invention

Mark Rober visits Zipline and looks at its autonomous delivery drones, including medical and blood deliveries in Rwanda. He demonstrates how the drones' propeller design and cable-lowered delivery pod make them quiet and precise.

Corridor Crew tracks down Disney's lost sodium vapor prism process, used for Mary Poppins-era transparency mattes. They explain how a narrow sodium wavelength and a beam splitter enabled better compositing than green screen.

Veritasium tells the story of how Shuji Nakamura and others made the blue LED, long thought nearly impossible. It covers the materials challenge of gallium nitride and the persistence it took.

Alan Kay speaks at the DEMO Founder School session on why real progress takes invention rather than incremental innovation. He argues for problem-oriented thinking and long-term research funding.

Technology Connections explains how touch lamps work and traces them back through patents to the 1950s, far earlier than most people assume.

A long rebuttal arguing that the Wright Brothers truly invented the airplane, responding to other YouTubers who credit others. It walks through the engineering breakthroughs the Wrights achieved, such as control and wind tunnel work.

Technology Connections examines why light bulbs have the lifespans they do, including the real history of the Phoebus cartel. He shows that bulb life trades off against brightness and efficiency rather than being simple planned obsolescence.

Technology Connections explains how dishwashers work and how to use them well, including detergent use, the prewash cycle and why pre-rinsing hurts. It follows his earlier dishwasher videos.

Tom Scott explains the design of the British BS 1363 plug and socket, including fuses, shutters and safety features, and why he thinks it beats other plugs.

Alexander Rose of the Long Now Foundation describes the design and construction of the 10,000 year clock conceived by Danny Hillis. He covers the project's history, methods, and how different cultures built things to last millennia.

Tim Hunkin's 1987 TV series episode on how vacuum cleaners and related household machines work, remastered and upscaled in 2021. It is part of the six-episode 'Secret Life of Machines' series with hands-on demonstrations of everyday technology.

Technology Connections explains why American cars all had the same standardized sealed-beam headlights until 1957. It covers the regulations behind the design and the effect on night visibility.

Mark Rober builds a glitter-bomb booby-trapped package to take revenge on porch pirates, filming the thieves' reactions. Some reactions were later acknowledged as partially staged.

The official tour video of Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg, the world's largest model railway. It shows the 1,300 square meter layout with trains, aircraft, cars and ships moving around.

Part 1 of an episode of the British educational TV series The Secret Life of Machines, about how vacuum cleaners work and their history. It mixes humor with explanation of household technology.

Electronics hobbyist bigclivedotcom tears down a cheap USB power supply with a manufacturing fault that carries full mains voltage to the USB ports, showing the risk of electric shock.

A short clip showing a person touching an active table saw blade with a finger and walking away unharmed, thanks to SawStop's system that stops the blade within milliseconds of skin contact.

An episode of the Well There's Your Problem podcast on the 1987 Goiania radiological accident in Brazil, based largely on the IAEA report. It goes through the event day by day.

Louis Rossmann examines fuses sold on Amazon that fail to trip at their rated current, including a 2A fuse surviving 8 amps. He uses it to criticize Amazon's lax control over safety-relevant products.

Mark Rober builds a machine that plays the Cyclone arcade game with perfect timing and discovers the game is rigged so that perfect play still loses. The video explains the physics and electronics tricks behind carnival-style skill games.

Thunderf00t debunks the Fontus self-filling water bottle, arguing that pulling meaningful amounts of water from air with a small solar-powered device is thermodynamically impractical.

Mark Rober spends eleven months building and testing a glitter bomb package with GPS and cameras to get back at porch pirates who steal parcels.

Mark Rober builds a third-generation glitter bomb trap and films it catching package thieves, with phone trackers and fart spray included. It shows the engineering behind the build and the comic payoff.

A one-minute Volvo Trucks demo of the Collision Warning with Emergency Brake system on a fully loaded 40-ton tractor-trailer, avoiding a rear-end collision on a test track.

A SAAMI-produced training video for firefighters explaining what happens when sporting ammunition burns, including that unchambered cartridges lack the energy to penetrate much. It includes test footage of ammunition in fires.

A short video illustrating the hazard of pressure differentials (delta P) in commercial diving, where a pressure difference creates enormous force on a diver. It is a safety-oriented look at diving accidents.

LockPickingLawyer picks an Amazon's Choice 'high security' padlock in about two seconds.

Promotional video from Zapata Racing showing Franky Zapata flying the Flyboard Air prototype, claiming autonomous flight to 10,000 feet, 150 km/h top speed and 10 minutes of endurance.

Gravity Industries tests its jet suit for paramedic mountain rescue with the Great North Air Ambulance in the Lake District, reaching a casualty in 90 seconds versus a 25-minute climb.

Mark Rober's holiday video features the near-final version of his glitter bomb package, built to deter thieves. It is part of his series of elaborate revenge traps against porch pirates and car thieves.

Toyota's short promo clip showing a Mirai carbon-fiber hydrogen tank shot with a .50 caliber round at point blank range. The bullet pierces the tank, which does not burst, and the gas simply escapes and disperses.

A short silent video from the US Consumer Product Safety Commission warning consumers to stop using the Peloton Tread+. It shows a child being pulled under the treadmill, and it preceded Peloton's recall.

3Blue1Brown explores infinite sums from convergent to divergent, with an introduction to the 2-adic metric, themed on the cycle between discovering and inventing mathematics.

Part 3 of Kirby Ferguson's Everything is a Remix series, using Apple and the iPhone to show how invention builds on copying and combining prior ideas. It argues that creativity and innovation are inseparable from copying.

Episode 8 of the Fall of Civilizations podcast, a roughly two and a half hour history of the Sumerians. It covers their mysterious origins, invention of writing and mathematics, great early cities and eventual collapse, with myths, proverbs and recreated music.

Alan Kay's 2015 talk on the power of simplicity, arguing that systems become simpler by building on more sophisticated fundamental building blocks and that big research horizons drove invention at Xerox PARC. It ranges across computing, tools and scaling software.

Adam Conover's talk at a millennial marketing conference argues that generations are an unscientific, condescending idea and that millennials do not exist as a real category. The description notes that researcher Jean Twenge later said he misrepresented some of her work.

Irving Finkel of the British Museum lectures at the Royal Institution on the invention and decipherment of cuneiform writing in Mesopotamia, and why it is so hard to translate.

Skateboarding pioneer Rodney Mullen talks about how the open skate community and its environments drive the invention of new tricks out of pure passion. He draws parallels to collaboration and open source.

A 1990 Lotus sales demo of Improv, a spreadsheet built for the NeXT computer that rethought the grid with named categories and multiple views. The uploader, who tested it at Price Waterhouse, presents it as an early, innovative vision of the spreadsheet.