Seasons 01 to Season 4 truly are one of my favorite seasons among the whole history of Mythbusting. I mean, come on, it's these seasons where every single thing is unfiltered!
After season 4, it seemed to feel much more about TV production quality and following a plan and formula and putting on a performance rather than just a team of people trying to figure interesting things out for themselves and showing us the process. Love all the mythbusters, but early on it was a raw and fresh product and was a pure type of entertainment that makes me happy
@@comradeurod9805 yeah it does. I wonder if it was a synthetic structure with the same density as bone? This would enable her to say she's going to see what it would do to real bones? That's a guess, I don't remember how she phrased it.
It was also because the "outside consulting gig" (the origin of that device) is for an "adult entertainment" company, according to a posting in reddit. Knowing that, It will give you a new perspective if you re-watch that segment.
Yes! See, these are the kinds of things that convinced me, that mechanical engineering, is just straight up 'black magic', cause you are correct, that little box making that giant bridge vibrate IS incredible, and for me personally it just blows my mind that if you ask one of those wizards (mechanical engineers) 'why?' they'll say 'Ok, well, you asked' and then show you some papers with weird runes and symbols and incantations such as 'Fourier Analysis' and you're like, yeah, this is magic, because once they understand and study the scripture then they bend and shape the universe around them. Straight up wizards
I'd love to see then repeat this experiment but with bricks and plaster around a steel frame. I really think the vibrating metal would cause serious issues for other building materials in the same building.
This episode in particular was a huge part of my childhood. The moment at 40:39 in particular. I had a group of friends I watched this with, and from the moment we saw it, all one of us would have to do is say: "I taste beans in the air", and all of us would burst out laughing.
15:44 A couple of things wrong with this approach. Firstly, the way a beam is 'fixed' changes which modes it experiences, and thus what the natural frequency is. They might be under the assumption that having it 'floating' on wires makes it not supported, but thats not true. The wires are in tension, and hence the beam is constrained in the vertical direction (as long as the 'preload' force provided by gravity is not exceeded, which for the simple hammer excitement it wont). I.e. in the vertical plane this is a two-way supported/fixed beam, where the natural frequency is the first mode (a standing wave with a period of 2x the length between strings). It is unconstrained in the horizontal plane though, and frequency components there are more unpredictable (depends on the internal mass distribution/stiffness/density of the beam/material) with its lowest frequency component being determined by the mass of the beam and the length of the string (its a swing after all). Secondly measuring the resonance frequency of the full beam, but then adding the excitement changes the dynamics. The system goes from a beam with two sides fixed, to a mass with two beams, of which one side of each beam is fixed. One could approximate this more accurately by a mass/spring system (where the spring is formed by the parallel addition of the two 'beam pieces' with a linear stiffness (taking into account no rotation can occur at the beam end). You add a substantial amount of mass thus the eigen frequency is likely going to be much lower than previously. So contrary to what they were doing, they would have likely needed a much lower frequency to excite the (modified) system. 21:46 Also something important they seem to neglect is the location of excitation. If the excitation is at a natural frequency (or multiple, as shown here), it should be at the appropriate point. If you perform the excitation at a nodule of said frequency, you will get no response. Regardless, a structure will fail if you manage to get enough strain, for long enough, to hit fatigue limits. If you want this to happen with mechanical resonance with a very low input excitation you would need very low damping of the critical frequency (or a high Q-factor of the design). My profession is not in civil engineering, but I wouldn't be surprised if Q-factor is an important property in structure design, and that damping is sufficiently applied (if required) to reduce it. Building a high Q oscillator in itself is quite challenging, so I wouldn't be shocked if the material properties themselves have sufficient damping to prevent this mode from ever being excited too easily.
@@AkiSan0 As if any input 20+ years ago would have made a difference after the show already airing. That doesn't mean that it isn't a good opportunity to learn and share knowledge, such that others can get a bit of a deeper understanding. Or what do you suppose is wrong with that?
this is golden info. thanks for going to the effort of posting it. i had many a questions about this topic too. i am a sound guy but not an acoustics guy. so this was very interesting to me.
I'm no civil engineer either, yet i am an engineering physicist and i think i can relate to the problem at hand with an analogue of vibrational modes such as in IR spectroscopy: the molecular vibrational modes are always calculated in reference with the normal modes and in a crystal lattice structure (meaning a structure repeating itself periodically) it correlates to the molecular "nodes" that is the lattice parameter(s) of a "unit cell" (spanning 14 types of Bravais Lattices - 14 different types of arrangement in 3D space). When you think of - say a cube made of springs in wireframe, the vibrational mode is most prominent when you flex the spring-structure from the nodes that connect the strings (i.e. the corner of the cube). If Tesla positioned his device on these intersecting beam "nodes" and managed to build enough reciprocating momentum (like Grant's linear motor) to overcome the attenuation (dampening) of the concrete structure, he might have achieved the effect he described. Still, he needed to know the exact natural frequencies of both steel and bulk cement yet it's hard to predict the latter because it has a porous structure and high attenuation whatsoever.
idk what exactly you all are talking about but i have seen and heard of several soldiers being told not to march across bridges because some marching can make the bridge really unstable
I was in my 20s when this showed first aired, and I loved it. Making science fun 😊 It is of course sad to know that Grant is no longer with us :( When the show aired, I was in a very difficult time in my life (precursors of depression which I am battling to this day). Watching the show allowed me to escape the darkness for a while.
The show didn’t do anything without insurance and insurance would never let them do that without permission, proper permits and planning. One of the purposes of their scaled testing for myths, was demonstrating their intentions and the possible outcome, for the insurance company.
I agree with many comments, the actuator needs a seperate feedback mechanism, e.g. an accelerometer feeding back to the actuator. What they didn't allow for is using a fixed input frequency when the target starts to 'ring' the increase in amplitude usually also changes the resonant frequency, and that means they fall out of tune. We did this at various scales in college, decades ago, without an active feedback the target changes resonant frequency due to fatigue and work-hardening and other losses which make it impossible to get beyond a certain point. I'd like to see Adam, or anyone else, revisit this with accelerometers and phase-shift feedback.
You don't necessarily need feedback or exact frequency adjustment if the trigger is carefully designed. You want the actuator to go off when the actuator attached to the structure is moving at maximum speed/is near the origin. That way you get the most power from any force you apply, since power is force times speed (proof: take the equation energy is force times distance and differentiate by time). That works at any frequency. (That's actually how most electric clock pendulums work, the magnet is near the centre).
I'm curious if they would have had different results using harmonics of the correct frequency. It's actually kind of odd to me that they didn't try it.
When i was like 7 i had a similar experience to the laval lamp story but luckily nobody got hurt. My mom was making a pot of tea while doing the dishes. She turned on the wrong stove burner, which had a stack of plates on it. I was walking through the kitchen and the stack blew up, shooting hot shards of glass everywhere but me and my mom, god bless😂 theres still burn marks on the old linoleum underneath our new floor boards
38:37 I did hear of someone who put a frozen can of coke in a pot of water on the stove to thaw it out quickly, then they got distracted and left it until it exploded, embedding shards of aluminium in the ceiling and walls, as well as spraying boiling water and sugar on everything.
tesla's earthquake machine works, but not on a scale they say it does. here's an experiment that you can try at home. you need a window that you can break or just big piece of glass in a frame. attach that frame so it won't shake or move (like a window on house), then take any solid object and start tapping on it. not too gently, but not too hard either. don't smash it, just tap on it. don't use ceramics as it might break the glass on first hit, like that special glass hammer that has hardened tip. use a fork or a spoon or something, keep tapping and eventually, more or less, perfect circle will fall out. i've done it myself 3-4 times and it works every time, i even have old pictures of it. this is caused due vibration, it's like dropping something into water, it makes circular waves. same thing happens inside every material and eventually they'll break. rubber and plastic is extremely durable against vibrational waves, but more solid materials like glass and concrete are much less resistant to this kind of vibrations. i can totally see this device breaking entire building, but not in a way they described it. what tesla said that at first nothing happend, yes that's correct, but it won't make entire house shake. i'm fairly certain if you put that kind of device against support pillar on building and leave it on for a day or two, it will make the support pillar crack and break. you just need right frequency. in other words, it won't cause earthquakes, but it can break things for sure.
i think they focused more on the "earthquake" explanation that tesla gave to the cops than a machine that would cause the machinery to shake and possibly dislodge bricks and stuff off an old building a good generator not secured can cause issues so i can see something attached to the building framework would knock a bit of structure down plus a building vibrating at 18/19 hz could cause issues with people causing dizziness and confusion which fits the description of the situation outside
a building is designed to stay up against its own weight... a bridge is designed to be rigid and span a distance... are they hitting the note of a single beam, or the entire asembly/span? as shown by the linear actuator they eventually chose, a jackhammer doesnt quite give the same result as the tesla oscillator... something about a jackhammer being designed to hit a hammer... not oscillate and shake the user. the energy goes into the chisel, not the operator holding the machine. pull apart a jackhammer, theres an oscillating piston, be it driven by air or a crank... but it acts inside another piston, an "air spring", and its THAT piston that hammers against the chisel. and the action of the hammering counteracts the action of the piston... all sort of equalises and the machine only shakes a small amount whilst the end of the chisel takes a pounding. whereas here, its the inertia of the piston being moved one way that simply makes everything ELSE want to move the other way... eventually it will reach an equilibrium where the inertia of the vibrating assembly counteracts the inertia of the piston, and they will both oscillate with a particular amplitude determined by the respective inertias... then theres fundamentals and overtones, nodes and antinodes... the mass isnt as important as the location... whilst the tesla story seems a little... overinflated... theres every chance he did do something along those lines. thinking of this drill bit i was once brazing. big hollow mining drill. shove the oxy torch up its rear end to preheat it, and with a certain tweaking of the mixture and torch position, it suddenly started "singing" at about 300hz... "cool" i thought... left it to go have my morning tea... walk out into lunchroom and the glass window is shaking... boss comes running down from office upstairs, WTF IS THAT?!?!? as this howling note builds and floods the industrial park we were located in... everyone came running! WTF IS THAT?!? yet it was just a mere whisper in comparison, standing NEXT to it... some sort of awesome helmholtz resonant cavity :) put all the CNC machines and every other noise we ever made to shame. at the same time, it was very location specific. ive made similar "singing tubes" but never had THAT result again... the building was a massive suspended slab, huge cavern underneath... in a cubicle, welding bay, with a mezzanine floor above... iunno, just the layout of that building had a massive role to play it seems. i did it again outside the bay as well, no result... harmonics and pressure waves and interference patterns are WEIRD! another one was shoving a long bent steel tube (trampoline base? dont ask...) into the coals of last nights fire... poured petrol in it... which of course ignites... and playing around with the angle of it could get this awesome "idling V8" sound from it :)
47:20 - that's old tech by todays standard, I wonder what would happen if some AI would have several places where is can measure vibration and than continuously vary frequency? I's imagine that sweet spot will drift here and there depending on how much of this bridge is vibrating.
At the 1935 party, Tesla also claimed the mechanical oscillator could destroy the Empire State Building with "Five pounds of air pressure" (34 kPa) if attached to a girder and that he expected to earn $100 million from the oscillator within two years.
one of my favorite episodes, kinda creepy but one can think if they build a machine like the one Grant hands Jamie and Adam in the end but with a 1 ton weight or something it would take that bridge down.
I still believe in tesla to be able to break any structrue with the right tuning because there's multiple types of resonances and ways of achieving the desired destruction
So the bridge test was equivalent to a magnitude 3 earthquake? 2.0-2.9 "Felt slightly by some people. No damage to buildings" 3.0-3.9 "Often felt by people, but very rarely causes damage. Shaking of indoor objects can be noticeable."
The best “invention” Tesla ever made, was his idea to migrate to the USA. Totally contemporary and independent research by Italian scientists Galileo Ferraris in Torino (Turin), lead to the publication of papers on alternating current motors/generators, totally identical to Tesla ideas, just before the USA patent was granted.
Tesla was certainly one of the greatest geniuses of all time... But he was also insane. Those two things all too often go hand in hand. To be a visionary far beyond one's time is a heavy burden to bear.
Yep, he made a few really great things, but they were all still built off the backs of previous devices and knowledge and his most famous one, AC wasn't invented by him as he only invented a much better way to use it and even then another man invented the same thing on his own around the same time. And most of the stuff he invented was tat or flat out didn't work and never would because they were physically impossible. He's also responsible for his own poverty because he refused royalties for his inventions until it was too late and instead asked for upfront payment, plus the tesla/edison rivalry is fictional and not at all what happened according to tesla himself. He also believed in lots of pseudoscience that was proven incorrect even back then and didn't believe in proven atoms and electrons.
According to reddit, someone posted that he was an editor on the show and the "outside consulting gig" for that device was actually an "adult entertainment industry" company. That may explain their giggles throughout that segment.
In earthquake design we use 5% viscous damping for your average building, damping can be up to 10-15%. This means that with each oscillation when left alone, the next oscillation will be 5% less. For a building, we will need a lot more energy put into the building than this little device can do. People always like a good conspiracy theory and if the name Tesla is involved, many people seem willing to believe any story. The point is that the energy to damage or destroy a building has to be put into it. A little handheld device just cannot do it.
so that was right at the time where people would shut about that you use google but internet was still not mainstream so most likely their researchers might've used it but it was not yet a household name. source: i was there.
Well it's hard to make something resonating when you have no intuition in such processes. Tesla definitely had! To me it was obvious that that bar wouldn't oscillate at such low frequency you've gave it. You should be able to correlate quickly in your mind the size (and mass and form and the point you apply to) of an object and the approximate rate of frequencies it needed to resonate and then TUNE, moving your driving frequency across that range slowly. You've done ALL that wrong. And there is such thing as a Q-factor so you should be able to provide some mimimum power to drive a system to its resonance. Whole institutes studying waves and oscillations of engineering objects through years and you just made a couple of tries and "Ah... that's not working at all!"
They mention resonant frequency multiple times throughout and said they spent hours dailing in the correct frequency with a controller that has 100th of a Hz accuracy. I'm sure they are aware of what they need to do and the number they mentioned was a rounded one close to the number they need.
19:40 That's a common misconception. He didn't invent alternating current, he invented an updated version to make it more efficient and useful, while galileo ferraris invented the same on his own. AC itself was invented decades prior to tesla and tesla has taken the credit through this ridiculous cult of personality. Also he wanted up front payments for his inventions instead of royalties which is why he died poor, not because he just wasn't given his due or failed by his sponsors.
ok, so, you can scale down a building to see what will happen with a life size building, as per Adam roughly at 36:40 So, lets try them twin towers, ey? Lets check what will happen in a scaled down model....
@@jacobsan sir, it has already been done by a dutch guy. And he gave a lecture. Anyways, it is pretty obvious that we will see something completely different if we were to scale down both those towers and bld 7. Mind you: all 3 of em "collapsed" due to fire. And bld 7 is for everyone to see. If a fire can do that, then most certainly CDI and such companies would use fire as a way to bring buildings down.
tesla earthquake machine - you were adjusting frequency - you forgot period; also feet above sea level; measure the solid metal frequency and the shaped forms' frequency. Play it like a musical interment until you can manipulate it - and I bet you could cause some fractures at the crystalline structure level.
Seasons 01 to Season 4 truly are one of my favorite seasons among the whole history of Mythbusting. I mean, come on, it's these seasons where every single thing is unfiltered!
Total agree
After season 4, it seemed to feel much more about TV production quality and following a plan and formula and putting on a performance rather than just a team of people trying to figure interesting things out for themselves and showing us the process. Love all the mythbusters, but early on it was a raw and fresh product and was a pure type of entertainment that makes me happy
Kari'shitter?
@@stickmandaninacan total agree
I agree. Television magic at its best!
MythBusters: Use Fake Blood
Also MythBusters: *Cassually buy an actual human ribscage*
For $210 too, saw the price tag on it
@@ctakitimuthat seems quite cheap if you think about the all the headache that acquiring those bones to sell must be
@@comradeurod9805 yeah it does. I wonder if it was a synthetic structure with the same density as bone? This would enable her to say she's going to see what it would do to real bones? That's a guess, I don't remember how she phrased it.
@comradeurod9805 it looked like only the centre piece was real.
@ctakitimu the centre section was real. The rest isn’t.
Gotta admit I really prefer the style of the old mythbuster compared to the newer seasons.
Peter Rees is that you?
I like the seasons 1 to 5
More natural, a lot less cinematic and forced
@@pakuma3 I keep reading the same comment on every old episode. Just watched a couple from seaon 6 and they were great.
@@RGK93There were no bad episodes, it’s just that the later ones kinda became more reality tv show ish.
That bridge vibrating because of that little box is incredible!
Indeed. That only shows, if you perfectly hit the resonance of a building, or bridge, you CAN make it move/vibrate.
It was also because the "outside consulting gig" (the origin of that device) is for an "adult entertainment" company, according to a posting in reddit. Knowing that, It will give you a new perspective if you re-watch that segment.
Yes! See, these are the kinds of things that convinced me, that mechanical engineering, is just straight up 'black magic', cause you are correct, that little box making that giant bridge vibrate IS incredible, and for me personally it just blows my mind that if you ask one of those wizards (mechanical engineers) 'why?' they'll say 'Ok, well, you asked' and then show you some papers with weird runes and symbols and incantations such as 'Fourier Analysis' and you're like, yeah, this is magic, because once they understand and study the scripture then they bend and shape the universe around them. Straight up wizards
I'd love to see then repeat this experiment but with bricks and plaster around a steel frame. I really think the vibrating metal would cause serious issues for other building materials in the same building.
@@rgl168 You don't happen to have a link?
RIP Grant, he seems like such a genuinely nice guy. He always was my favorite when I was younger.
Tests shows that the myth is almost impossible to be even plausible
Adam: lets make a real life scale model to test it
"this myth is really recent, from 2004...”
Oh, just 20 years.
Ah, just 2 entire decades, nothing major then
well, season 4 was around 2006 so for them it was just 2 years.
@@frndrmn imagine understanding time and context, shame on you
Grant was using AOL search engine lol
Bro thinks mythbusters season 4 aired in 2024
This episode in particular was a huge part of my childhood. The moment at 40:39 in particular. I had a group of friends I watched this with, and from the moment we saw it, all one of us would have to do is say: "I taste beans in the air", and all of us would burst out laughing.
funny how the massager at 22:50 is now a thing for sale
That’s so true! I had the same thought 💭
15:44 A couple of things wrong with this approach.
Firstly, the way a beam is 'fixed' changes which modes it experiences, and thus what the natural frequency is. They might be under the assumption that having it 'floating' on wires makes it not supported, but thats not true. The wires are in tension, and hence the beam is constrained in the vertical direction (as long as the 'preload' force provided by gravity is not exceeded, which for the simple hammer excitement it wont).
I.e. in the vertical plane this is a two-way supported/fixed beam, where the natural frequency is the first mode (a standing wave with a period of 2x the length between strings). It is unconstrained in the horizontal plane though, and frequency components there are more unpredictable (depends on the internal mass distribution/stiffness/density of the beam/material) with its lowest frequency component being determined by the mass of the beam and the length of the string (its a swing after all).
Secondly measuring the resonance frequency of the full beam, but then adding the excitement changes the dynamics. The system goes from a beam with two sides fixed, to a mass with two beams, of which one side of each beam is fixed. One could approximate this more accurately by a mass/spring system (where the spring is formed by the parallel addition of the two 'beam pieces' with a linear stiffness (taking into account no rotation can occur at the beam end). You add a substantial amount of mass thus the eigen frequency is likely going to be much lower than previously.
So contrary to what they were doing, they would have likely needed a much lower frequency to excite the (modified) system.
21:46 Also something important they seem to neglect is the location of excitation. If the excitation is at a natural frequency (or multiple, as shown here), it should be at the appropriate point. If you perform the excitation at a nodule of said frequency, you will get no response.
Regardless, a structure will fail if you manage to get enough strain, for long enough, to hit fatigue limits. If you want this to happen with mechanical resonance with a very low input excitation you would need very low damping of the critical frequency (or a high Q-factor of the design). My profession is not in civil engineering, but I wouldn't be surprised if Q-factor is an important property in structure design, and that damping is sufficiently applied (if required) to reduce it.
Building a high Q oscillator in itself is quite challenging, so I wouldn't be shocked if the material properties themselves have sufficient damping to prevent this mode from ever being excited too easily.
a little late to the party, arent we?
@@AkiSan0 As if any input 20+ years ago would have made a difference after the show already airing.
That doesn't mean that it isn't a good opportunity to learn and share knowledge, such that others can get a bit of a deeper understanding. Or what do you suppose is wrong with that?
this is golden info. thanks for going to the effort of posting it. i had many a questions about this topic too. i am a sound guy but not an acoustics guy. so this was very interesting to me.
I'm no civil engineer either, yet i am an engineering physicist and i think i can relate to the problem at hand with an analogue of vibrational modes such as in IR spectroscopy: the molecular vibrational modes are always calculated in reference with the normal modes and in a crystal lattice structure (meaning a structure repeating itself periodically) it correlates to the molecular "nodes" that is the lattice parameter(s) of a "unit cell" (spanning 14 types of Bravais Lattices - 14 different types of arrangement in 3D space). When you think of - say a cube made of springs in wireframe, the vibrational mode is most prominent when you flex the spring-structure from the nodes that connect the strings (i.e. the corner of the cube). If Tesla positioned his device on these intersecting beam "nodes" and managed to build enough reciprocating momentum (like Grant's linear motor) to overcome the attenuation (dampening) of the concrete structure, he might have achieved the effect he described. Still, he needed to know the exact natural frequencies of both steel and bulk cement yet it's hard to predict the latter because it has a porous structure and high attenuation whatsoever.
idk what exactly you all are talking about but i have seen and heard of several soldiers being told not to march across bridges because some marching can make the bridge really unstable
I love the evil laugh after Adam declares they'll only use their powers for good 😆
i really like the earlier seasons
idk, the team feels more authentic
I keep reading the same comment on every old episode. Just watched a couple from seaon 6 and they were great.
@@RGK93 nobody said the later seasons were bad, i just prefer the earlier ones :V
I was in my 20s when this showed first aired, and I loved it. Making science fun 😊
It is of course sad to know that Grant is no longer with us :(
When the show aired, I was in a very difficult time in my life (precursors of depression which I am battling to this day). Watching the show allowed me to escape the darkness for a while.
Remember when AOL was a thing
Lmfao, random ass comment, but just made me remember how old I am 😂😂
Was that before they bought ICQ or after they were bought by WB?
It must have suck to clean that container van.
Given the state of US infrastructure, the test on the bridge was actually way more dangerous.
This is 2006 when they were just enacting all the budget cuts that would bring US infrastructure to its current state.
Grant's face at 10:35 is hilarious.
Also... did they have a permit to vibrate that bridge?
Considering that the bridge seemingly closed off, more then likely.
its terrorism lol🌋😵💫🤣
The show didn’t do anything without insurance and insurance would never let them do that without permission, proper permits and planning. One of the purposes of their scaled testing for myths, was demonstrating their intentions and the possible outcome, for the insurance company.
@@MaxPower-vf8kt And now it makes sense. Thank you.
I agree with many comments, the actuator needs a seperate feedback mechanism, e.g. an accelerometer feeding back to the actuator. What they didn't allow for is using a fixed input frequency when the target starts to 'ring' the increase in amplitude usually also changes the resonant frequency, and that means they fall out of tune. We did this at various scales in college, decades ago, without an active feedback the target changes resonant frequency due to fatigue and work-hardening and other losses which make it impossible to get beyond a certain point. I'd like to see Adam, or anyone else, revisit this with accelerometers and phase-shift feedback.
You don't necessarily need feedback or exact frequency adjustment if the trigger is carefully designed. You want the actuator to go off when the actuator attached to the structure is moving at maximum speed/is near the origin. That way you get the most power from any force you apply, since power is force times speed (proof: take the equation energy is force times distance and differentiate by time). That works at any frequency. (That's actually how most electric clock pendulums work, the magnet is near the centre).
Grant saved the day about Tesla device!
That Bone Room place is insane.
7:14 Yeah... a REALLY good torso!
lol
I'm curious if they would have had different results using harmonics of the correct frequency. It's actually kind of odd to me that they didn't try it.
Fizzy drink cans
Beer
Vodka
Aerosol cans
Never heat on a stove or microwave
When i was like 7 i had a similar experience to the laval lamp story but luckily nobody got hurt. My mom was making a pot of tea while doing the dishes. She turned on the wrong stove burner, which had a stack of plates on it. I was walking through the kitchen and the stack blew up, shooting hot shards of glass everywhere but me and my mom, god bless😂 theres still burn marks on the old linoleum underneath our new floor boards
38:37 I did hear of someone who put a frozen can of coke in a pot of water on the stove to thaw it out quickly, then they got distracted and left it until it exploded, embedding shards of aluminium in the ceiling and walls, as well as spraying boiling water and sugar on everything.
Sounds absolutely horrifying, but rapidly adding energy to a closed container being a bad idea should be pretty common knowledge lmao
I remember this episode so good. The bridge would great for lattice climbing.
This idea by Tesla came about in his later years when he, well, let's say, was becoming a bit more "flimsical" in his thought pattern
Tesla ideas when he’s high af.
Is "flimsical" a mix of "flimsy" and "whimsical"?....
Super! MYTH BUSTERS? Thank you very much!
10:34 Grant went to another world for a second :D
i guess those earthquake attempts have a fundamental flaw, they are without feedback - it needs a closed loop feedback ;)
You changed the resonate frequency of the bar by clamping it.
29:11 the nervous reaction from tory got me
tesla's earthquake machine works, but not on a scale they say it does.
here's an experiment that you can try at home. you need a window that you can break or just big piece of glass in a frame.
attach that frame so it won't shake or move (like a window on house), then take any solid object and start tapping on it. not too gently, but not too hard either. don't smash it, just tap on it.
don't use ceramics as it might break the glass on first hit, like that special glass hammer that has hardened tip.
use a fork or a spoon or something, keep tapping and eventually, more or less, perfect circle will fall out. i've done it myself 3-4 times and it works every time, i even have old pictures of it.
this is caused due vibration, it's like dropping something into water, it makes circular waves. same thing happens inside every material and eventually they'll break. rubber and plastic is extremely durable against vibrational waves, but more solid materials like glass and concrete are much less resistant to this kind of vibrations.
i can totally see this device breaking entire building, but not in a way they described it.
what tesla said that at first nothing happend, yes that's correct, but it won't make entire house shake.
i'm fairly certain if you put that kind of device against support pillar on building and leave it on for a day or two, it will make the support pillar crack and break. you just need right frequency.
in other words, it won't cause earthquakes, but it can break things for sure.
i think they focused more on the "earthquake" explanation that tesla gave to the cops than a machine that would cause the machinery to shake and possibly dislodge bricks and stuff off an old building a good generator not secured can cause issues so i can see something attached to the building framework would knock a bit of structure down plus a building vibrating at 18/19 hz could cause issues with people causing dizziness and confusion which fits the description of the situation outside
You have to remember the weight of a "good generator"
a building is designed to stay up against its own weight... a bridge is designed to be rigid and span a distance... are they hitting the note of a single beam, or the entire asembly/span?
as shown by the linear actuator they eventually chose, a jackhammer doesnt quite give the same result as the tesla oscillator... something about a jackhammer being designed to hit a hammer... not oscillate and shake the user. the energy goes into the chisel, not the operator holding the machine.
pull apart a jackhammer, theres an oscillating piston, be it driven by air or a crank... but it acts inside another piston, an "air spring", and its THAT piston that hammers against the chisel. and the action of the hammering counteracts the action of the piston... all sort of equalises and the machine only shakes a small amount whilst the end of the chisel takes a pounding.
whereas here, its the inertia of the piston being moved one way that simply makes everything ELSE want to move the other way... eventually it will reach an equilibrium where the inertia of the vibrating assembly counteracts the inertia of the piston, and they will both oscillate with a particular amplitude determined by the respective inertias...
then theres fundamentals and overtones, nodes and antinodes... the mass isnt as important as the location...
whilst the tesla story seems a little... overinflated... theres every chance he did do something along those lines.
thinking of this drill bit i was once brazing. big hollow mining drill. shove the oxy torch up its rear end to preheat it, and with a certain tweaking of the mixture and torch position, it suddenly started "singing" at about 300hz... "cool" i thought... left it to go have my morning tea... walk out into lunchroom and the glass window is shaking... boss comes running down from office upstairs, WTF IS THAT?!?!? as this howling note builds and floods the industrial park we were located in... everyone came running! WTF IS THAT?!?
yet it was just a mere whisper in comparison, standing NEXT to it... some sort of awesome helmholtz resonant cavity :)
put all the CNC machines and every other noise we ever made to shame.
at the same time, it was very location specific. ive made similar "singing tubes" but never had THAT result again... the building was a massive suspended slab, huge cavern underneath... in a cubicle, welding bay, with a mezzanine floor above... iunno, just the layout of that building had a massive role to play it seems. i did it again outside the bay as well, no result... harmonics and pressure waves and interference patterns are WEIRD!
another one was shoving a long bent steel tube (trampoline base? dont ask...) into the coals of last nights fire... poured petrol in it... which of course ignites...
and playing around with the angle of it could get this awesome "idling V8" sound from it :)
@@paradiselost9946 awesome man i wonder if that sort of thing could be done at concerts or fairgrounds
😊😊😊😊
An episode I've never seen, or actually heard of before is awesome!
😂 Just when I thought Kari couldn’t get any more perfect 😂 “What’s bean going on?”
What about cast iron, it is brittle, I think it would shatter at those vibration levels, keep up the good work guys I love watching your shows.😊
I reckon should of tried the electric linier motor on the bridge when it was a windy day
It's so weird hearing Adams voice from this young dude when you're used to the Tested channel
hanging a piece of steel on a string is not strapping it to a beam of a structure...?
There could have been a damage to the glass, or a weak spot which resulted in the glass exploding before the safety cap blew
For the Tesla thing, why not test it at twice the vibration frequency ? And a good fraction of the weight applied to the force.
bass speaker placed some distance from water on top of an oil drum, will make the water spalsh in columns
the frequecey needs to be multiplied to get the earthquake from max resonance
I think the linear motor is cool af.
For.... reasons.
8:00 - Suicide Girls shirt... What a sign of the times.
i think thats another episode that did not air in germany, just because of the real human bones i assume.
Im deutschen Fernsehen wird mehr gezeigt als im US amerikanischen
47:20 - that's old tech by todays standard, I wonder what would happen if some AI would have several places where is can measure vibration and than continuously vary frequency? I's imagine that sweet spot will drift here and there depending on how much of this bridge is vibrating.
41:49 Kari is wearing the Store Nørd t-shirt!
A bridge started to sway when the wind speed matched the frequency of the structure and collapsed.
have you guys ever used a oscillating saw? you will find that frequency you are looking for multiple times pure cut.
Isnt that the bridge that cracked?
wait what ?
“…isnt…”
7:22 for a second I thought their sound guy was the biggest human on earth.
Adam kept his promise; it was only if the device *worked.*
When Tesla tells you something has an inclination to break, that rule applies to all times and places.
It worked on the part jamie wanted to put in. They found it's resonant frequwency and it fell apart
0:42 when did they shoot buster like that?
Should have tried modified Shake-Weights
There's a little difference between skeletonal and fleshy, if there isn't YOU have problems
At the 1935 party, Tesla also claimed the mechanical oscillator could destroy the Empire State Building with "Five pounds of air pressure" (34 kPa) if attached to a girder and that he expected to earn $100 million from the oscillator within two years.
one of my favorite episodes, kinda creepy but one can think if they build a machine like the one Grant hands Jamie and Adam in the end but with a 1 ton weight or something it would take that bridge down.
NoIcE
I still believe in tesla to be able to break any structrue with the right tuning because there's multiple types of resonances and ways of achieving the desired destruction
So the bridge test was equivalent to a magnitude 3 earthquake?
2.0-2.9 "Felt slightly by some people. No damage to buildings"
3.0-3.9 "Often felt by people, but very rarely causes damage. Shaking of indoor objects can be noticeable."
Er concerns the breaking glass you vibrated the rod to break the glass Adam
For 'breakstep bridge' google 'opening london millenium bridge'. Utter disaster
It’s the same effect, just much bigger scale
Yes,they got that totally wrong.
The best “invention” Tesla ever made, was his idea to migrate to the USA. Totally contemporary and independent research by Italian scientists Galileo Ferraris in Torino (Turin), lead to the publication of papers on alternating current motors/generators, totally identical to Tesla ideas, just before the USA patent was granted.
Yep. Also his AC motor was not inventing AC itself but just an updated way to utilise AC.
Imahara's eyes look like alien
Tesla was certainly one of the greatest geniuses of all time... But he was also insane.
Those two things all too often go hand in hand. To be a visionary far beyond one's time is a heavy burden to bear.
Yep, he made a few really great things, but they were all still built off the backs of previous devices and knowledge and his most famous one, AC wasn't invented by him as he only invented a much better way to use it and even then another man invented the same thing on his own around the same time. And most of the stuff he invented was tat or flat out didn't work and never would because they were physically impossible.
He's also responsible for his own poverty because he refused royalties for his inventions until it was too late and instead asked for upfront payment, plus the tesla/edison rivalry is fictional and not at all what happened according to tesla himself. He also believed in lots of pseudoscience that was proven incorrect even back then and didn't believe in proven atoms and electrons.
There's a reason army guys aren't allowed to march in step across bridges.
They actually did an episode on that subject.
How many tons of steel were being set in motion by that oscillator, hundred foot of bridge, eek, one weak spot might snap!
34:01 that look on jamie's face:)
According to reddit, someone posted that he was an editor on the show and the "outside consulting gig" for that device was actually an "adult entertainment industry" company. That may explain their giggles throughout that segment.
arent there lava lamps that consist of a sealed glas phiole ?
The last sentence of Jamie what if we put a 100 pounds on that sucker, wouldn't you get the same result as in the shop with te steel beam?
In the 2nd war they had to teach army cadets how to cook their tinned rations !!!
23:47 Adam said skibidi
(almost)
Once i made a hole bridge shake, only using my own bodyweight.
Me too. It was a rope bridge.
I got a 3kW Subwoofer that can proof the myth. Ask my neighbors.
There is brown , yellow and black rice
In earthquake design we use 5% viscous damping for your average building, damping can be up to 10-15%. This means that with each oscillation when left alone, the next oscillation will be 5% less. For a building, we will need a lot more energy put into the building than this little device can do. People always like a good conspiracy theory and if the name Tesla is involved, many people seem willing to believe any story. The point is that the energy to damage or destroy a building has to be put into it. A little handheld device just cannot do it.
And about matching the bar's natural frequency, you don't have to. There are harmonics.
They didn't even use google, how old is this?
so that was right at the time where people would shut about that you use google but internet was still not mainstream so most likely their researchers might've used it but it was not yet a household name. source: i was there.
strange how america has the earthquake making ship though.
Love and respect Jamie and Adam,
But they aren't Tesla.
35:15 Alastor
lava lamp: * j*zz
me: *sees mess
also me: *sees glass shard
Carey said 'milk rocket ' ha ha ha
Kari?
Well it's hard to make something resonating when you have no intuition in such processes. Tesla definitely had! To me it was obvious that that bar wouldn't oscillate at such low frequency you've gave it. You should be able to correlate quickly in your mind the size (and mass and form and the point you apply to) of an object and the approximate rate of frequencies it needed to resonate and then TUNE, moving your driving frequency across that range slowly. You've done ALL that wrong. And there is such thing as a Q-factor so you should be able to provide some mimimum power to drive a system to its resonance. Whole institutes studying waves and oscillations of engineering objects through years and you just made a couple of tries and "Ah... that's not working at all!"
Calling Nicola Tesla a 'Crackpot Genius'. Lol. Ok, buddy.
Dig the Suicide Girls top.
They took the vibration myth so wrong... The resonance frequencies are so much lower than what they are using.. The bigger the object the lower it is.
I miss Grant :/
You need the resonant frquency of the metal you are using, not some random 2Hz frequency you pick randomly..
They mention resonant frequency multiple times throughout and said they spent hours dailing in the correct frequency with a controller that has 100th of a Hz accuracy. I'm sure they are aware of what they need to do and the number they mentioned was a rounded one close to the number they need.
Grant selflessly offers himself to do the math, narrator claims he’s taking the day off. I’d like to see said narrator do the math instead.
I must have missed the part where the myth required any maths
19:40 That's a common misconception. He didn't invent alternating current, he invented an updated version to make it more efficient and useful, while galileo ferraris invented the same on his own. AC itself was invented decades prior to tesla and tesla has taken the credit through this ridiculous cult of personality. Also he wanted up front payments for his inventions instead of royalties which is why he died poor, not because he just wasn't given his due or failed by his sponsors.
32:35 it is Carrie's morning workout routine...
lava lamps have bottlecaps ... forbidden soda
ok, so, you can scale down a building to see what will happen with a life size building, as per Adam roughly at 36:40
So, lets try them twin towers, ey?
Lets check what will happen in a scaled down model....
Go right ahead
@@jacobsan sir, it has already been done by a dutch guy.
And he gave a lecture.
Anyways, it is pretty obvious that we will see something completely different if we were to scale down both those towers and bld 7.
Mind you: all 3 of em "collapsed" due to fire.
And bld 7 is for everyone to see.
If a fire can do that, then most certainly CDI and such companies would use fire as a way to bring buildings down.
tesla earthquake machine - you were adjusting frequency - you forgot period; also feet above sea level; measure the solid metal frequency and the shaped forms' frequency. Play it like a musical interment until you can manipulate it - and I bet you could cause some fractures at the crystalline structure level.
Still amazed that you can just pop down the shops and buy human remains in America, apparently.
13:38 Is the mythbusters yaoi fanfic I'm writting canon now??
Are you fucking serious?!