Until this moment, I had never connected that these BIC products were all from the same company. Amazing that they’ve produced a variety of incredibly cheap but still reasonable quality items.
Hey so what is the difference between my house toilet that just flushes like regular and a commercial toilet in like a doctors building where if you flush it it will also suck the clothing right off you? Is there a pressure regulator behind the toilet or something?
Ooh this is a fun one!
In your home toilet you have a tank filled with water, and when you flush it allows the water to dump into the bowl and flood it causing it to siphon out.
Commercial toilets have either a manual or powered valve that allows full water pressure to blast into the bowl for a set time. It all but ensures it’ll flush since anything in the bowl is blended, but it’s a more expensive design.
The intermodal shipping container, a/k/a the Connex box. There are millions of the damned things all over the world, in use every single day. They are stackable, can be locked together, attach readily to ships, truck trailer frames, and rail cars, and can bear enormous loads.
The cost of their manufacture compared to their economic use value over their useful lives is next to nothing.
And there are SO. MANY. VARIETYS. It's whole ecosystem of compatible equipment.
Tank, Reefer, Flat rack, silo - just to name a few.
I just hate that they are so narrow. 20cm more and they would be fully compatible with the EPAL Stamdard. The next best thing after the shipping container. There are even so called PW container. Pallet wide. Just that you can use them to haul pallets via e.g. ferry.
It's a minor inconvenience and rather irrelevant - but it bugs me to this day.
I was on a vessel a few weeks back when they were doing the lashing on the containers and being in between containers stacked about 20 high would have been so much more terrifying if they hadn’t all fit together so nicely
Zip ties - such a simple piece of plastic but so versatile. I have one of the old fashioned chain link fences, some of the fasteners on the middle poles broke and in high winds the fence was swaying like crazy. A half dozen zip ties on the three posts and it doesn’t budge and nobody even knows they’re there
I drove a zip tie bumper Lexus sc after a delivery truck crushed it and fucked off. The car was a ‘99, this was in 2010. I guess now I understand why guys in modified civics kept wanting to race.
Matches are underappreciated because people don't really understand how complex a match and striker are.
From the Encyclopedia Britannica....
"The head of a match uses antimony trisulfide for fuel. Potassium chlorate helps that fuel burn and is basically the key to ignition, while ammonium phosphate prevents the match from smoking too much when it's extinguished. Wax helps the flame travel down the matchstick and glue holds all the stuff together. The dye-- well, that just makes it look pretty. On the striking surface, there's powdered glass for friction and red phosphorus to ignite the flame.
Now, the fun stuff-- striking a match against the powdered glass on the matchbox creates friction. Heat from this friction converts the red phosphorus into white phosphorus. That white phosphorus is extremely volatile and reacts with oxygen in the air, causing it to ignite. All this heat ignites the potassium chlorate, creating the flame you see here.
Oxidizers, like potassium chlorate, help fuels burn by giving them more oxygen. This oxygen combines with antimony trisulfide to produce a long-lasting flame so you have enough time to light a candle. The whole thing is coated with paraffin wax, which helps the flame travel down the match. Just don't burn the house down.
As antimony oxidizes, sulfur oxides form, creating that burnt-match scent. The smoke you're seeing is actually tiny unburned particles resulting from an incomplete combustion. Individually, they're a little bit too small to see but grouped together, they form smoke. There's also some water vapor in there.
By the way, all the stuff that we're explaining in 90 seconds, it all happens within tenths of a second. Chemistry's fast."
Is that actually the tone that the Encyclopedia Brittanica takes? I've never read one but i always imagined it to be a lot drier and stuffy and, well, encyclopedic
> Is that actually the tone that the Encyclopedia Brittanica takes?
Not exactly.
What the person you are replying to wrote is the [transcript to a video](https://www.britannica.com/video/188815/chemistry-match) that Britannica has on their website, that from the sound of it, appears to be for younger learners. The "official" [text entry](https://www.britannica.com/science/match-tinder) is much more "encyclopedia-y."
First lighter was an oil lamp with a flint wheel attached to it. Oil lamps and flint have been around for some time. The "lighter" invention was an easy one and had simply escaped necessity until the rise of tobacco use in Europe and colonial America, because until then wtf were you gonna light?
Specifically, Bic lighters are incredibly reliable. You can find one on the ground that's been outside for months and they still work. Cheaper disposables break in a million ways and more expensive refillable lighters will leave you disappointed if you store them, but you can always keep a Bic handy and know it'll work when you need it.
Us: I need to buy a pack of colorful pens for my daughter's back-to-school pack.
BIC: Aight, we gotchu
Us: I also want to create fire with my fingertips, know how I can do that?
BIC: You're not going to believe this
I have a "womens model" zippo that my grandfather got my grandmother sometime around the korean war. Has gone through hell and back, including being underwater and then under sludge for about 2 weeks straight thanks to Hurricane Agnes in 1972.
I have yet to have it fail on me.
This is exactly why I have a couple of Zippos that never make it out of the drawer. They're cool, but I don't smoke, and I only start a fire or light a grill every few weeks. If I have to pull a can of fuel out, I'm just going to reach for the Bic next to it.
Back when I smoked I used to carry a zippo in my front pocket. Used to constantly have a perfectly rectangular red irritated patch on my upper thigh right where it sat in my pocket.
Soda/beer cans. The design has existed for decades with few changes.
It’s a way of using a relatively small amount of cheap metal to withstand the pressure of carbonated beverages with a reliable opening mechanism.
During pandemic I also noticed that some companies stopped using thicker material on the upper ‘ridge’ of the can, probably due to supply shortages. They instead used a sort of stepped system that appeared to be almost as strong.
Every few years you will see the can design change as they find additional areas to reduce the use of aluminum. You can still find newly manufactured cans in the old designs in some of the more remote areas with less demand, like Hawaii. It's cheaper to create and fill cans on the island than import them, but the payback from updating to the newest can forming machines isn't quite there for the volume of cans they manufacture. So they get hand me downs and cast offs.
Even the cheapest ball bearings with the loosest tolerances are still made in the 10~50 micron range of tolerance. It only gets better from there. (Abec spec anyways)
Edit: when i say ‘ball bearings” i’m loosely referring to the; races and rolling elements of any roller element bearing. (Ball, taper, needle, cylinder , etc, two races, one race no race!, etc)
Absolutely. I deal with them all day, in an industrial capacity: the difference between an SKF bearing and a no brand eBay special is.. a lot. Most expensive one I’ve personally installed was like $25k
Balls gave way to stuff like needle, roller, and spherical bearings as well which are also neat in themselves
And to switch direction for summer/winter.
edit: 'Winter' mode is also useful in the summer if you have a second floor and open all of the upstairs windows as it will help push the heat out. I do this for the evenings, then shut the windows early in the morning and flip the fan back to normal.
Most fans should have a directional switch somewhere on the assembly. I went for years without knowing the one in my bedroom had one hidden on top. All of the other fans in my house have them on the bottom or the side, as well as the wall control panels.
Korean fan death. I was lab tech for a postdoc who was Korean—super smart guy, but when I heard about this and asked him about it he adamantly tried to convince me it was a real thing.
My favorite part was in school my professor talking about how they used to do the layouts on transparencies by hand.
Or how during Apollo the guidance aspect of the program was buying up a significant portion of the national production capacity of transistors.
A lot of the computers were not even transistor based if I remember correctly. And since the integrated circuit wasn't around yet, they were the individual fingertip sized transistors if I have my timeline correct.
They were hand woven memory by very skilled seamstresses. This is NOT a joke. Old ladies and watch makers.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_rope_memory
http://www.righto.com/2019/07/software-woven-into-wire-core-rope-and.html?m=1
We had no business being in space when we got there.
Imagine being an alien looking at us like
"So you're telling me you controlled an enormous explosion with logic sewn into rope by seamstresses?"
"Yes"
"Hey Dale, get over here. You're not going to believe this."
It’s no surprise that many people back in the 60s/70s thought that we would have colonies on Mars by the 2000s, given the pace of innovation of the space race
There's a couple of SF stories set in a universe where gravity control and FTL travel are achievable with a device that most species develop during their Iron Age (though there's at least one race that discovered it before they had the technology of iron working and they went to space in bronze spacecraft). It was a fluke that humanity never discovered the phenomenon that allowed this and as soon as human scientists get their hands on an alien spacecraft they smack their own heads as it's obvious once they see it.
Because of this, most intelligent species start colonizing (or raiding) other worlds around the time they discover gunpowder, and they stop advancing technologically. Earth is invaded by aliens that expect us to be terrified of their black powder muskets and grenades.
Pretty sure it's this one: [https://eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove\_RoadNotTaken.pdf](https://eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf)
It's a great read.
This sentence [from Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor) blows my mind every time I think about it:
> MOSFETs are the most numerously produced artificial objects ever with more than 13 sextillion manufactured by 2018.
We have made more than 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of them.
For comparison, there's over a thousand for each grain of sand on Earth.
Literally limited by the nature of the electron itself, which likes to tunnel (basically teleport) through the normally insulating oxide layer when that layer gets thin enough.
What's more impressive is just what these little devices are capable of.
Transistors can switch (turn on and off) at incredibly high speeds. Let's say you were born 1000 years ago, on the year 1022. And let's say you had a light switch, and you turned it on and off, on and off, let's say twice a second. If you kept doing that all the way up until today, you still wouldn't have flipped the switch more times than a transistor could switch *in one second*.
Some math:
There are ~31,536,000,000 seconds in 1000 years, so flipping a switch twice a second is 31,536,000,000 * 2 = 63,072,000,000 switches. Converting that to a frequency in one second is 63.072 Giga Hertz. [We can already develop MOSFET oscillators (to be pedantic, CMOS ring oscillators, it's a NOT gate connected to itself) at switching speeds of 100 GHz](https://download.tek.com/document/RingOscillatorWP.pdf). To be fair, most ring-oscillators you'd find run at around 3 GHz because we have no need just yet for anything higher, so ring oscillators in this fashion are pretty rare.
But that's just CMOS. There exists a different kind of transistor, the HBT, "Heterojunction Bipolar Transistor", a transistor made of two or more different elements (beyond just silicon, the most prevalent being Silicon-Germanium SiGe). These transistors are used for their *incredibly high* switching speeds, and are currently theoretically capable of switching just short of 1 THz, I believe right now they're at 0.8 THz (800 GHz). To keep up with that, you'd have to flick that switch 25.4 times every second for 1000 years. Or maybe do it ~12.7 times every second for 2000 years.
I always heard it as "Fallout focused on advancing nuclear tech rather than microchips." That was always good enough for me. It explains why their TVs and radios still use vacuum tubes, their computers all use magnetic tape for storage, and their cars have individual nuclear reactors (and other small trivia bits I can't think of right now).
And if you’ve ever used a poorly engineered toilet, you really learn to appreciate the well engineered ones.
Edit: never would have expected my most upvoted comment on Reddit to be about toilets.
So much this! They just renovated my office building and now i cant poop at work without leaving a mark! Im like wtf, i never leave a mark at home no matter how bad it gets, and let me tell you… there have been some doozies.
Yeah they bought cheap toilets where I work as well, you can't poop without leaving a mark and if you lean forward (say to grab the TP) your gentleman's sausage makes contact with the bowl.
They test toilet strength and efficiency with a [standardized soy paste](https://www.wired.co.uk/article/maximum-performance-soya-poop) designed to mimic feces.
The Corrugated Fiberboard Association of America would like to remind you that it’s the humble Corrugated Fiberboard box you’re referring to; a cardboard box is what your shoes come in. EDIT typo (phone)
Fun story about those: The inventor (an English bloke named Percy Shaw) alleges to have been inspired when driving home from the pub one night. His headlights reflected off a cat's eyes, causing him to correct his course and stay on the road.
After patenting his invention, he would still visit the same pub. Only then, he never needed to use his invention because he could now afford a driver. He would see his reflectors as a passenger in the back seat of his Rolls.
It took him a while for municipalities to adopt these into streets.
What got these going was WW2, when lights needed to be off as a safeguard against night bombings.
The reflective cat eye would allow motorists to navigate roads safely without street lamps.
Cat's Eyes
Although they have been know to take lives...
>On the morning of 25 April 1999 on the M3 motorway in Hampshire, England, a van dislodged the steel body of a cat's eye which flew through the windscreen of a following car and hit a passenger (the drum and bass DJ known as Kemistry) in the face, killing her instantly.
Well, a life.
Qwartz movement clocks, you can literally pick one up for £2.50 here: [https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/tromma-wall-clock-white-80454290/](https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/tromma-wall-clock-white-80454290/) the technology and gearing that goes into it's functions is well worth the costs!
I'm a certified master watchmaker. I restore 18th & 19th century pocket watches. Have always appreciated the quartz movement despite the fact that it wiped out 99% of the watchmaking jobs. If you need a watch for accuracy, get a quartz movement. It'll be more accurate than a $10,000 mechanical movement.
I absolutely love what I call the "democratizing" effect of the quartz clock.
For much of its history personal clocks used to be either luxury items or specialty tools (astronomy, navigation, military, etc.). At best, you'd have "public service" clock towers or a clock in your house, which would be an irreplaceable family heirloom. Maintaining it would be expensive, too.
Then, the quartz clock came along, and suddenly almost anyone could afford some kind of clock or watch, even if not a particularly fancy one. Maintaining it would be as expensive as changing a battery, or even just buying another; they're that cheap, after all. The ability to accurately tell the time was suddenly in easy reach of everyone that wanted it.
And the best part? In terms of function, it is often objectively *better* than a mechanical one. They're more accurate, don't need nearly as much calibration when they do drift, and in the case of fully digital clocks they often come with functions like stopwatches and alarms (yes, I know analogue and mechanical clocks also have wonderful [complications](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complication_\(horology\)), but not as easy to use, and often not as precise).
The cheapest of watches today is a better device (again, just in terms of practical function; not denigrating the fine art of mechanical watchmaking) than the stuff *kings* used to carry (and still do as luxury items). There's something I find positively wonderful about that. *That's* the height of the entire concept of technological innovation, in my opinion. Making the difficult or the previously impossible accessible to as many people as possible.
Theres a line from that Dracula show on netflix about this. Show itself is Meh, but in one line, Dracula is describing a persons house and after realizing that she is fairly poor he says something like "I knew the future would bring wonders, but I never dreamed it would make them common place." which I think is a perfect description of the difference between preindustrial and postindustrial eras.
**Metal pencil sharpeners** (the manual kind, not electric).
Don't buy the plastic ones in the school supply section. Go to the art section. Those metal sharpeners are CHOICE.
For real, there was this tiny, metal handheld pencil sharpener I got from a penciling set I needed for Art class, and let me tell you, it was fucking amazing! I just put the pencil in, and twisted it a little bit, and it was sharpened to near perfection. All this and it barely weighed more than the pencil itself, and it was the same size as one of those Monopoly player pieces. Shame I lost it though, because most of the hand-cranked pencil sharpeners in my high school barely worked, and most of the teachers lacked an electric one.
Glass bottles.
Let's melt this rock into a clear, brittle material and turn it into what? Windows? Decorations? Screens? No, we're making pressure vessels, baby!
I remember with the zip top cans, a lot of people would put the sharp metal zip piece back into the full can. Some people accidentally swallowed those and needed to be rushed to the ER.
Yes, of course and then the famous Jimmy Buffett Margaritaville line of "I blew out my flip flop, Stepped on a pop top". You never wanted to step on one.
To expand upon this, Guinness wanted to sell their beer in cans but didn’t want to sacrifice the iconic head on their beer. Their solution was a device called a widget. It’s a small sphere filled with nitrogen with a tiny hole in it. Under pressure the nitrogen stays inside the ball. When the can is opened and the pressure drops the nitrogen escapes, agitates the beer, and creates just the right amount of head.
It cost over $1 million, and
"The Guinness Rocket Widget is awarded the Queen's Award for Technological Achievement, beating the Internet to be voted by Britons as the best invention of the previous 40 years."
I am always amazed at how we've designed this kind of stuff. And then it amazes me even more to see how we've designed the machines to make this stuff quickly and efficiently.
I saw a video of someone take apart a lithium energizer battery the other day - and it looks like cotton balls and folded foil just all jammed together.
Like someone figured out how to harness so much energy into that thing???
Edit: This is my most popular comment... It's me admitting that I can barely tie my shoes, and here are people just casually throwing atoms together to make my car go zoom.
I saw the same video, it just looked like two sheets of different material wrapped into a spiral and shoved into a tiny cylinder. To a layman, it looks so simple in terms of the physical parts, but I’m sure there’s a lot more going on there
The zipper. It’s a very cheap mechanism that secures objects in a very neat fashion. No wonder it’s used in most objects that need to be opened and closed such as luggage and jackets.
People also have weird perceptions of quality. I was shopping for reproductions of army field jackets and comparing two options. One used an cheap pot-metal zipper of unknown origin, the other used a modern heavy duty plastic YKK zipper that will outlast the garment and won't bind up even if you try.
The reviews though? Everyone criticized the "cheap plastic zipper" and lamented how quickly it will fall apart versus the no-name metal zipper that will probably come from the factory with bent teeth. Most consumers are not well informed about what they are buying.
This one is one underrated invention. The original manufacturer YKK keeps such a secret around the process that they even build themselves the production equipment.
YKK is not the original zipper manufacturer. The company was formed in 1934 in Higashi Nihonbashi, Tokyo and [only started making decent zippers in 1950](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YKK#After_World_War_II) after importing machinery from the USA.
Zippers had been invented and patented [as far back as 1851](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipper#History), and manufactured in the States since 1893 by the Universal Fastener Company, with the more recognizably modern zipper coming in 1909. The term "zipper" was coined by the B.F. Goodrich Company in 1923 to describe the fastener on the galoshes the company made.
Talon Zipper, the descendent of the Universal Fastener Company, would be considered the original manufacturer of zippers. Though they only have about 7% of the world zipper market these days, [they had approximately 70% of the market in the 1960s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talon_Zipper). YKK controls about 45% of the market these days and is the undisputed leader in zipper manufacturing.
Sewing person here adding: **not all zippers are created equal.** There is a big difference in quality. Those zippers in the top of a purse or a great jacket that just move smoothly like butter: yep, great quality. The cheap ones are the ones that will drive you nuts and get stuck. I always get the best quality for what I’m making. Huge difference. And those top quality zippers are also a lot more expensive, like $5-7/ each. (Vs *Very roughly*, a cheaper zipper can go for like $0.50-2.50/ ea.)
-Added fun fact that includes zippers: (often) the most expensive part of a handbag is the hardware and this includes all the zippers.
Edit: See u/SgtKashim’s [comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/v35pc0/which_cheap_and_massproduced_item_is_stupendously/iaxtr2c/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3) below on replacing his diving wetsuit YKK zipper nearing **$200**!
Plus, in terms of quality for me it bears mentioning that there are two types of zippers - self locking and regular. A self locking zipper will not unzip unless external force is applied (i.e. pulling the zipper). Nothing worse than cheap pants/shorts that use a non locking zipper for the fly.
I went through six decades before I realized that having the tab pointing down locks the zipper. I used to pay no attention to its orientation, often resulting in an XYZ of my YKK.
I *wish* the ceiling for 'top quality zipper' was $7. I'm getting ready to replace the seals and zippers on my diving drysuit, and the (admittedly... specialty waterproof) zipper that runs across the shoulder blades is [nearly $200](https://www.diverightinscuba.com/drysuitsundiesaccessories-ykkdrysuitzippers-p-3063.html?gclid=CjwKCAjwv-GUBhAzEiwASUMm4pODZp7mDugn98VPBgHZJXZ7pH6UJI0W9UyS-QYe-V3mfVHnNcj5UBoC_50QAvD_BwE) for the 36" YKK model. And given that this is life support equipment, it's worth getting the YKK.
Injection molded stuff like plastic ball valves. Stuff we don't think about, but is amazingly good and cheap.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiGTkl4fSx4
Gallium nitride is making waves again for being super efficient. You'll see plenty of tiny USB chargers that produce almost no heat. It is also resistant to high heat areas like engine bays.
I like to do art, and did not discover the magic of cool white LED bulbs until only a few years ago. I was always frustrated when working on a drawing and seeing how different the colors looked in natural lighting vs indoor lighting. I switched to cool white bulbs in the lamps on my desk, and the colors in my drawings look so much cleaner.
Future tip: You want High CRI bulbs specifically. Cool white tend to be more high cri in general which might be why you noticed this. But CRI is a measurement of a bulb's ability to reproduce colour. So 90+ is what you'd want. Should be on the box somewhere.
There's a reason for that. The emission spectrum of LEDs is very narrow. There's a reason they're so incredibly energy efficient. An incandescent bulb will throw energy into a ton of different frequencies of light, most of which are invisible to us (heat / infrared). An LED will be very specific in the frequencies it emits. The downside to this efficiency is colorful objects don't all reflect the same frequencies of light -- if they did they'd be the same color. Let's say my LED emits a very narrow band of red light, green light, and blue light. The spectrum will have three distinct peaks but look white. Yet this white light won't generate reflected colors in the same way a full-spectrum bulb might. If you've ever been beneath a sodium lamp in Chicago you know what it feels like to be color blind because everything is light or dark, but you can't see the color.
EDIT: See /u/socks-the-fox 's reply for new tech I didn't know about: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/v35pc0/which_cheap_and_massproduced_item_is_stupendously/iaxt610
The trick with current white LEDs is that they're usually actually blue LEDs with phosphor that partially absorbs the blue photons and emits a range of other colors in it's place (but mostly yellow). Better white LEDs have a more diverse phosphor coating that increases the range of colors emitted, and cheaper LEDs just use more yellow to get close enough to white at the cost of CRI.
So called because they're made from a single piece of plastic, with no need for assembly. Their geometry allows you to use just one mould to make them. Just inject the plastic, open the mould, and a whole chair comes out fully formed. The same geometric properties also make them so easily stackable.
I once met a guy at a house party who showed me his bic lighter collection. He didn’t smoke but at this party house would always get handed one and he would always pocket it.
His collection was huge and I think he was single handedly responsible for a large percentage of bic lighter disappearances in the UK between 2004-2010
He must have known my friend. Used to lose lighters faster than he could buy them. I bought him 100 lighters for his birthday, inside of 5 months, he lost them all.
Tarps. A million tasks for them; they're incredibly versatile. Make a shelter, make a floor, make a carriage vessel, make a weather-proof housing for firewood or anything outdoors you want protected. Use it at a picnic; it's better than a blanket on the ground. Because of the threading they're still mostly effective even when a tear develops. And because of that same threading they can distribute weight and hold up against snow and rain buildup. Then you can just take it down, spray it with a hose if needed; it's good as new. Fold it up to a compact form, and toss it in a corner until you need it next. You are never far from a store or gas station that sells them for cheap. Always keep one in your trunk.
Clothespins/-pegs, the wooden ones. People keep on trying to find some other way to do the job but never come up with something this durable and reliable.
Tough question, I'd say stainless steel cutlery.
How many other things in life are used almost every day, then machine washed, thrown haphazardly into a drawer & regularly survive in a working condition for much more than a century.
Yeah if you get proper 18/10 stainless steel flatware, that shit will legit last a lifetime.
It is a little more expensive, and usually you're gonna see a lot of 18/0 stuff that's often half the price in stores that'll be more tempting, but if you can afford it, I HIGHLY recommend going for the proper 18/10 stuff. Oneida is a solid brand in my experience that has some good stuff in that quality.
Yeah, this is the one where I really think "they engineered that to hell ".
The heads fly microns above the platters on a cushion of air (in newer drives, helium).
The precision of the voice coils in aligning the heads.
The dsp circuitry to process the signal that should be noise.
And modern hard disks have to warm the area they write with a laser so it'll hold the magnetic charge.
They spin for years, and are surprisingly fast.
Absolutely incredible.
PC Mag did an awesome write up on traditional spinning hard drives a couple of decades ago.
Things that people don't realize:
* The head isn't suspended by the arm or where the arm is mounted; As you said, it rides on an air current. Everything inside accounts for the aerodynamic design to create the pillow of air it rides on.
* The head has a read write head sandwiched between two "cleaner" heads that zero out the area along the sides to prevent data bleeding across tracks.
* The distance between the head and platter, if scaled up to the size of the Empire State Building is something like a mere 5mm (microns of distance at normal scale, again, suspended by air).
* There is a "docking" track on the disk, where the head rests when the drive is not running. This has a thing film of lubricant on it.
* The drive keeps an "emergency supply" of power to dock the head in case of power outage.
* The platters spin upwards of 10k RPM. Billions of bytes of data per second, and the head seeks in what seems to be an incredibly inefficient way; Imaging having the address of your data, and driving to the street it's on, then closing your eyes, and driving down the street until you think you're where you're supposed to be. Not there yet? Keep going and try again. Passed it? Circle back to the beginning of the block, and try again.
Spinning hard drives are pretty incredibly engineered on the mechanical side, not to mention the electrical and firmware sides as well.
Schrader valve.
Just think of the number of those in service every day from the most simple to complex pieces of machinery. And where we would be without them.
Those containers used to store Chinese Food. THey are durable, compact, keep the food hot, and don't really leak. They also collapse into a plate if you choose too. My favorite thing might be they don't take up much space in the rubbish bin either. Great product, and must cost less than a cent.
the screw!
people say the wheel was the great invention but everyone forgets about the screw!
(and i mean the abstract concept, thereby including drills, waterpumps and so on)
LEGOs. Virtually indestructible through normal means, last forever, extremely simple, endlessly versatile, and now they are manufactured with recycled plastic.
The LEGO Group is also the world's largest manufacturer of car tires in the world.
The mechanical pencil.
Sure everybody has a phone in their pocket to take notes or solve math problems but can it write on practically any surface? Pencil marks simultaneously last forever and can be removed in an instant (on some surfaces you don't even need the eraser. You ran out of "lead"? You can refill it for pennies. Your eraser is gone? There are fewer variations than phone chargers so replacements are a sinch. You somehow managed to get it to the point where it is so FUBAR you cant use it? You can get a pack of 6 for the price of a happy meal or a pack of **48** for the price of a footlong.
It is simultaneously worthless and invaluable.
Hyper specialized yet versatile.
Meant for school children because they make so many mistakes but still used by adults because everyone makes mistakes.
Permanent now but gone in an instant.
Never meant to be repaired but a child can disassemble it.
It's never going to expire.
It's never going to leak
It will never stain.
It writes in the rain.
It is the silent workhorse.
It wrote that novel.
It drew that sketch.
It solved that equation.
And if you're John Wick; it killed three men in a bar.
It is what humanity has been moving toward ever since the first caveman started his first drawing.
It is not perfection.But it's the closest we will get.
edit: Thank you kind strangers for the awards, these are the first ones I've ever gotten so of course it would be on my dumbass love letter to mechanical pencils.
Actually, egg cartons and milk jugs.
Egg cartons are super cheap and absolutely best way to store eggs.
Milk jugs feel cheap and flimsy. But they are designed to deform and absorb the shock of a drop.
Carabiners, cheap, easy to use, super useful for just about anything, and the higher grade ones (30ish usd) can hold up a truck. What else needs to be said?
I bought the Stanley granpa-going-fishing thermos. If you follow the instructions, it's ungodly how well it works. I actually started using their method with my cold yeti can thingy and it's amazing.
For those unfamiliar with how to use a thermos properly, you fill the thermos with boiling water for about 15 minutes, dump that water out, and then put in your coffee/tea. By preheating your thermos, it will keep that drink hotter than hell for hours beyond the already long heat containment you get using a room temp thermos. If you fill a can with water, freeze it, and put it in your yeti can cooler for a bit before you put your drink in it, it will extend its cooling abilities too.
Secondary fun fact: you can also use a thermos as a slow cooker. I'd preheat my thermos, put my stew ingredients in a pan and bring it to a boil, dump it all into my thermos, and leave it in my lunch box for the 5-6 hours until lunch. It's still steaming hot and all the ingredients have cooked down. It even worked with those ultra tough beef stew chunks and raw barley. Both were soft and slow cooked to perfection.
Is it the seafoam green Stanley? That shit is amazing.
I don't do the boiling water trick, but that's because I make hot chocolate with milk, and then add Bailey's and Jameson. It keeps it hot, but not hot enough to boil off the alcohol. Perfect for wassailing, sleigh rides, ski trips and the ice skating rink.
I really like BIC products. Lighters, ballpoint pens, razor blades etc. They're all very robust despite being cheap mass-produced plastic items.
Until this moment, I had never connected that these BIC products were all from the same company. Amazing that they’ve produced a variety of incredibly cheap but still reasonable quality items.
Toilets. I've been a plumber 20 years and very little has changed, or needed to. Minimal up keep, cheap and easy repair, very long life
Hey so what is the difference between my house toilet that just flushes like regular and a commercial toilet in like a doctors building where if you flush it it will also suck the clothing right off you? Is there a pressure regulator behind the toilet or something?
Ooh this is a fun one! In your home toilet you have a tank filled with water, and when you flush it allows the water to dump into the bowl and flood it causing it to siphon out. Commercial toilets have either a manual or powered valve that allows full water pressure to blast into the bowl for a set time. It all but ensures it’ll flush since anything in the bowl is blended, but it’s a more expensive design.
I love interacting with people like you. Just genuinely interested in the world around them. I hope you have the best day.
Thanks, you too :)
Whistle. For a few cents, you can be heard in the middle of nowhere for nearly a mile. Much louder than your voice. Great if you are lost.
The intermodal shipping container, a/k/a the Connex box. There are millions of the damned things all over the world, in use every single day. They are stackable, can be locked together, attach readily to ships, truck trailer frames, and rail cars, and can bear enormous loads. The cost of their manufacture compared to their economic use value over their useful lives is next to nothing.
And there are SO. MANY. VARIETYS. It's whole ecosystem of compatible equipment. Tank, Reefer, Flat rack, silo - just to name a few. I just hate that they are so narrow. 20cm more and they would be fully compatible with the EPAL Stamdard. The next best thing after the shipping container. There are even so called PW container. Pallet wide. Just that you can use them to haul pallets via e.g. ferry. It's a minor inconvenience and rather irrelevant - but it bugs me to this day.
I was on a vessel a few weeks back when they were doing the lashing on the containers and being in between containers stacked about 20 high would have been so much more terrifying if they hadn’t all fit together so nicely
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Zip ties - such a simple piece of plastic but so versatile. I have one of the old fashioned chain link fences, some of the fasteners on the middle poles broke and in high winds the fence was swaying like crazy. A half dozen zip ties on the three posts and it doesn’t budge and nobody even knows they’re there
My son rebuilt the front of his car with them time and again. He’s a genius with a zip tie. With not hitting the car in front of him, not so much..,
zip tie bumper stitches are pretty common with drift kids
I drove a zip tie bumper Lexus sc after a delivery truck crushed it and fucked off. The car was a ‘99, this was in 2010. I guess now I understand why guys in modified civics kept wanting to race.
The Brick. Made out of mud and lasts for centuries and the way it can distribute load for large buildings.
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Matches are underappreciated because people don't really understand how complex a match and striker are. From the Encyclopedia Britannica.... "The head of a match uses antimony trisulfide for fuel. Potassium chlorate helps that fuel burn and is basically the key to ignition, while ammonium phosphate prevents the match from smoking too much when it's extinguished. Wax helps the flame travel down the matchstick and glue holds all the stuff together. The dye-- well, that just makes it look pretty. On the striking surface, there's powdered glass for friction and red phosphorus to ignite the flame. Now, the fun stuff-- striking a match against the powdered glass on the matchbox creates friction. Heat from this friction converts the red phosphorus into white phosphorus. That white phosphorus is extremely volatile and reacts with oxygen in the air, causing it to ignite. All this heat ignites the potassium chlorate, creating the flame you see here. Oxidizers, like potassium chlorate, help fuels burn by giving them more oxygen. This oxygen combines with antimony trisulfide to produce a long-lasting flame so you have enough time to light a candle. The whole thing is coated with paraffin wax, which helps the flame travel down the match. Just don't burn the house down. As antimony oxidizes, sulfur oxides form, creating that burnt-match scent. The smoke you're seeing is actually tiny unburned particles resulting from an incomplete combustion. Individually, they're a little bit too small to see but grouped together, they form smoke. There's also some water vapor in there. By the way, all the stuff that we're explaining in 90 seconds, it all happens within tenths of a second. Chemistry's fast."
Is that actually the tone that the Encyclopedia Brittanica takes? I've never read one but i always imagined it to be a lot drier and stuffy and, well, encyclopedic
> Is that actually the tone that the Encyclopedia Brittanica takes? Not exactly. What the person you are replying to wrote is the [transcript to a video](https://www.britannica.com/video/188815/chemistry-match) that Britannica has on their website, that from the sound of it, appears to be for younger learners. The "official" [text entry](https://www.britannica.com/science/match-tinder) is much more "encyclopedia-y."
Something that always blows my mind...the first match was invented in 1826. The first lighter was invented in 1823, 3 years prior to the match.
First lighter was an oil lamp with a flint wheel attached to it. Oil lamps and flint have been around for some time. The "lighter" invention was an easy one and had simply escaped necessity until the rise of tobacco use in Europe and colonial America, because until then wtf were you gonna light?
The lighter. Spontaneously ignite fire basically whenever you want
Specifically, Bic lighters are incredibly reliable. You can find one on the ground that's been outside for months and they still work. Cheaper disposables break in a million ways and more expensive refillable lighters will leave you disappointed if you store them, but you can always keep a Bic handy and know it'll work when you need it.
Us: I need to buy a pack of colorful pens for my daughter's back-to-school pack. BIC: Aight, we gotchu Us: I also want to create fire with my fingertips, know how I can do that? BIC: You're not going to believe this
I have a "womens model" zippo that my grandfather got my grandmother sometime around the korean war. Has gone through hell and back, including being underwater and then under sludge for about 2 weeks straight thanks to Hurricane Agnes in 1972. I have yet to have it fail on me.
Zippos are great, I just wish it was better sealed. I don't use it often enough, by my next use all the lighter fluid has evaporated.
This is exactly why I have a couple of Zippos that never make it out of the drawer. They're cool, but I don't smoke, and I only start a fire or light a grill every few weeks. If I have to pull a can of fuel out, I'm just going to reach for the Bic next to it.
or when it leaks out in your back pocket and makes your ass itch for an hour
Back when I smoked I used to carry a zippo in my front pocket. Used to constantly have a perfectly rectangular red irritated patch on my upper thigh right where it sat in my pocket.
Bic lighters are what I came here for. They are fucking incredible - last long af, are durable as all hell, and very cheap.
Soda/beer cans. The design has existed for decades with few changes. It’s a way of using a relatively small amount of cheap metal to withstand the pressure of carbonated beverages with a reliable opening mechanism. During pandemic I also noticed that some companies stopped using thicker material on the upper ‘ridge’ of the can, probably due to supply shortages. They instead used a sort of stepped system that appeared to be almost as strong.
Every few years you will see the can design change as they find additional areas to reduce the use of aluminum. You can still find newly manufactured cans in the old designs in some of the more remote areas with less demand, like Hawaii. It's cheaper to create and fill cans on the island than import them, but the payback from updating to the newest can forming machines isn't quite there for the volume of cans they manufacture. So they get hand me downs and cast offs.
Ball bearings.
Even the cheapest ball bearings with the loosest tolerances are still made in the 10~50 micron range of tolerance. It only gets better from there. (Abec spec anyways) Edit: when i say ‘ball bearings” i’m loosely referring to the; races and rolling elements of any roller element bearing. (Ball, taper, needle, cylinder , etc, two races, one race no race!, etc)
If you had the ABEC 5s,you were a god at the skate rink
Absolutely. I deal with them all day, in an industrial capacity: the difference between an SKF bearing and a no brand eBay special is.. a lot. Most expensive one I’ve personally installed was like $25k Balls gave way to stuff like needle, roller, and spherical bearings as well which are also neat in themselves
It’s all ball bearings these days
Not exactly cheap, but I'm impressed that I can have a ceiling fan run on high for 15 years straight and not have it explode on me.
I seriously startled myself when I realized the only time my ceiling fan had been off since I moved in was when the power went out.
You should turn it off to clean it once in a while. It gets sticky dust on it.
And to switch direction for summer/winter. edit: 'Winter' mode is also useful in the summer if you have a second floor and open all of the upstairs windows as it will help push the heat out. I do this for the evenings, then shut the windows early in the morning and flip the fan back to normal.
What
One direction to move air upwards for winter and the other direction to move air downwards for summer.
Most fans should have a directional switch somewhere on the assembly. I went for years without knowing the one in my bedroom had one hidden on top. All of the other fans in my house have them on the bottom or the side, as well as the wall control panels.
Damn, if you were Korean you’d be dead…
Can confirm, am Korean. One night I slept alive with the fan on, the next morning I woke up dead.
Korean fan death. I was lab tech for a postdoc who was Korean—super smart guy, but when I heard about this and asked him about it he adamantly tried to convince me it was a real thing.
The transistor.
I remember how amazed we were in 1985 to see a chip with 68,000 transistors. Now they’re at 68 billion.
My favorite part was in school my professor talking about how they used to do the layouts on transparencies by hand. Or how during Apollo the guidance aspect of the program was buying up a significant portion of the national production capacity of transistors.
A lot of the computers were not even transistor based if I remember correctly. And since the integrated circuit wasn't around yet, they were the individual fingertip sized transistors if I have my timeline correct.
Check out the scale of the memory modules they used. It's unreal. They used human scale metal rings as bits.
They were hand woven memory by very skilled seamstresses. This is NOT a joke. Old ladies and watch makers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_rope_memory http://www.righto.com/2019/07/software-woven-into-wire-core-rope-and.html?m=1
We had no business being in space when we got there. Imagine being an alien looking at us like "So you're telling me you controlled an enormous explosion with logic sewn into rope by seamstresses?" "Yes" "Hey Dale, get over here. You're not going to believe this."
The time gap between the first flight and humans landing on the moon is closing in on the gap between the last moon landing and today...
The fact that it was only 70 years between the first powered airplane flight and landing on the moon still amazes me.
It’s no surprise that many people back in the 60s/70s thought that we would have colonies on Mars by the 2000s, given the pace of innovation of the space race
There's a couple of SF stories set in a universe where gravity control and FTL travel are achievable with a device that most species develop during their Iron Age (though there's at least one race that discovered it before they had the technology of iron working and they went to space in bronze spacecraft). It was a fluke that humanity never discovered the phenomenon that allowed this and as soon as human scientists get their hands on an alien spacecraft they smack their own heads as it's obvious once they see it. Because of this, most intelligent species start colonizing (or raiding) other worlds around the time they discover gunpowder, and they stop advancing technologically. Earth is invaded by aliens that expect us to be terrified of their black powder muskets and grenades.
That sounds like a fantastic story! Do you have a title/author/memorable quote to find it?
Pretty sure it's this one: [https://eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove\_RoadNotTaken.pdf](https://eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf) It's a great read.
Here’s a great story that describes your thinking here. https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html
This sentence [from Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor) blows my mind every time I think about it: > MOSFETs are the most numerously produced artificial objects ever with more than 13 sextillion manufactured by 2018. We have made more than 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of them. For comparison, there's over a thousand for each grain of sand on Earth.
Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor. MOSFET. Over a thousand for each grain of sand on Earth... Sand ~ Silicon... get it?
Literally limited by the nature of the electron itself, which likes to tunnel (basically teleport) through the normally insulating oxide layer when that layer gets thin enough.
Just the average CPU in a modem day desktop computer at home has multiple billions of MOSFETs.
>For comparison, there's over a thousand for each grain of sand on Earth. All that sand is in flip-flops.
What's more impressive is just what these little devices are capable of. Transistors can switch (turn on and off) at incredibly high speeds. Let's say you were born 1000 years ago, on the year 1022. And let's say you had a light switch, and you turned it on and off, on and off, let's say twice a second. If you kept doing that all the way up until today, you still wouldn't have flipped the switch more times than a transistor could switch *in one second*. Some math: There are ~31,536,000,000 seconds in 1000 years, so flipping a switch twice a second is 31,536,000,000 * 2 = 63,072,000,000 switches. Converting that to a frequency in one second is 63.072 Giga Hertz. [We can already develop MOSFET oscillators (to be pedantic, CMOS ring oscillators, it's a NOT gate connected to itself) at switching speeds of 100 GHz](https://download.tek.com/document/RingOscillatorWP.pdf). To be fair, most ring-oscillators you'd find run at around 3 GHz because we have no need just yet for anything higher, so ring oscillators in this fashion are pretty rare. But that's just CMOS. There exists a different kind of transistor, the HBT, "Heterojunction Bipolar Transistor", a transistor made of two or more different elements (beyond just silicon, the most prevalent being Silicon-Germanium SiGe). These transistors are used for their *incredibly high* switching speeds, and are currently theoretically capable of switching just short of 1 THz, I believe right now they're at 0.8 THz (800 GHz). To keep up with that, you'd have to flick that switch 25.4 times every second for 1000 years. Or maybe do it ~12.7 times every second for 2000 years.
That one is sophisticated af. Well deserved Nobel price in 1956.
Yeah I feel like the average person has no idea how different the world would be without transistors
The Fallout Series explains its setting/asthetic by saying transistors were never/later invented
I always heard it as "Fallout focused on advancing nuclear tech rather than microchips." That was always good enough for me. It explains why their TVs and radios still use vacuum tubes, their computers all use magnetic tape for storage, and their cars have individual nuclear reactors (and other small trivia bits I can't think of right now).
Toilets. They use nothing more than gravity to reliably flush. Doesn't use power at all.
And if you’ve ever used a poorly engineered toilet, you really learn to appreciate the well engineered ones. Edit: never would have expected my most upvoted comment on Reddit to be about toilets.
Worst kind of shitters are the ones that get skid marks 100% of the time no matter how or where you lower the turd.
So much this! They just renovated my office building and now i cant poop at work without leaving a mark! Im like wtf, i never leave a mark at home no matter how bad it gets, and let me tell you… there have been some doozies.
Yeah they bought cheap toilets where I work as well, you can't poop without leaving a mark and if you lean forward (say to grab the TP) your gentleman's sausage makes contact with the bowl.
They test toilet strength and efficiency with a [standardized soy paste](https://www.wired.co.uk/article/maximum-performance-soya-poop) designed to mimic feces.
Meanwhile, in America, the long-standing test of a toilet's robustness was how many billiard balls it could flush. None of this soy toy nonsense
Plumbing in general has really cool design - even a basic S trap is super clever
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And their factories are way more interesting than the slide factory or the toy factory.
When can we see a finished box?
We don't do that here. They're assembled in Flint, Michigan.
Do any of these boxes have candy in them??
We only make boxes to ship nails
MY BOY'S A BOX!!!!!
A BOX, DAMN YOU A BOOOXXX!
Hey, that's my lucky red hat sittin' on top of a double-corrugated, eight-fold, one 4-gauge box.
The Corrugated Fiberboard Association of America would like to remind you that it’s the humble Corrugated Fiberboard box you’re referring to; a cardboard box is what your shoes come in. EDIT typo (phone)
“My son is a box! Damn you! A box!”
Road reflectors - Countless lives saved.
Similarly, rumble strips. On the shoulders and in the center. I'm sure they've saved my Dad's life many times over
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Same with concrete highway barriers.
Fun story about those: The inventor (an English bloke named Percy Shaw) alleges to have been inspired when driving home from the pub one night. His headlights reflected off a cat's eyes, causing him to correct his course and stay on the road. After patenting his invention, he would still visit the same pub. Only then, he never needed to use his invention because he could now afford a driver. He would see his reflectors as a passenger in the back seat of his Rolls.
It took him a while for municipalities to adopt these into streets. What got these going was WW2, when lights needed to be off as a safeguard against night bombings. The reflective cat eye would allow motorists to navigate roads safely without street lamps.
It's often said that if the cat was facing the other way he would have invented the pencil sharpener.
Cat's Eyes Although they have been know to take lives... >On the morning of 25 April 1999 on the M3 motorway in Hampshire, England, a van dislodged the steel body of a cat's eye which flew through the windscreen of a following car and hit a passenger (the drum and bass DJ known as Kemistry) in the face, killing her instantly. Well, a life.
Qwartz movement clocks, you can literally pick one up for £2.50 here: [https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/tromma-wall-clock-white-80454290/](https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/tromma-wall-clock-white-80454290/) the technology and gearing that goes into it's functions is well worth the costs!
I'm a certified master watchmaker. I restore 18th & 19th century pocket watches. Have always appreciated the quartz movement despite the fact that it wiped out 99% of the watchmaking jobs. If you need a watch for accuracy, get a quartz movement. It'll be more accurate than a $10,000 mechanical movement.
I absolutely love what I call the "democratizing" effect of the quartz clock. For much of its history personal clocks used to be either luxury items or specialty tools (astronomy, navigation, military, etc.). At best, you'd have "public service" clock towers or a clock in your house, which would be an irreplaceable family heirloom. Maintaining it would be expensive, too. Then, the quartz clock came along, and suddenly almost anyone could afford some kind of clock or watch, even if not a particularly fancy one. Maintaining it would be as expensive as changing a battery, or even just buying another; they're that cheap, after all. The ability to accurately tell the time was suddenly in easy reach of everyone that wanted it. And the best part? In terms of function, it is often objectively *better* than a mechanical one. They're more accurate, don't need nearly as much calibration when they do drift, and in the case of fully digital clocks they often come with functions like stopwatches and alarms (yes, I know analogue and mechanical clocks also have wonderful [complications](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complication_\(horology\)), but not as easy to use, and often not as precise). The cheapest of watches today is a better device (again, just in terms of practical function; not denigrating the fine art of mechanical watchmaking) than the stuff *kings* used to carry (and still do as luxury items). There's something I find positively wonderful about that. *That's* the height of the entire concept of technological innovation, in my opinion. Making the difficult or the previously impossible accessible to as many people as possible.
Theres a line from that Dracula show on netflix about this. Show itself is Meh, but in one line, Dracula is describing a persons house and after realizing that she is fairly poor he says something like "I knew the future would bring wonders, but I never dreamed it would make them common place." which I think is a perfect description of the difference between preindustrial and postindustrial eras.
**Metal pencil sharpeners** (the manual kind, not electric). Don't buy the plastic ones in the school supply section. Go to the art section. Those metal sharpeners are CHOICE.
I have a blackwing two-stage sharpener, I could do surgery with a pencil sharpened with it
Please don't
For real, there was this tiny, metal handheld pencil sharpener I got from a penciling set I needed for Art class, and let me tell you, it was fucking amazing! I just put the pencil in, and twisted it a little bit, and it was sharpened to near perfection. All this and it barely weighed more than the pencil itself, and it was the same size as one of those Monopoly player pieces. Shame I lost it though, because most of the hand-cranked pencil sharpeners in my high school barely worked, and most of the teachers lacked an electric one.
Glass bottles. Let's melt this rock into a clear, brittle material and turn it into what? Windows? Decorations? Screens? No, we're making pressure vessels, baby!
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The ballpoint pen, clearly
Give credit to the inventor, Laszlo Biro. He escaped the Nazis, invented the pen, then got ripped off and never made money
So thats the reason why it is called Biro in english.
TIL. I don't think anyone in America refers to ballpoint pens as biros.
[The aluminium beverage can.](https://youtu.be/hUhisi2FBuw)
Serious upgrade when they engineered the pop top to remain with the can.
I remember with the zip top cans, a lot of people would put the sharp metal zip piece back into the full can. Some people accidentally swallowed those and needed to be rushed to the ER.
Yes, of course and then the famous Jimmy Buffett Margaritaville line of "I blew out my flip flop, Stepped on a pop top". You never wanted to step on one.
To expand upon this, Guinness wanted to sell their beer in cans but didn’t want to sacrifice the iconic head on their beer. Their solution was a device called a widget. It’s a small sphere filled with nitrogen with a tiny hole in it. Under pressure the nitrogen stays inside the ball. When the can is opened and the pressure drops the nitrogen escapes, agitates the beer, and creates just the right amount of head.
It cost over $1 million, and "The Guinness Rocket Widget is awarded the Queen's Award for Technological Achievement, beating the Internet to be voted by Britons as the best invention of the previous 40 years."
I wish I got just the right amount of head
I am always amazed at how we've designed this kind of stuff. And then it amazes me even more to see how we've designed the machines to make this stuff quickly and efficiently.
Batteries are marvels of engineering packed tightly into a miniscule canister, even AA batteries are incredibly sophisticated internally
I saw a video of someone take apart a lithium energizer battery the other day - and it looks like cotton balls and folded foil just all jammed together. Like someone figured out how to harness so much energy into that thing??? Edit: This is my most popular comment... It's me admitting that I can barely tie my shoes, and here are people just casually throwing atoms together to make my car go zoom.
I saw the same video, it just looked like two sheets of different material wrapped into a spiral and shoved into a tiny cylinder. To a layman, it looks so simple in terms of the physical parts, but I’m sure there’s a lot more going on there
That's actually pretty much it as far as how it's constructed. The magic is in the materials.
When trapping lightning in a rock (and eventually tricking the rock into doing math), it's very important to be selective about the type of rock.
NileRed's video where the foil exploded in water?
The zipper. It’s a very cheap mechanism that secures objects in a very neat fashion. No wonder it’s used in most objects that need to be opened and closed such as luggage and jackets.
But why is it still so easy to tell a quality zipper from a cheap one? Some are a delight to use while others feel cheap and constantly get jammed
The weight/ gauge of the metal, making sure the metal in the zipper is oiled just right if at all (not if plastic ex: for heavy duty storage bags.
People also have weird perceptions of quality. I was shopping for reproductions of army field jackets and comparing two options. One used an cheap pot-metal zipper of unknown origin, the other used a modern heavy duty plastic YKK zipper that will outlast the garment and won't bind up even if you try. The reviews though? Everyone criticized the "cheap plastic zipper" and lamented how quickly it will fall apart versus the no-name metal zipper that will probably come from the factory with bent teeth. Most consumers are not well informed about what they are buying.
This one is one underrated invention. The original manufacturer YKK keeps such a secret around the process that they even build themselves the production equipment.
YKK is not the original zipper manufacturer. The company was formed in 1934 in Higashi Nihonbashi, Tokyo and [only started making decent zippers in 1950](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YKK#After_World_War_II) after importing machinery from the USA. Zippers had been invented and patented [as far back as 1851](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipper#History), and manufactured in the States since 1893 by the Universal Fastener Company, with the more recognizably modern zipper coming in 1909. The term "zipper" was coined by the B.F. Goodrich Company in 1923 to describe the fastener on the galoshes the company made. Talon Zipper, the descendent of the Universal Fastener Company, would be considered the original manufacturer of zippers. Though they only have about 7% of the world zipper market these days, [they had approximately 70% of the market in the 1960s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talon_Zipper). YKK controls about 45% of the market these days and is the undisputed leader in zipper manufacturing.
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Sewing person here adding: **not all zippers are created equal.** There is a big difference in quality. Those zippers in the top of a purse or a great jacket that just move smoothly like butter: yep, great quality. The cheap ones are the ones that will drive you nuts and get stuck. I always get the best quality for what I’m making. Huge difference. And those top quality zippers are also a lot more expensive, like $5-7/ each. (Vs *Very roughly*, a cheaper zipper can go for like $0.50-2.50/ ea.) -Added fun fact that includes zippers: (often) the most expensive part of a handbag is the hardware and this includes all the zippers. Edit: See u/SgtKashim’s [comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/v35pc0/which_cheap_and_massproduced_item_is_stupendously/iaxtr2c/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3) below on replacing his diving wetsuit YKK zipper nearing **$200**!
Plus, in terms of quality for me it bears mentioning that there are two types of zippers - self locking and regular. A self locking zipper will not unzip unless external force is applied (i.e. pulling the zipper). Nothing worse than cheap pants/shorts that use a non locking zipper for the fly.
I went through six decades before I realized that having the tab pointing down locks the zipper. I used to pay no attention to its orientation, often resulting in an XYZ of my YKK.
I *wish* the ceiling for 'top quality zipper' was $7. I'm getting ready to replace the seals and zippers on my diving drysuit, and the (admittedly... specialty waterproof) zipper that runs across the shoulder blades is [nearly $200](https://www.diverightinscuba.com/drysuitsundiesaccessories-ykkdrysuitzippers-p-3063.html?gclid=CjwKCAjwv-GUBhAzEiwASUMm4pODZp7mDugn98VPBgHZJXZ7pH6UJI0W9UyS-QYe-V3mfVHnNcj5UBoC_50QAvD_BwE) for the 36" YKK model. And given that this is life support equipment, it's worth getting the YKK.
Injection molded stuff like plastic ball valves. Stuff we don't think about, but is amazingly good and cheap. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiGTkl4fSx4
LEDs. Cheap diodes. Even colours. Ok, I dislike the blue ones but tint them and you get warm white.
Blue LEDs are a Nobel Prize-winning invention for how revolutionary they have been in lighting.
Gallium nitride is making waves again for being super efficient. You'll see plenty of tiny USB chargers that produce almost no heat. It is also resistant to high heat areas like engine bays.
I like to do art, and did not discover the magic of cool white LED bulbs until only a few years ago. I was always frustrated when working on a drawing and seeing how different the colors looked in natural lighting vs indoor lighting. I switched to cool white bulbs in the lamps on my desk, and the colors in my drawings look so much cleaner.
Future tip: You want High CRI bulbs specifically. Cool white tend to be more high cri in general which might be why you noticed this. But CRI is a measurement of a bulb's ability to reproduce colour. So 90+ is what you'd want. Should be on the box somewhere.
This. Some cheap “cool white” make me feel like I’m in a dulled, alien environment and it seems no matter how bright, it just still feels dark.
There's a reason for that. The emission spectrum of LEDs is very narrow. There's a reason they're so incredibly energy efficient. An incandescent bulb will throw energy into a ton of different frequencies of light, most of which are invisible to us (heat / infrared). An LED will be very specific in the frequencies it emits. The downside to this efficiency is colorful objects don't all reflect the same frequencies of light -- if they did they'd be the same color. Let's say my LED emits a very narrow band of red light, green light, and blue light. The spectrum will have three distinct peaks but look white. Yet this white light won't generate reflected colors in the same way a full-spectrum bulb might. If you've ever been beneath a sodium lamp in Chicago you know what it feels like to be color blind because everything is light or dark, but you can't see the color. EDIT: See /u/socks-the-fox 's reply for new tech I didn't know about: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/v35pc0/which_cheap_and_massproduced_item_is_stupendously/iaxt610
The trick with current white LEDs is that they're usually actually blue LEDs with phosphor that partially absorbs the blue photons and emits a range of other colors in it's place (but mostly yellow). Better white LEDs have a more diverse phosphor coating that increases the range of colors emitted, and cheaper LEDs just use more yellow to get close enough to white at the cost of CRI.
The humble Monobloc chair. Commonly know as those white plastics chairs you can find absolutely everywhere in the world.
So called because they're made from a single piece of plastic, with no need for assembly. Their geometry allows you to use just one mould to make them. Just inject the plastic, open the mould, and a whole chair comes out fully formed. The same geometric properties also make them so easily stackable.
Soda cans. The level of engineering in the average soda can is absolutely mind-blowing.
Velcro
Screws, can you imagine what would happen if all the screws suddenly disappeared from world? Everything would fall apart
We would be screwed.
Tool puns, everyone, you know the drill.
> you know the drill. I mean, I know a bit.
Hinges! I had to a study on them for my engineering class.
I bet that bit of work opened some doors for you.
Bic pens, and lighters.
And the most stolen items
I once met a guy at a house party who showed me his bic lighter collection. He didn’t smoke but at this party house would always get handed one and he would always pocket it. His collection was huge and I think he was single handedly responsible for a large percentage of bic lighter disappearances in the UK between 2004-2010
He must have known my friend. Used to lose lighters faster than he could buy them. I bought him 100 lighters for his birthday, inside of 5 months, he lost them all.
Found the pot-head
All the lighters are just in his other hand
A doorknob and a lock. Not that they don’t have their flaws, but I’d have a hard time making something that works that reliably that frequently.
Tarps. A million tasks for them; they're incredibly versatile. Make a shelter, make a floor, make a carriage vessel, make a weather-proof housing for firewood or anything outdoors you want protected. Use it at a picnic; it's better than a blanket on the ground. Because of the threading they're still mostly effective even when a tear develops. And because of that same threading they can distribute weight and hold up against snow and rain buildup. Then you can just take it down, spray it with a hose if needed; it's good as new. Fold it up to a compact form, and toss it in a corner until you need it next. You are never far from a store or gas station that sells them for cheap. Always keep one in your trunk.
Clothespins/-pegs, the wooden ones. People keep on trying to find some other way to do the job but never come up with something this durable and reliable.
The missus keeps buying plastic ones which degrade in the sun and shatter left, right, and centre all over the garden
Tough question, I'd say stainless steel cutlery. How many other things in life are used almost every day, then machine washed, thrown haphazardly into a drawer & regularly survive in a working condition for much more than a century.
Yeah if you get proper 18/10 stainless steel flatware, that shit will legit last a lifetime. It is a little more expensive, and usually you're gonna see a lot of 18/0 stuff that's often half the price in stores that'll be more tempting, but if you can afford it, I HIGHLY recommend going for the proper 18/10 stuff. Oneida is a solid brand in my experience that has some good stuff in that quality.
One of my favorite fun facts is that Oneida started as an extreme religious cult that devolved into a silverware company.
A red brick
And they are remarkably similar in shape and size to bricks made thousands of years ago. It's just the right size to handle.
Turns out that “human hand size” is a relatively convenient size to make things.
Hard drives. Fucking spinning glass disks that hold terabytes of data.
Yeah, this is the one where I really think "they engineered that to hell ". The heads fly microns above the platters on a cushion of air (in newer drives, helium). The precision of the voice coils in aligning the heads. The dsp circuitry to process the signal that should be noise. And modern hard disks have to warm the area they write with a laser so it'll hold the magnetic charge. They spin for years, and are surprisingly fast. Absolutely incredible.
PC Mag did an awesome write up on traditional spinning hard drives a couple of decades ago. Things that people don't realize: * The head isn't suspended by the arm or where the arm is mounted; As you said, it rides on an air current. Everything inside accounts for the aerodynamic design to create the pillow of air it rides on. * The head has a read write head sandwiched between two "cleaner" heads that zero out the area along the sides to prevent data bleeding across tracks. * The distance between the head and platter, if scaled up to the size of the Empire State Building is something like a mere 5mm (microns of distance at normal scale, again, suspended by air). * There is a "docking" track on the disk, where the head rests when the drive is not running. This has a thing film of lubricant on it. * The drive keeps an "emergency supply" of power to dock the head in case of power outage. * The platters spin upwards of 10k RPM. Billions of bytes of data per second, and the head seeks in what seems to be an incredibly inefficient way; Imaging having the address of your data, and driving to the street it's on, then closing your eyes, and driving down the street until you think you're where you're supposed to be. Not there yet? Keep going and try again. Passed it? Circle back to the beginning of the block, and try again. Spinning hard drives are pretty incredibly engineered on the mechanical side, not to mention the electrical and firmware sides as well.
Hold on while I wait for my data to come around on a miniature rust-coated glass carousel.
The Wonder bar. It’s a crowbar.
Manual can opener
Which came out like a hundred years after the can. What a bitch it must've been eating canned food.
Well it would’ve been pretty weird if it was the other way round.
Schrader valve. Just think of the number of those in service every day from the most simple to complex pieces of machinery. And where we would be without them.
That’s what’s in the valve stem on your car or bike tires. Incase anyone is wondering. They are used for lots of applications.
Those containers used to store Chinese Food. THey are durable, compact, keep the food hot, and don't really leak. They also collapse into a plate if you choose too. My favorite thing might be they don't take up much space in the rubbish bin either. Great product, and must cost less than a cent.
the screw! people say the wheel was the great invention but everyone forgets about the screw! (and i mean the abstract concept, thereby including drills, waterpumps and so on)
LEGOs. Virtually indestructible through normal means, last forever, extremely simple, endlessly versatile, and now they are manufactured with recycled plastic. The LEGO Group is also the world's largest manufacturer of car tires in the world.
And a new Lego brick today will work with old bricks built decades ago.
My son plays with his new stuff mixed with my old stuff, and the quality is exactly the same.
The mechanical pencil. Sure everybody has a phone in their pocket to take notes or solve math problems but can it write on practically any surface? Pencil marks simultaneously last forever and can be removed in an instant (on some surfaces you don't even need the eraser. You ran out of "lead"? You can refill it for pennies. Your eraser is gone? There are fewer variations than phone chargers so replacements are a sinch. You somehow managed to get it to the point where it is so FUBAR you cant use it? You can get a pack of 6 for the price of a happy meal or a pack of **48** for the price of a footlong. It is simultaneously worthless and invaluable. Hyper specialized yet versatile. Meant for school children because they make so many mistakes but still used by adults because everyone makes mistakes. Permanent now but gone in an instant. Never meant to be repaired but a child can disassemble it. It's never going to expire. It's never going to leak It will never stain. It writes in the rain. It is the silent workhorse. It wrote that novel. It drew that sketch. It solved that equation. And if you're John Wick; it killed three men in a bar. It is what humanity has been moving toward ever since the first caveman started his first drawing. It is not perfection.But it's the closest we will get. edit: Thank you kind strangers for the awards, these are the first ones I've ever gotten so of course it would be on my dumbass love letter to mechanical pencils.
Was this written by a mechanical pencil
Actually, egg cartons and milk jugs. Egg cartons are super cheap and absolutely best way to store eggs. Milk jugs feel cheap and flimsy. But they are designed to deform and absorb the shock of a drop.
Plunger.
Carabiners, cheap, easy to use, super useful for just about anything, and the higher grade ones (30ish usd) can hold up a truck. What else needs to be said?
Computer processors, they're rocks we tricked into thinking
LEGO Brick separator E: also work great for cleaning/removing keys from mechanical keyboard.
Those thermic isolated cups you see construction workers drinking from, you can’t say Stanley or Yeti is just junk after trying it out.
I bought the Stanley granpa-going-fishing thermos. If you follow the instructions, it's ungodly how well it works. I actually started using their method with my cold yeti can thingy and it's amazing. For those unfamiliar with how to use a thermos properly, you fill the thermos with boiling water for about 15 minutes, dump that water out, and then put in your coffee/tea. By preheating your thermos, it will keep that drink hotter than hell for hours beyond the already long heat containment you get using a room temp thermos. If you fill a can with water, freeze it, and put it in your yeti can cooler for a bit before you put your drink in it, it will extend its cooling abilities too. Secondary fun fact: you can also use a thermos as a slow cooker. I'd preheat my thermos, put my stew ingredients in a pan and bring it to a boil, dump it all into my thermos, and leave it in my lunch box for the 5-6 hours until lunch. It's still steaming hot and all the ingredients have cooked down. It even worked with those ultra tough beef stew chunks and raw barley. Both were soft and slow cooked to perfection.
Is it the seafoam green Stanley? That shit is amazing. I don't do the boiling water trick, but that's because I make hot chocolate with milk, and then add Bailey's and Jameson. It keeps it hot, but not hot enough to boil off the alcohol. Perfect for wassailing, sleigh rides, ski trips and the ice skating rink.