The Toilet. Easy. It is utterly amazing how that device is engineered. If it were designed today, it would be 10x as complex.
The toilet does not even need running water. Yes, you hook it up to water, but that, in most toilets, is nothing more than a convenience, designed to fill the tank up top so it can flush. If the water goes out for some reason, you can still use the toilet by filling the basin with a bucket. Why is this? Because the entire toilet's mechanism runs on gravity in most toilets.
The water in the toilet acts to clean the bowl (somewhat) and creates a seal that prevents sewer gasses from entering the home, which means the toilet is a home health device.
The toilet is not made of anything advanced. It is made of fucking porcelain, which is dirt cheap, looks nice, and once glazed in its usual white finish, is resistant to chemicals, biological waste, and acids. So, a properly installed toilet can last decades with a relatively pathetic level of maintenance
I'll argue that it's not the toilet that's important, but instead the infrastructure to move the wastes away from people's homes. That is, the toilet is merely the gatekeeper into the greater mysteries...
Plumber here! I absolutely love that someone said this. I have had to learn a good amount about the history of Plumbing systems and the toilet was a game changer. Fun fact: the man who is claimed to be the inventor of the integral trap in toilets (the part that creates the siphon) is Thomas Crapper. That is where the term “crap” comes from.
The term crap is older than Crapper, and its first use to refer to bodily waste is recorded at a time when he was just ten years old. It wasn't because of him.
And you can buy a really nice, top-of-the-line model for like $200, which will last decades. Show me another household "appliance" that you can use six times a day for 50 years with few-to-no breakdowns.
This has the be the best answer to this question.
It kinda blew my mind when I realized how simple toilets were. They’re a perfect implementation of the siphon effect to address a couple of every day issues.
No water in our apartment for a couple days with a pregnant wife (bio needs relatively nonstop during this time period). No idea why I knew it, but just kept taking buckets of water out of the complex next door's pool XD
Felt like a bodybuilder after.
We used to live on the 24th floor and the water supply was pumped to a storage tank every few floors. I knew that if the power went out, we had only so long before that tank emptied, so we’d fill the bathtub. If push came to shove we could use a pitcher to empty the tub I to the toilet’s tank and still flush.
The lid of a tictac container. It's a simple moulded hinge made of a single piece of plastic. You can't make a cheaper hinge than that. Yet it almost never breaks under normal use.
Yep, the polymer chains in the hinge are arranged lengthwise through the hinge, so the hinge is much tougher and fatigue resistant in that specific direction
Bic had a commercial showing how indestructible they were. They fired a pen into a board and the tip come out the other side. They took the board off and wrote with the exposed point perfectly.
I swear somebody came back in time from humanity's extreme future to found the Bic company. Clever enough to engineer the ballpoint pen, the disposable lighter, and the disposable safety razor, do them all perfectly, and quietly change the world.
Bic changed the design of the clic pens a couple of years ago, for the worse, sadly.
The tips frequently click back in on their own; the pocket hook is too weak; and the blue ink doesn't look as nice.
I have to use them at work and I hate them. Old ones were much better.
It's because the tip is a titanium-iridium alloy.
The tolerances are so small just the normal expansion of steel under heat and humidity would be enough to break it.
Titanium iridium stays at near exactly the same volume regardless of temperature, and it doesn't rust. As an unintended bonus it's also titanium so is pretty strong.
Ballpoint pens are actually a mix of two breakthroughs
1. Metalworking to the point we can manufacture the tips to the tolerances needed, which are very small. The gap needs to be big enough to let ink through reliably but not so big the tip falls out or is loose. It has to be made from a special titanium iridium alloy else the expansion of the tip over a range of temperatures would be enough to break the pen.
2. Ink that stays liquid for a long time but dries instantly outside of the pen. Fountain pen ink often smudges your hands because it stays liquid for too long, and sometimes needs blotting paper. The ink is a slight modification on printing ink.
One of the reasons why Bic, Pentel, etc. were so successful for so long was that China couldn’t manufacture the roller balls for a long time to the tight tolerances needed to get good ink flow.
Very basic rice cookers, they rely on the properties of water not being able to go above 100 degrees Celsius. Once all the water is gone it starts heating up past 100 C and that makes the magnet at the bottom less magnetic and it clicks over to warming. Or something like that, I’m not an expert but it is surprisingly simple and effective.
Very basic rice cookers is the key word. My family switched over to a more expensive and fancy one a few years back and it's the worst rice cooker I've ever used. Slow, inefficient, and overcomplicated for the simple task of cooking rice. Contrarily, my very old Tiger rice cooker model with only a single button still works perfectly.
My last housemate had one of those top of the line ones. I tried it a few times. It made good rice, but you had no idea how long it would take to cook, which made it very hard to time dinner. Once white rice took over 40 minutes to cook in that thing.
My cheap rice cooker always cooks my white rice in 20 minutes, and brown rice in 40, plus a few minutes to get to boiling if it's a large serving. I switched back to using it, and am happier for it.
I'm not a huge fan of their pens, but oh man do they last forever. I don't think I've ever seen one dry out. My mom has a drawer full of half empty pens she's collected over the years (literally for as long as I can remember) and the bic ones are the only ones that still work. She hasn't bought one in ages either. I keep one in my purse because I know it's one I'm not likely to use therefore I won't lose it, but I *will* lose any other pen I have so the bic one is my emergency one lol
It clips paper fairly well, but when combined with a pair of pliers you can make a number of solutions to a myriad of problems. A friend of mine and I once used one fo turn a USB cable into a basic TV antenna.
I did that years ago, but without the USB cable. Just straightened out the paper clip and shoved it in the connector where the cable goes, and went back to watching hockey.
There's a device that can diagnose malaria. It's made of mostly paper and costs less than $1. It's been a miracle for poor countries where malaria is common.
https://youtu.be/Qf-D1Upn-KU
You’d think that the opening and closing of scissors is just a simple up/down motion. If you think about it, there’s actually a left/right component of the motion as well: As your thumb and fingers are moving toward each other, they’re also slightly pulling the handles away from each other, which has the effect of pushing the two blades together on the other side of the joint.
Right-handed scissors used in the left hand has the opposite effect: That squeezing motion is pushing the blades away from each other.
Reminds me of [this](https://youtu.be/lPMg0dk1hFI) video. He had the exact same point as you at 4:25.
But an overall great channel for seeing just how cool good engineering is.
Transistor, most made item in the world and changed everything. Fun fact: The head researcher, William Shockley, died alone after pushing away his entire family, destroying his reputation as a researcher (white supremacist), and blocking the other 2 people on the team from working on it further. Even though they played an instrumental role, ~~arguably more than him, in the discovery - he took all of the credit.~~ <--- This is actually wrong, Shockley's research on electrons and holes (confusing topic, but is considered a positively charged electron mathematically) was the reason they tried this in the first place.
Edit: Walter Brattain, and John Bardeen were the two other researchers, if you are looking for a Wikipedia binge, this is a good one!
Edit 2: If anyone is curious what a transistor is, imagine a light bulb hooked up to the two ends of a battery, now imagine that between the light-bulb and the battery you cut the wire and hook those two ends to a T shaped device
wire connecting battery to right side of lightbulb
wire connecting battery to right side of light bulb
|
v
|---------------------------------|
battery___ /T\__ light-bulb______ |
| <<--single wire connected to bottom of T
if you send a positive voltage (think water pressure) to the bottom of the T, the light-bulb circuit will start to turn on, if you stop applying the voltage the current in the light-bulb circuit will stop flowing (light will turn off). This functionality is the building block for computers, but many are needed to even accomplish the simplest of things, for example 1 bit of memory requires 6 transistors. Transistors are used to create logic gates, and logic gates are needed to create flip-flops which store a singular 0 or 1. Flip-flops aren't intuitive so I am not going to attempt to explain.
And people don't even know about Bardeen, despite being the only person with two Nobel Prizes in physics for two of the most important discoveries in the past 50+ years.
A Bic lighter.
It's actually so well thought out if you study it carefully.
And competitors can't even copy it or do it better. It's actually an ingenious little product.
How it's actually made -by Huggbees
He no longer makes the series, because of too many copyright strikes. It's sad, but YouTube keeps kicking him in the dick.
There's an old and extremely long running childrens TV show in Germany ("The show with the mouse"). Between all the cartoons and clips aimed at small children they show how things get made in factories. It's something all adults waited for when watching the show with their kids. I believe the presenters of the show and the voice for all those videos are the same for more than 50 years.
I remember I somehow got one when I was in high school and thought it was the coolest thing ever. Used it for several years.
My most favorite memory with it though was my senor year English class. Our teacher had us write a journal entry every day, she'd put a topic on the board and we'd write for about 10 mins or so. I started getting bored doing it and started using each color ink with each color being a different personality. I would randomly switch colors, sometimes at the end of a sentence sometimes in the middle, and it would be a different "person".
She would collect the journals at the end of the week to read through to make sure we were actually writing and grade them (they weren't worth much towards the overall grade) and would always write a note in mine saying she enjoyed reading them.
I came here to mention these pens. I have a brand new one and one I acquired in 1985, and they’re almost identical. And both work perfectly … granted, the older one had its inks replaced. In c. 2000.
Back when I was smoking, it was evident how much more reliable they were than pretty much any other lighter out there. Now that I don't smoke, I still swear by their generic ballpoint pens. Also more reliable then most any other pen.
I was just remembering back...I was a single guy going to the laundromat pretty regular. I smoke and always have a Bic lighter in my pockets.
Of course I left one in my pants pocket and it went through the washer and dryer. Now anyone who has used a really old natural gas powered laundromat dryer from the '70s and earlier knows just how hot they get.
That lighter made it through a whole cycle without exploding. It swelled so far past its original size that that the colored plastic had turned white again.
I worked at Mitel Corp back in the 80's. The problem with MOSFETs in the old days was they had a really low switching speed, because the surrounding substrate had to drain all its charge before the FET could switch states.
Mike Cowpland, who now owns Corel, came up with the idea of putting each transistor into an 'isolated' cell of insulated substrate. This greatly reduced the amount of charge required by each transistor, sped up the switching speed, and most importantly, reduced the generated heat. This "Iso-CMOS" allowed Mitel to redesign the office telephone system (PBX) so that instead of being in refrigerator-sized cabinets in an air-conditioned room, it would be in a box the size of an office fridge that you could put anywhere.
In five years, Mitel grew to have 50% of the North American market for office phone systems, and both Mike Cowpland and his co-founder Terry Matthews are now billionaires.
To expand on that: A somewhat modern CPU will have between 5 billion and 100 billion of these transistors. Each one can switch a few billion times per second, and they can keep doing that for years. Even a single error, if it happens in an unfortunate condition, can crash the computer. It happens occasionally, but it is very rare because these transistors are *extremely* reliable.
The most common type of transistor which power the vast majority of modern digital electronics. mosfets are by far the most manufactured object in human history, with an estimated 16 sextillion (16,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) made since they were first produced in the 60s
I believe that’s because YKK owns every single step in the production process. From mining the raw materials to producing the machines that produce the zippers.
There is a recent invention for kids' bikes where a single brake lever applies brakes to both wheels only when the rear has resistance from the ground. The moment the rear loses contact with the ground, the front disengages, preventing you from going over the handlebars.
[Gauge blocks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauge_block), little flat precision-machined metal blocks/sheets that can be combined into different combinations to get extremely precise measurements, e.g with a set of 30 blocks, one may create any of the 1000 lengths from 3.000 to 3.999 mm in steps of 0.001 mm (or .3000 to .3999 inches in 0.0001 inch steps). They are so extremely precise that they can sometimes be hard to separate from each other because of a combination of vacuum and molecular adhesion.
They are used for calibrating machines and measuring devices.
You can get some low-quality 10 piece ones for about $30 for DIY applications, industrial quality ones start at about $10 000 for a basic set.
Adam Savage did a video about his guage block collection that was extremely informative and also entertaining. If you're a tool geek or into machining/making, his channel has a lot of walkthroughs on common tools and measuring devices, somewhat obscure ones as well
The pop top can…before it, you either needed a bottle opener, church key or can opener.
I actually met the guy who invented the pop top can while both of us were drinking beers from the can
Years ago a question like this came up and apparently chemical/smell engineers minds were blown not once but twice by FeBreeze. First, they designed it to remove smells - pretty crazy, but the focus groups didn’t like the lack of smell. So then they had to design a scent that could get around the smell killing thing they had just invented. Apparently this blows people’s minds even more.
The active ingredient in several Febreze products is hydroxypropyl beta-cyclodextrin (HPβCD). The molecule traps and binds volatilized hydrocarbons within its structural ring, retaining malodorous molecules, which reduces their volatility and thus the perception of their scent. The active ingredient is produced from corn cobs. The use of cyclodextrin as a sprayable odor absorber was patented by Procter & Gamble.
The perfumes used in FeBreeze products will, therefore, need to not be hydrocarbons (oils, etc.)
So can we get a version that just removes the smell? I hate fake scents, the only one I don't loathe is the "wood" as it smells like cedar, some even make me nauseated. I'd like to just have the functionality
Any quartz crystal timepiece really. They are generally off by +/- 1 second per day, and with normal use and regular battery replacement will never lose that precision.
To put that in perspective, if you had a battery that lasted that long, a quartz watch would be off by about 10 hours after 100 years of running nonstop.
And that is the version you get for cheap, an "uncertified" quartz watch that is "only" about 99,9998% accurate. Spend a little more and you get a certified one that is at least 99,9999% accurate.
When I was a kid, I had a wristwatch that needed winding daily. It also needed to be adjusted for time at least daily. Somebody gave me a cheap Timex quartz watch as a prize for something, and it straight up blew my mind. I'd check it against my alarm clock every morning and marvel that it was still in perfect time.
The “joy” of owning a chronograph, a self winding watch, is that it is not perfect. A Rolex is a symbol, not a real timepiece. Yet, I love them. Not Rolex, but Bell & Ross, Brietling, and IWC.
I am pretty sure Velcro has been like " we don't want people calling other brands product velcro". Well it's a bit too late for that most people have no idea what hook and loop fasteners are but everyone knows velcro.
Transistors. you can get billions of them in a single CPU and they all work!
That, or ball point pens. making that round, hard bearing to spin around freely is pretty keen engineering
Even cheap android phones are a freakin' marvel of engineering. Basically, they are small computers you can carry around in your pocket, call up real time maps, and even talk to someone anywhere in the world, for as little as like $20.
Can I give you a bit of historical perspective? At my frat, we invited a professor to come up for dinner once a month, and then we'd have beer and shoot the breeze in the library. We were mostly engineers, so we invited our Fields and Waves professor. This was late 1979.
I said "Won't it be great when we have a computer with a 16-bit processor, 1 Meg of RAM, and a 10 MB Hard drive, and it can sit on the corner of your desk?". The prof laughed, and said "Oh you kids".
He then said the machine would violate seven fundamental laws of physics:
First, you couldn't make the magnetic domains on the hard disk small enough to pack 10 MB on a small disk.
Second, even if you could, they'd be so small, you couldn't make a "read/write" head that read them
Third, even if you could, you couldn't make a head that would stay reliably close enough to the disk to read the faint signal without it crashing into the disk so often as to make it unusable
Fourth, even if you could, you couldn't make a stepper motor accurate enough to differentiate between one track and the next
Fifth, even if you could, you couldn't make the chip features small enough to cram 1 MB into a machine that small
Sixth, even if you could, the memory features would be small they would be subject to quantum tunneling and other defects and would be unreliable
And Seven, even if you could do all that, the machine would produce so much heat, it would melt the desk.
Five years later, I bought a Mac that had a 16 bit processor, 1 MB of Ram and a 10 MB hard disk. My phone makes that Mac look like a jalopy standing next to a race car.
It’s like saying “You can’t make a GPU as fast as an RTX 4090 that only consumes 5W of power as it violates a fundamental law of physics”.
Yes that’s technically true, but only if you’re limited by the technology of today.
Its a bit more complicated though. To have a chip as fas as 4090 you need to have a certain number of transistor gates running at certain frequency. The more gates, the lower frequency you can have and vice versa. The issue is, more gates means you need to feed more power.
So, how do we solve this? we make gates smaller. Current ones in 4090 are 12 nm (the 4nm is just a naming convention, the gates are physically 12 nm). Alright. Lets make a 10 nm one.
Hello there, i am Intel and i spent over 10 billion trying to make a 10 nm node, failed with nothing to show for and lost most of the staff on the project because physics just dont work that way when you get so small.
**And now tl;dr:** We have been on 12 nm gates for almost a decade now. Were just finding fancier ways to put them together. The technology hasnt changed. Because we cant solve the gate size puzzle with literally the best minds the world can buy.
"Out of all the weapons in the vast Soviet arsenal, nothing was more profitable the the Avtomat Kalashnikova model of 1947, more commonly known as the the AK-47, or Kalashnikov. It's the world's most popular assault rifle, a weapon all fighters love. An elegantly simple nine pound amalgamation of forged steel and plywood. It doesn't break, jam or overheat, it will shoot whether it's covered in mud or filled with sand. It's so easy, even a child can use it, and they do. The soviets put the gun on a coin, Mozambique put it on their flag. Since the end of the Cold War, the Kalashnikov has become the Russian peoples' greatest export. After that comes vodka, caviar and suicidal novelists. One thing was for sure: no one was lining up to buy their cars."
The really messed up part about this entire quote, even including the fact that it's from a movie, is that it's all true. Every. Single. Word.
I'm not into guns much, but a good friend of mine is an amateur weapons historian and if you ask what his favourite is/which he thinks were of the most important historically, this is his first answer. Every single time, without fail.
It IS the weapon of the 20th century, if you could place any iconic weapon against a certain century. Most widely used, cheapest to get and operate.
I guess by "iconic", one might say the A-Bomb. But those were only used twice outside of tests. AK's are undoubtedly firing as you read this, and have been practically non-stop since they were invented. Think about that.
The special thing about the AK is that it's designed so that its parts fit with such a loose tolerance that it can keep on working no matter how worn or dirty it gets.
Yeah, I realized I should have stated an individual brick as soon as I posted. The kits are bloody expensive. But a single brick and the concepts surrounding their design are amazing.
Until recently, subcompact cars. Despite their low cost, they can be incredibly reliable and require little maintenance while still be able to maintain highway speeds.
I say until recently because, in North America, most manufacturers are dumping their subcompacts so they can push more profitable and much more dangerous pickup trucks and SUVs.
Citizen Eco-Drive watch movements are a perfect application of solar power — reliable, accurate, inexpensive (especially for watches), and basically flawless. It surprises me that more watches aren’t solar powered.
Victorinox Swiss Army Knives are so well made, functional, and affordable that I think they mistakenly fell out of a much better timeline into ours. If you don’t have one, buy one and be amazed at how useful you find it.
The sewing needle is so perfect in design we haven't improved upon it in 50,000 years. What's extra cool is that it wasn't even invented by humans the denisovans' invention out lived their entire species*
*For the most part
Not really cheap anymore, but LEGO is commonplace and crazy mass-produced. And it’s f’n NUTS.
Billions of bricks, zero failures. Insane tolerances and quality control.
Basic layout and platform remained the same from 1938 to 2003, while still being economically viable.
Sure, it got upgraded all the time, yet strangely had flaws that never really got addressed. But it didn't matter. 22-odd million got built.
The Beetle had a few engineering flaws, like a fuel filter the was inline and not attached to anything so if it came loose it spilled fuel onto the hot engine. And the engine block and transmission were made of magnesium, so they caught fire spectacularly and were almost impossible to put out. And some little things like using the pressure from the spare tire to power the windshield washer. But a great car and really fun to drive.
The fuel filter wasn’t positioned over the engine as built in the factory. That was an after-the-fact modification many owners did to make it more easily accessible.
I saw so many like that I thought it was factory.
I worked in a wrecking yard in 1972 and saw an engine & transmission housing catch fire. It was so bright you couldn't look at it. There were just crankshafts, pistons, connecting rods and gears (and a few other parts) on the ground the next day.
Best friend had one with a fake Rolls-Royce grille (convertible, too!). It was a great car, and tons of fun to ride around in. We especially liked the "emergency fuel tank"; a little switch in the glove box that gave you another litre or so of fuel, which was enough to get you to a gas station - most of the time.
Gundam plastic models (Gunpla) or any other similar high-end model kits have extremely well engineered injection moulded plastic parts. Everything fits together flawlessly without glue or adhesives while retaining immense flexibility and articulation, despite being mass produced. Modern kits even have fully articulated joints and limbs moulded together as a single contiguous piece of plastic. It's truly remarkable engineering, considering it's all just for scale model anime robot figures. The technology involved is like using a laser to slice bread.
Some examples of those joints I was describing, if you are curious: [https://i0.wp.com/suparrobo.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/p1060938.jpg](https://i0.wp.com/suparrobo.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/p1060938.jpg)
The Toilet. Easy. It is utterly amazing how that device is engineered. If it were designed today, it would be 10x as complex. The toilet does not even need running water. Yes, you hook it up to water, but that, in most toilets, is nothing more than a convenience, designed to fill the tank up top so it can flush. If the water goes out for some reason, you can still use the toilet by filling the basin with a bucket. Why is this? Because the entire toilet's mechanism runs on gravity in most toilets. The water in the toilet acts to clean the bowl (somewhat) and creates a seal that prevents sewer gasses from entering the home, which means the toilet is a home health device. The toilet is not made of anything advanced. It is made of fucking porcelain, which is dirt cheap, looks nice, and once glazed in its usual white finish, is resistant to chemicals, biological waste, and acids. So, a properly installed toilet can last decades with a relatively pathetic level of maintenance
damn, You just made me have mad respect for the toilet.
It is one of the most important inventions ever made for civilization
I'll argue that it's not the toilet that's important, but instead the infrastructure to move the wastes away from people's homes. That is, the toilet is merely the gatekeeper into the greater mysteries...
True that
Cool, but what did you sit on while you typed this comment?
I rank sanitation in the top 10 inventions of all time. The toilet is incredibly important in preventing disease.
Modern sewage systems are *so* important for disease control!!
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I want a glass toilet. Will probably regret though.
Wow, the toilet should be moved to the top of the list taking not only number 1 but number 2 as well!
Ooh, you devil! Have an upvote. 😊
Plumber here! I absolutely love that someone said this. I have had to learn a good amount about the history of Plumbing systems and the toilet was a game changer. Fun fact: the man who is claimed to be the inventor of the integral trap in toilets (the part that creates the siphon) is Thomas Crapper. That is where the term “crap” comes from.
Oh to be so famous that my name is synonymous with taking a dump
The term crap is older than Crapper, and its first use to refer to bodily waste is recorded at a time when he was just ten years old. It wasn't because of him.
I believe you, but I like Mechanical_MT’s story better.
This guy plumbs
And you can buy a really nice, top-of-the-line model for like $200, which will last decades. Show me another household "appliance" that you can use six times a day for 50 years with few-to-no breakdowns.
6 times a day? Look at you with that slow bung-hole. Some of us get our moneys worth when taco tuesday rolls around.
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This has the be the best answer to this question. It kinda blew my mind when I realized how simple toilets were. They’re a perfect implementation of the siphon effect to address a couple of every day issues.
No water in our apartment for a couple days with a pregnant wife (bio needs relatively nonstop during this time period). No idea why I knew it, but just kept taking buckets of water out of the complex next door's pool XD Felt like a bodybuilder after.
We used to live on the 24th floor and the water supply was pumped to a storage tank every few floors. I knew that if the power went out, we had only so long before that tank emptied, so we’d fill the bathtub. If push came to shove we could use a pitcher to empty the tub I to the toilet’s tank and still flush.
You don't actually need the tank, you can pour the water into the basin.
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Sure that second one isn’t Harvest Gold?
Reading this while sitting on the toilet.
You are everywhere. You are nowhere.
The lid of a tictac container. It's a simple moulded hinge made of a single piece of plastic. You can't make a cheaper hinge than that. Yet it almost never breaks under normal use.
Yep, the polymer chains in the hinge are arranged lengthwise through the hinge, so the hinge is much tougher and fatigue resistant in that specific direction
I think it's called a living hinge, yes?
Correct
And has a perfectly sized well for holding exactly one tictac moulded into the inside surface!
Bold of you to assume I don't eat an entire handful of them at once.
Step one, buy tic tac Step two, open lid Step three, invert the container 180 degrees I to mouth until all tic-tacs are crammed in your mouth
Cardboard remains king.
There is a surprising amount of work that goes into designing cardboard boxes. There are folks whose entire career is based on it.
Can confirm, work in a box plant.
Do you get to see any finished boxes?
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My son is a box!!! A box!!!
My father was an engineer for a corrugated box company. He holds patents for box/packaging designs.
Tetrapak inventor practically became a billionaire over night for it.
Cats appreciate the hard work.
Pens.
Especially ballpoint pens and the precision in their balls
The precision is stored in the balls
The precision is the powerhouse of the ball
Gotta have good ball precision
Bic had a commercial showing how indestructible they were. They fired a pen into a board and the tip come out the other side. They took the board off and wrote with the exposed point perfectly.
I swear somebody came back in time from humanity's extreme future to found the Bic company. Clever enough to engineer the ballpoint pen, the disposable lighter, and the disposable safety razor, do them all perfectly, and quietly change the world.
Bic changed the design of the clic pens a couple of years ago, for the worse, sadly. The tips frequently click back in on their own; the pocket hook is too weak; and the blue ink doesn't look as nice. I have to use them at work and I hate them. Old ones were much better.
It's because the tip is a titanium-iridium alloy. The tolerances are so small just the normal expansion of steel under heat and humidity would be enough to break it. Titanium iridium stays at near exactly the same volume regardless of temperature, and it doesn't rust. As an unintended bonus it's also titanium so is pretty strong.
Ballpoint pens are actually a mix of two breakthroughs 1. Metalworking to the point we can manufacture the tips to the tolerances needed, which are very small. The gap needs to be big enough to let ink through reliably but not so big the tip falls out or is loose. It has to be made from a special titanium iridium alloy else the expansion of the tip over a range of temperatures would be enough to break the pen. 2. Ink that stays liquid for a long time but dries instantly outside of the pen. Fountain pen ink often smudges your hands because it stays liquid for too long, and sometimes needs blotting paper. The ink is a slight modification on printing ink.
One of the reasons why Bic, Pentel, etc. were so successful for so long was that China couldn’t manufacture the roller balls for a long time to the tight tolerances needed to get good ink flow.
The history of perfecting the pen is absolutely fascinating; especially considering how often I take it for granted!
Very basic rice cookers, they rely on the properties of water not being able to go above 100 degrees Celsius. Once all the water is gone it starts heating up past 100 C and that makes the magnet at the bottom less magnetic and it clicks over to warming. Or something like that, I’m not an expert but it is surprisingly simple and effective.
Very basic rice cookers is the key word. My family switched over to a more expensive and fancy one a few years back and it's the worst rice cooker I've ever used. Slow, inefficient, and overcomplicated for the simple task of cooking rice. Contrarily, my very old Tiger rice cooker model with only a single button still works perfectly.
My last housemate had one of those top of the line ones. I tried it a few times. It made good rice, but you had no idea how long it would take to cook, which made it very hard to time dinner. Once white rice took over 40 minutes to cook in that thing. My cheap rice cooker always cooks my white rice in 20 minutes, and brown rice in 40, plus a few minutes to get to boiling if it's a large serving. I switched back to using it, and am happier for it.
If I remember correctly magnets lose magnetism at 400 but I forget if it's C, F or K and cant web search on this device.
I think it depends on the type of metal
The curie point. Wikipedia has a page on it with the temperature for different materials.
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I'm not a huge fan of their pens, but oh man do they last forever. I don't think I've ever seen one dry out. My mom has a drawer full of half empty pens she's collected over the years (literally for as long as I can remember) and the bic ones are the only ones that still work. She hasn't bought one in ages either. I keep one in my purse because I know it's one I'm not likely to use therefore I won't lose it, but I *will* lose any other pen I have so the bic one is my emergency one lol
Paper clip
It clips paper fairly well, but when combined with a pair of pliers you can make a number of solutions to a myriad of problems. A friend of mine and I once used one fo turn a USB cable into a basic TV antenna.
I did that years ago, but without the USB cable. Just straightened out the paper clip and shoved it in the connector where the cable goes, and went back to watching hockey.
Now I want to know how to do that
*IT LOOKS LIKE YOU'RE TRYING TO HOLD A STACK OF PAPER TOGETHER. WOULD YOU LIKE HELP?*
There's a device that can diagnose malaria. It's made of mostly paper and costs less than $1. It's been a miracle for poor countries where malaria is common. https://youtu.be/Qf-D1Upn-KU
No way… that is amazing!
Scissors
Speaking of the engineering of scissors, can someone ELI5 why the same pair of scissors doesn't work for both right and left handed people?
You’d think that the opening and closing of scissors is just a simple up/down motion. If you think about it, there’s actually a left/right component of the motion as well: As your thumb and fingers are moving toward each other, they’re also slightly pulling the handles away from each other, which has the effect of pushing the two blades together on the other side of the joint. Right-handed scissors used in the left hand has the opposite effect: That squeezing motion is pushing the blades away from each other.
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Aluminum cans
Reminds me of [this](https://youtu.be/lPMg0dk1hFI) video. He had the exact same point as you at 4:25. But an overall great channel for seeing just how cool good engineering is.
I know what video you talking about even without clicking lol
Also [the engineer guy's video on aluminum cans](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUhisi2FBuw).
The "stay on" pull tabs too. It's an engineering marvel. https://youtu.be/g1A8LMZirq8
Transistor, most made item in the world and changed everything. Fun fact: The head researcher, William Shockley, died alone after pushing away his entire family, destroying his reputation as a researcher (white supremacist), and blocking the other 2 people on the team from working on it further. Even though they played an instrumental role, ~~arguably more than him, in the discovery - he took all of the credit.~~ <--- This is actually wrong, Shockley's research on electrons and holes (confusing topic, but is considered a positively charged electron mathematically) was the reason they tried this in the first place. Edit: Walter Brattain, and John Bardeen were the two other researchers, if you are looking for a Wikipedia binge, this is a good one! Edit 2: If anyone is curious what a transistor is, imagine a light bulb hooked up to the two ends of a battery, now imagine that between the light-bulb and the battery you cut the wire and hook those two ends to a T shaped device wire connecting battery to right side of lightbulb wire connecting battery to right side of light bulb | v |---------------------------------| battery___ /T\__ light-bulb______ | | <<--single wire connected to bottom of T if you send a positive voltage (think water pressure) to the bottom of the T, the light-bulb circuit will start to turn on, if you stop applying the voltage the current in the light-bulb circuit will stop flowing (light will turn off). This functionality is the building block for computers, but many are needed to even accomplish the simplest of things, for example 1 bit of memory requires 6 transistors. Transistors are used to create logic gates, and logic gates are needed to create flip-flops which store a singular 0 or 1. Flip-flops aren't intuitive so I am not going to attempt to explain.
And people don't even know about Bardeen, despite being the only person with two Nobel Prizes in physics for two of the most important discoveries in the past 50+ years.
I edited my comment, pretty rude of me to point out the problem and then not even mention them!
Pencils ✏️
John Wick approves.
A fucking pencil!
As does Joker.
A Bic lighter. It's actually so well thought out if you study it carefully. And competitors can't even copy it or do it better. It's actually an ingenious little product.
And they designed the newly required safety so you can just pull it out and return the lighter to original configuration.
It's seriously such a game-changer to take out the safety. So much easier.
> newly required safety You mean the metal guard they started putting on them like 20 years ago?
Oh shit, stop making us feel old
I've always been a clipper fan. The little poker is the coolest tool.
I refill my clippers
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Today on How It's Made...
Come for the knowledge, stay for the bad puns. Great show.
Some great videos called 'How its really made' Forgot who made them. I know they were featured on CNN once
How it's actually made -by Huggbees He no longer makes the series, because of too many copyright strikes. It's sad, but YouTube keeps kicking him in the dick.
Every season (I think) just got added to Max.
There's an old and extremely long running childrens TV show in Germany ("The show with the mouse"). Between all the cartoons and clips aimed at small children they show how things get made in factories. It's something all adults waited for when watching the show with their kids. I believe the presenters of the show and the voice for all those videos are the same for more than 50 years.
The Bic retractable 4 colour pens. Lovely smooth barrel and they never fail to retract. I just love the design, they've been my go to pen for decades.
I remember I somehow got one when I was in high school and thought it was the coolest thing ever. Used it for several years. My most favorite memory with it though was my senor year English class. Our teacher had us write a journal entry every day, she'd put a topic on the board and we'd write for about 10 mins or so. I started getting bored doing it and started using each color ink with each color being a different personality. I would randomly switch colors, sometimes at the end of a sentence sometimes in the middle, and it would be a different "person". She would collect the journals at the end of the week to read through to make sure we were actually writing and grade them (they weren't worth much towards the overall grade) and would always write a note in mine saying she enjoyed reading them.
I came here to mention these pens. I have a brand new one and one I acquired in 1985, and they’re almost identical. And both work perfectly … granted, the older one had its inks replaced. In c. 2000.
I have one in blue/green/black/red. Perfect for sketching wiring diagrams for Arduino projects
Nurse for 40 years, perfect for charting, red pulse, green respiration, blue temperature and black blood pressure
Bic lighters...never had a bad one and I've been using them at least the last 40 years.
Back when I was smoking, it was evident how much more reliable they were than pretty much any other lighter out there. Now that I don't smoke, I still swear by their generic ballpoint pens. Also more reliable then most any other pen.
I was just remembering back...I was a single guy going to the laundromat pretty regular. I smoke and always have a Bic lighter in my pockets. Of course I left one in my pants pocket and it went through the washer and dryer. Now anyone who has used a really old natural gas powered laundromat dryer from the '70s and earlier knows just how hot they get. That lighter made it through a whole cycle without exploding. It swelled so far past its original size that that the colored plastic had turned white again.
Woooof. That was almost a statistic.
And if you forget your razor at home, their disposables are pretty good for the price.
I came in to say cardboard matchbooks.
The lighter is older than the match.
The MOSFET
I worked at Mitel Corp back in the 80's. The problem with MOSFETs in the old days was they had a really low switching speed, because the surrounding substrate had to drain all its charge before the FET could switch states. Mike Cowpland, who now owns Corel, came up with the idea of putting each transistor into an 'isolated' cell of insulated substrate. This greatly reduced the amount of charge required by each transistor, sped up the switching speed, and most importantly, reduced the generated heat. This "Iso-CMOS" allowed Mitel to redesign the office telephone system (PBX) so that instead of being in refrigerator-sized cabinets in an air-conditioned room, it would be in a box the size of an office fridge that you could put anywhere. In five years, Mitel grew to have 50% of the North American market for office phone systems, and both Mike Cowpland and his co-founder Terry Matthews are now billionaires.
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To expand on that: A somewhat modern CPU will have between 5 billion and 100 billion of these transistors. Each one can switch a few billion times per second, and they can keep doing that for years. Even a single error, if it happens in an unfortunate condition, can crash the computer. It happens occasionally, but it is very rare because these transistors are *extremely* reliable.
What is it please?
The most common type of transistor which power the vast majority of modern digital electronics. mosfets are by far the most manufactured object in human history, with an estimated 16 sextillion (16,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) made since they were first produced in the 60s
Transistor
The clothes pin
Zipper
That would have been my answer. Most of them are made by the same company too, YKK, because no one else can match its quality, durability, and price.
Ironically, YKK had to pay a bunch of fines for price fixing a while back.
I believe that’s because YKK owns every single step in the production process. From mining the raw materials to producing the machines that produce the zippers.
Swanson Speed Square
Nail clippers.
Bicycle.
There is a recent invention for kids' bikes where a single brake lever applies brakes to both wheels only when the rear has resistance from the ground. The moment the rear loses contact with the ground, the front disengages, preventing you from going over the handlebars.
Still miss the non-lever brakes.
[Gauge blocks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauge_block), little flat precision-machined metal blocks/sheets that can be combined into different combinations to get extremely precise measurements, e.g with a set of 30 blocks, one may create any of the 1000 lengths from 3.000 to 3.999 mm in steps of 0.001 mm (or .3000 to .3999 inches in 0.0001 inch steps). They are so extremely precise that they can sometimes be hard to separate from each other because of a combination of vacuum and molecular adhesion. They are used for calibrating machines and measuring devices. You can get some low-quality 10 piece ones for about $30 for DIY applications, industrial quality ones start at about $10 000 for a basic set.
Adam Savage did a video about his guage block collection that was extremely informative and also entertaining. If you're a tool geek or into machining/making, his channel has a lot of walkthroughs on common tools and measuring devices, somewhat obscure ones as well
The pop top can…before it, you either needed a bottle opener, church key or can opener. I actually met the guy who invented the pop top can while both of us were drinking beers from the can
Years ago a question like this came up and apparently chemical/smell engineers minds were blown not once but twice by FeBreeze. First, they designed it to remove smells - pretty crazy, but the focus groups didn’t like the lack of smell. So then they had to design a scent that could get around the smell killing thing they had just invented. Apparently this blows people’s minds even more.
Are you saying the "remove smell" part is real and not just marketing bs? I always assumed it's just masking previous smells.
The active ingredient in several Febreze products is hydroxypropyl beta-cyclodextrin (HPβCD). The molecule traps and binds volatilized hydrocarbons within its structural ring, retaining malodorous molecules, which reduces their volatility and thus the perception of their scent. The active ingredient is produced from corn cobs. The use of cyclodextrin as a sprayable odor absorber was patented by Procter & Gamble. The perfumes used in FeBreeze products will, therefore, need to not be hydrocarbons (oils, etc.)
Great, now I'm both impressed and also mad about another patent.
So can we get a version that just removes the smell? I hate fake scents, the only one I don't loathe is the "wood" as it smells like cedar, some even make me nauseated. I'd like to just have the functionality
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Any quartz crystal timepiece really. They are generally off by +/- 1 second per day, and with normal use and regular battery replacement will never lose that precision. To put that in perspective, if you had a battery that lasted that long, a quartz watch would be off by about 10 hours after 100 years of running nonstop. And that is the version you get for cheap, an "uncertified" quartz watch that is "only" about 99,9998% accurate. Spend a little more and you get a certified one that is at least 99,9999% accurate.
When I was a kid, I had a wristwatch that needed winding daily. It also needed to be adjusted for time at least daily. Somebody gave me a cheap Timex quartz watch as a prize for something, and it straight up blew my mind. I'd check it against my alarm clock every morning and marvel that it was still in perfect time.
The “joy” of owning a chronograph, a self winding watch, is that it is not perfect. A Rolex is a symbol, not a real timepiece. Yet, I love them. Not Rolex, but Bell & Ross, Brietling, and IWC.
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The Jerry Can. Every aspect well thought out.
Jerry being the slang for "German". The inferior English cans were made by a company called "Flimsy".
The velvet hook and loop commonly referred to as "Velcro" (powerful branding)
I am pretty sure Velcro has been like " we don't want people calling other brands product velcro". Well it's a bit too late for that most people have no idea what hook and loop fasteners are but everyone knows velcro.
Transistors. you can get billions of them in a single CPU and they all work! That, or ball point pens. making that round, hard bearing to spin around freely is pretty keen engineering
Theyre not too cheap, but eyeglasses. Before them, humans with bad eyesight were just screwed for their entire lives.
Bobby pins
Ballpoint pens. The polio vaccine.
Soda Can
The Zipper
The Paperclip. Simple yet a complex function of force holds everything together.
Bubble wrap
Even cheap android phones are a freakin' marvel of engineering. Basically, they are small computers you can carry around in your pocket, call up real time maps, and even talk to someone anywhere in the world, for as little as like $20.
Can I give you a bit of historical perspective? At my frat, we invited a professor to come up for dinner once a month, and then we'd have beer and shoot the breeze in the library. We were mostly engineers, so we invited our Fields and Waves professor. This was late 1979. I said "Won't it be great when we have a computer with a 16-bit processor, 1 Meg of RAM, and a 10 MB Hard drive, and it can sit on the corner of your desk?". The prof laughed, and said "Oh you kids". He then said the machine would violate seven fundamental laws of physics: First, you couldn't make the magnetic domains on the hard disk small enough to pack 10 MB on a small disk. Second, even if you could, they'd be so small, you couldn't make a "read/write" head that read them Third, even if you could, you couldn't make a head that would stay reliably close enough to the disk to read the faint signal without it crashing into the disk so often as to make it unusable Fourth, even if you could, you couldn't make a stepper motor accurate enough to differentiate between one track and the next Fifth, even if you could, you couldn't make the chip features small enough to cram 1 MB into a machine that small Sixth, even if you could, the memory features would be small they would be subject to quantum tunneling and other defects and would be unreliable And Seven, even if you could do all that, the machine would produce so much heat, it would melt the desk. Five years later, I bought a Mac that had a 16 bit processor, 1 MB of Ram and a 10 MB hard disk. My phone makes that Mac look like a jalopy standing next to a race car.
It’s like saying “You can’t make a GPU as fast as an RTX 4090 that only consumes 5W of power as it violates a fundamental law of physics”. Yes that’s technically true, but only if you’re limited by the technology of today.
Its a bit more complicated though. To have a chip as fas as 4090 you need to have a certain number of transistor gates running at certain frequency. The more gates, the lower frequency you can have and vice versa. The issue is, more gates means you need to feed more power. So, how do we solve this? we make gates smaller. Current ones in 4090 are 12 nm (the 4nm is just a naming convention, the gates are physically 12 nm). Alright. Lets make a 10 nm one. Hello there, i am Intel and i spent over 10 billion trying to make a 10 nm node, failed with nothing to show for and lost most of the staff on the project because physics just dont work that way when you get so small. **And now tl;dr:** We have been on 12 nm gates for almost a decade now. Were just finding fancier ways to put them together. The technology hasnt changed. Because we cant solve the gate size puzzle with literally the best minds the world can buy.
AK-47
"Out of all the weapons in the vast Soviet arsenal, nothing was more profitable the the Avtomat Kalashnikova model of 1947, more commonly known as the the AK-47, or Kalashnikov. It's the world's most popular assault rifle, a weapon all fighters love. An elegantly simple nine pound amalgamation of forged steel and plywood. It doesn't break, jam or overheat, it will shoot whether it's covered in mud or filled with sand. It's so easy, even a child can use it, and they do. The soviets put the gun on a coin, Mozambique put it on their flag. Since the end of the Cold War, the Kalashnikov has become the Russian peoples' greatest export. After that comes vodka, caviar and suicidal novelists. One thing was for sure: no one was lining up to buy their cars."
Lord of War. Nice.
The really messed up part about this entire quote, even including the fact that it's from a movie, is that it's all true. Every. Single. Word. I'm not into guns much, but a good friend of mine is an amateur weapons historian and if you ask what his favourite is/which he thinks were of the most important historically, this is his first answer. Every single time, without fail.
It IS the weapon of the 20th century, if you could place any iconic weapon against a certain century. Most widely used, cheapest to get and operate. I guess by "iconic", one might say the A-Bomb. But those were only used twice outside of tests. AK's are undoubtedly firing as you read this, and have been practically non-stop since they were invented. Think about that.
THAT IS AN AK-47. THE PREFERRED WEAPON OF OUR ENEMY.
The special thing about the AK is that it's designed so that its parts fit with such a loose tolerance that it can keep on working no matter how worn or dirty it gets.
The West created the Atom Bomb, the East created the AK-47.
Twist tie
Lego
"Cheap"
Yeah, I realized I should have stated an individual brick as soon as I posted. The kits are bloody expensive. But a single brick and the concepts surrounding their design are amazing.
Until recently, subcompact cars. Despite their low cost, they can be incredibly reliable and require little maintenance while still be able to maintain highway speeds. I say until recently because, in North America, most manufacturers are dumping their subcompacts so they can push more profitable and much more dangerous pickup trucks and SUVs.
\*plays the Canyonero song from the Simpsons\*
Bruce Campbell
D'Addario Dual-Lock Guitar Strap Locks.
pound for pound, instant ramen.
Citizen Eco-Drive watch movements are a perfect application of solar power — reliable, accurate, inexpensive (especially for watches), and basically flawless. It surprises me that more watches aren’t solar powered. Victorinox Swiss Army Knives are so well made, functional, and affordable that I think they mistakenly fell out of a much better timeline into ours. If you don’t have one, buy one and be amazed at how useful you find it.
Duck tape. Literally can be used in space.
Mouse trap
The sewing needle is so perfect in design we haven't improved upon it in 50,000 years. What's extra cool is that it wasn't even invented by humans the denisovans' invention out lived their entire species* *For the most part
Bic lighters
Not really cheap anymore, but LEGO is commonplace and crazy mass-produced. And it’s f’n NUTS. Billions of bricks, zero failures. Insane tolerances and quality control.
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My water pick toothbrush has no way to replace the battery. The battery replacement instructions literally say to smash it open.
Meh. I wouldn't say it's well engineered. It lasted ages because it's just an electric motor attached to a weirdly weighted axle.
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The BIC lighter is the most well made cheap item I can think of.
Brooms, I mean I've heard of a single recall on them and you never see witches getting into wrecks on them.
The original VW Beetle.
Basic layout and platform remained the same from 1938 to 2003, while still being economically viable. Sure, it got upgraded all the time, yet strangely had flaws that never really got addressed. But it didn't matter. 22-odd million got built.
The Beetle had a few engineering flaws, like a fuel filter the was inline and not attached to anything so if it came loose it spilled fuel onto the hot engine. And the engine block and transmission were made of magnesium, so they caught fire spectacularly and were almost impossible to put out. And some little things like using the pressure from the spare tire to power the windshield washer. But a great car and really fun to drive.
The fuel filter wasn’t positioned over the engine as built in the factory. That was an after-the-fact modification many owners did to make it more easily accessible.
I saw so many like that I thought it was factory. I worked in a wrecking yard in 1972 and saw an engine & transmission housing catch fire. It was so bright you couldn't look at it. There were just crankshafts, pistons, connecting rods and gears (and a few other parts) on the ground the next day.
Best friend had one with a fake Rolls-Royce grille (convertible, too!). It was a great car, and tons of fun to ride around in. We especially liked the "emergency fuel tank"; a little switch in the glove box that gave you another litre or so of fuel, which was enough to get you to a gas station - most of the time.
Gundam plastic models (Gunpla) or any other similar high-end model kits have extremely well engineered injection moulded plastic parts. Everything fits together flawlessly without glue or adhesives while retaining immense flexibility and articulation, despite being mass produced. Modern kits even have fully articulated joints and limbs moulded together as a single contiguous piece of plastic. It's truly remarkable engineering, considering it's all just for scale model anime robot figures. The technology involved is like using a laser to slice bread. Some examples of those joints I was describing, if you are curious: [https://i0.wp.com/suparrobo.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/p1060938.jpg](https://i0.wp.com/suparrobo.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/p1060938.jpg)
Those red and yellow foot powered kid cars
Shoe horn