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The ice hotel (audio)
In ths public radio piece Bill reveals the mysteries of the Ice Hotel. In January 2002 Bill visited the Ice Hotel with his wife Amy Somrak and their friends Allan and Pat Tuchman. Located in the arctic...
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Why does a cell phone look like it does? (video)
Bill invades a cell phone store to show that the design of a mobile isn't arbritary. Engineers uses seven basic principles to create a useful phone.
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What is inside a golfball and how did it get there? (video)
To learn what's inside a golf ball - and to show how clever engineers are - Bill uses a special cutter to chop one open - well more than one.
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Why a thermostat fits into our world (video)
Armed with a pair of wire cutters Bill shows how a common thermostat reveals how good industrial designers keep track of the dimensions of a human being.
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Tantalum: Nutmeg of the west
With his hammer Bill cracks up a cell phone to expose how our electronic gadgets rely on the mineral tantalum - mined as Coltan.
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Copper: The miracle metal
Using a pair of cutters to extract a copper pipe from the ceiling, Bill shows how copper is the "miracle metal" that gives us safe drinking water, and makes our electronic world possible.
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Garbage: What is really in a landfill? (video)
Bill Hammack covers his office floor with trash to see what takes up space in a landfill. He digs through fast food containers and diapers to learn that what we really need is green design of our...
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A playful look at how the photocopier works
Bill uses power tools to take apart a photocopier. He shows how it works, and shares the story of its invention by Chester Carlson.
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VIDEO: A light-hearted take on matches and their importance
Bill reveals the importance of matches in the 19th century; he shares how adding phosphorous to them revolutionized life - in both good and bad ways.
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Chairs: A seriocomical look at engineering design
Bill asks the question "Why a chair?" ... the answer reveals the human aspects of engineering design. He also answers the question, alas, "how many Bills does it take to talk about chairs."
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Concrete: A slightly tongue-in-cheek look
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...
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The IBM Selectric & its mechanical digital-to-analogue converter
Using slow motion video Bill Hammack, the engineer guy, shows howIBM's revolutionary "golf ball" typewriter works. He describes themarvelous completely mechanical digital-to-analogue converter...
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Whiffletree: A mechanical digital-to-analog converter
Early calculating devices and computers used mechanical digital toanalogue converters. This video describes one based on an arrangementof metal bars called a "whiffletree" - also sometimes called...
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Pop Can Stay-on tab: An ingenious engineering design
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...
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Coffee Maker
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.
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Black Box
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...
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How the first transistor worked
Bill shows how a transistor works by examing a replica of the first one ever build: The Bardeen-Brattain point contact transistor.
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How a quartz watch works
The amazing everyday wristwatch: We never think about it, but only because engineers have made it so reliable and durable that we don'tneed to. At its heart lies a tiny tuning fork made of the mineral...
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Why the other line is likely to move faster
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...
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Light Bulb Filament
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
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How smoke detectors work
Bill takes apart a smoke detector and shows how it uses a radioactive source to generate a tiny current which is disrupted when smoke flows through the sensor. He describes how a special transistor...
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LCD Monitor
Bill tears down an LCD monitor to show how it works. He describes how liquid crystals are used, the structure of the glass panes, and the thin film transistor (TFTs) that allow for active matrix...
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Hard drive teardown
Bill tears down a hard drive to show how it stores data. He explains how smooth the disk surface must be for the device to work, and he outlines the mathematical technique used to increase data storage.
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Cell phone design
Bill uses a pile of cell phones to illustrate the seven design criteria that shape a mobile device. He outlines the seven basic constrain
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Fiber optic cables
Bill uses a laser pointer and a bucket of glycol to show how fiber optic cables works, and how engineers use them to transmit signals across the ocean.
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CCD: The Heart of a Digital Camera
Bill takes apart a digital camera and explains how its captures images using a CCD (charge coupled device). He also shares how a single CCD is used with a color filter array to create colored images....
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How a Smartphone Knows Up from Down
Bill takes apart a smartphone and explains how its accelerometer works. He also shares the essential idea underlying the MEMS production of these devices
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Anodizing Aluminium (or The Beauty of Corrosion)
Bill describes how metals like aluminum and titanium are made resistant to corrosion by growing an oxide layer into the metals. These is the same process used on many Apple products. This video is...
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How a Laser Works
Bill shows how the three key characteristics of laser light - single wavelength, narrow beam, and high intensity - are made. He explains the operation of a ruby laser - the first laser ever made -...
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How an Atomic Clock Works
Bill shows the world's smallest atomic clock and then describes how the first one made in the 1950s worked. He describes in detail the use of cesium vapor to create a feedback or control loop to...
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What Keeps Nuclear Weapons from Proliferating
Bill explains that the hardest step is making the proper type of uranium. Weapons and power plants require uranium that contains a greater amount of the isotope uranium-235 than found in natural...
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How a Lead-Acid Battery Works
Bill details how a microwave oven heats food. He describes how the microwave vacuum tube, called a magnetron, generates radio frequencies that cause the water in food to rotate back and forth. He shows...
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Stories of Technological Failure: PicturePhone, Dvorak keyboard & Betamax
Introduction to a short series of three videos that takes a "snackable" look at the failure of three famous engineered objects: The Bell System's PicturePhone, which lost the company a half billion...
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How Sony’s Betamax lost to JVC’s VHS Cassette Recorder
In 1976 Sony introduced the Betamax video cassette recorder. It catalyzed the “on demand” of today by allowing users to record television shows, and the machine ignited the first “new media”...
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PicturePhone: How Bell Telephone lost a half billion, but nearly created the...
How Bell Telephone’s PicturePhone, introduced in 1964, flopped yet nearly catalyzed the internet. Technically, it was an amazing achievement: Bell used the existing twisted-pair copper wire of the...
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Why the Dvorak keyboard didn’t take over the world
Perhaps no technological failure is better known than that of the Dvorak keyboard. Since the early 1870s nearly every typewriter used a keyboard with a QWERTY layout, yet most studies show the Dvorak...
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Coffee makers: How baseball put them in our homes
Bill describes how the household drip coffee maker evolved.This was originally broadcast on August 29, 2000. Visit this link to view complete list of media attributions: http://goo.gl/fmGESM. Watch the...
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Ferris Wheel: How the Eiffel Tower wasn't good enough
Bill tells the story of the origins of an engineering marvel found at every amusement park, the Ferris Wheel. This radio piece was first broadcast February 15, 2005. Visit this link to view complete...
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Theremin: How science fiction got its sound
Bill discusses the theremin, and how it lead to one the music industry's most fundamental assets, the electronic synthesizer.This was originally broadcast on December 26, 2000. Visit this link to view...
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How the Donner Party inspired food packaging
Bill tells us about packaging, a sub-discipline of engineering that is essential to our society. This radio commentary was originally broadcast on November 30, 2004. Visit this link to view complete...
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Kodak
Bill tells the story of how George Eastman invented film. Its use in the Brownie camera revolutionized photography; that it changed the way American families think of themselves and recall their own...
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How home air conditioning triumphed over the open air movement
Bill explains how the rise of home air conditioning had to battle the open air movements in public school: They regarded it as only for factories where it was first introduced. Only when movie theatres...
View ArticleThe Cigarette machine
Bill nominates, perhaps only provocatively, James Bosnack's cigarette machine as the invention with the greatest economic impact on the 20th century. Cigarettes, as compared to pipes and cigars, are...
View Article(1/4) Intro/History: Introducing a 100-year-old mechanical computer
This introduction to the series Albert Michelson’s Harmonic Analyzer celebrates a nineteenth century mechanical computer that performed Fourier analysis by using gears, springs and levers to calculate...
View Article(2/4) Synthesis: A machine that uses gears, springs and levers to add sines...
This series on Albert Michelson’s Harmonic Analyzer celebrates a nineteenth century mechanical computer that performed Fourier analysis by using gears, springs and levers to calculate with sines and...
View Article(3/4) Analysis: Explaining Fourier analysis with a machine
► Learn more at: http://www.engineerguy.com/fourier ► Buy the book on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0983966176/ ► Buy the posters on Zazzle: http://www.zazzle.com/engineerguy ► Main videos...
View Article(4/4) Operation: The details of setting up the Harmonic Analyzer
This series on Albert Michelson’s Harmonic Analyzer celebrates a nineteenth century mechanical computer that performed Fourier analysis by using gears, springs and levers to calculate with sines and...
View ArticlePage-by-Page Guide to the Free PDF of the Book Albert Michelson's Harmonic...
his series on Albert Michelson’s Harmonic Analyzer celebrates a nineteenth century mechanical computer that performed Fourier analysis by using gears, springs and levers to calculate with sines and...
View ArticleBonus: Watch the machine spin around over and over...
This series on Albert Michelson’s Harmonic Analyzer celebrates a nineteenth century mechanical computer that performed Fourier analysis by using gears, springs and levers to calculate with sines and...
View ArticleBonus: Rocker arms: sinusoids in two different directions
This series on Albert Michelson’s Harmonic Analyzer celebrates a nineteenth century mechanical computer that performed Fourier analysis by using gears, springs and levers to calculate with sines and...
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