lot these days but George Ellery Hale had it in spades. Here’s how the two observatories that housed Hubble, Humason, Shapley, Zwicky, Baade, Rubin, and Schmidt came to be.
The third video from Corning’s Museum of Glass shows that the path to science is not always smooth and that learning from mistakes is the norm. The original 200 inch pyrex disk for the Palomar primary did not go according to plan and had to be recast. The second attempt succeeded and even so, it took ten years of painstaking grinding and polishing at Caltech before it was ready for use.
The web’s archive of older industrial films is a recurring delight. Jam Handy, Coronet, and other firms crafted these with an attention to detail, calm explanation, and rigorous science that is harder(*) to find today when most equivalents are about sales rather than fundamentals. Jeff Quitney (**) has uploaded a wonderful 1954 cleaned-up film to his Vimeo page on color theory and practice by the Interchemical Corporation. It begins with the importance of color to society – especially in packaging goods and people – and then gives a marvelous account of the optics involved. I’ve worked in the field for years but I learned to see things (pun intended) differently thanks to it.
The second film from 2016 looks at color in packaging through its emotional impact and its influence on design and designers. ‘Color In Sight’ resembles like Hustwit’s ‘Helvetica.’ A number of prominent designers talk about how they use and think about color in order to evoke a response, surface a memory, or reveal a part of the spectrum to the color-blind. I have no idea what I’d say to a nail-polish maker but Suzi Weiss-Fischmann (8m18s in) comes off as a fun seatmate on a long plane trip. I had a similar feeling about Helvetica’s Paula Scher. Interestingly, it is produced by TeaLeaves, a Canadian company specializing in very high-end teas for hotels. Judging by their Youtube page, they must spend a fortune on short films – many of which have little outward bearing on their products. I’ve never understood the appeal of tea but the videos are well worth a look.
(*) But not impossible by any means.
(**) 24 November 2023: Video link updated due to Jeff Quitney’s channels being taken down
At one time there were several Youtube channels that found, cleaned-up, and uploaded public domain training films and other documentary-style educational videos for a grateful audience. wdtvlive42 and Historia-Bel99TV were summarily deleted a couple of years ago. This week the hammer fell on Jeff Quitney who had presented over five thousand films that he had spruced up. Youtube does not seem to have an appeals process. They first demonetized him based on (most likely spurious) copyright claims against music that was part of a few of the soundtracks. Now, his channel has just disappeared. Fortunately he has at least partial backups at Bit.Tube and Vimeo. His goal is to ultimately have everything restored but that will take considerable time. I’ve linked to him many times and have found at least temporary replacements from the Internet Archive as well as from other Youtubers. Still, it is a shame what happened to him.
Periscope Film of Los Angeles still exists, providing watermarked films from their commercial library. Let’s hope they remain and grow.
Addendum 7 April 2019: Looks like he’s making Vimeo his go-to site for old and new videos. Click the image to go to his Vimeo page.
Click the image to go to Jeff Quitney’s Vimeo Channel
Addendum 10 June 2023: Jeff’s Vimeo site is down, as well.
Before the laser came the maser and before that the radar that let civilization live long enough to create the other two. We think that vacuum tubes have been completely overcome by their solid-state, fully integrated and integratable semiconductor rivals but they soldier on in niches where very high powers have to be sent out of antennas either to other antennas or to scatter back from targets. Here’s a superb old video explaining the ‘klystron‘, a name fragrant with the aroma of old school pulp science fiction. They’re still in use as are Traveling Wave Tube Amplifiers (TWTAs, pronounced ‘tweetas’) along with a few other devices that are coming up on nearly ninety years of life.
The Bell System is long gone but its manufacturing arm, the Western Electric Corporation, still has a website and offers products under its old banner. Its ‘Historic Technical Library’ section is a goldmine of references. Under ‘Western Electric Technology’ we can learn how to use our Picturephones and read the classic 1965 monograph, Principles of Electron Tubes. The latter delves rigorously into the business of taking small radio signals and amplifying them to for communications, science, or surveillance. Both klystrons and TWTAs get detailed treatment. Fittingly, the final chapter is on gas lasers featuring the ever popular helium-neon variety with only a brief mention of the carbon dioxide laser invented about the time the book would have gone to press.
It is easy to forget how the development of lasers and nonlinear optical devices came as logical outgrowths of the earlier work at much longer wavelengths – storing power in one medium and exchanging it to another all by playing games with resonances and the speed of light. The Handbook allows the reader to rediscover these links, often for the first time. It is not also surprising that places strong in the one such as Stanford; home of the brothers Varian, Edward Ginzton, and William Hansen of klystron fame, became so strong in the other with Schawlow, Hänsch, Siegman, Byer, and Harris. Of course, Bell Labs also falls into that category but it hardly bears repeating since it was so strong in so many areas.
As time marches relentlessly on, it slowly erodes what you think you know – especially those things you never knew in the first place. Despite all of its cruft, marketeering, and self-promotion there’s still a small corner of the internet that hews to its educational roots. The structure of subatomic particles like protons and neutrons is not conceptually easy, the mathematics reserved for a few. Eugene Khutoryansky’s colorful and surreal videos do a great service in making abstract concepts concrete. The underlying classical music soundtrack is in subtle contrast to the extremely non-classical physics.