I was disappointed we didn't get any Dan as well, even if it was only a 'Dan walking in from stage right with a good old British "What the bloody 'ell is goin' on 'ere then?" in the outtakes at the end.
@@bobweiss8682that’s what I was thinking too. The people who made these did so without the benefit of being able to see what is happening. I’m sure they would love the footage and it makes me wonder if they would be surprised by anything or just say, yep that’s how I designed it
As a person who worked in a G.E. Lamp Plant for over 20 years making the actual bulbs for the FlashCube, SuperCube, HiPower, MagiCube, & FlipFlash (names such as GE, Osram, Wootan, & several store brands); your assessment of the parts (glass bulb, glass beads, zirconium/magnesium foil, tungsten filament, oxygen, primer, etc...) were spot-on. The most dangerous part of the process was the use of the primer for MagiCube, which the post was dipped into. (A safer & different primer was used to dip the tungsten filament & electrical posts for the other flash bulbs. That primer wasn't as pressure sensitive.) The cup that held the primer was changed every 3-4 hours. As long as the primer wasn't dried out on the inside of the dip cup; which happens as the level in the cup drops, it was safe. BUT dried primer was extremely volatile & accidents have happened. As a side note... back in the heyday of chemical flash; our plant was just one of several that ran over 100 machines; each machine producing 2000-2500 bulbs/hour, 24 hours a day, 6+ days a week, for about 20 years. THAT'S A LOT OF BULBS!!
My Uncle, Bernard Kopelman, invented the Magicube. He was the head of research at Sylvania Lighting. I remember him explaining how it worked back around 1970 when I was a teenager. He was a material scientist and before working at Sylvania he was involved in the Manhattan Project developing materials for nuclear reactors. Sylvania (GTE) rewarded him for his work on the Magicube by making him the Vice President of their materials division. He regretted the promotion the rest of his career since he was an inventor at heart and did not enjoy being a manager. My uncle got me a summer job at the Sylvania factory in 1976 when they were developing a machine to make a million electronic flash tubes.
I love how so many youtubers bring Gavin on not because of clickbait, but because of his equipment and experience. Like, barely anyone mentions that they got him on in the title or thumbnails, so you just get surprise Gavin in the middle of a video, and honestly I love that.
Yeah. It makes me feel bad for Dan. When are other RUclipsrs going to need an almost-disposable english dude for some hazardous tests? He deserves some love, too!
@@AviertjeDoesn't Dan still live in the UK? I was under the impression he travels to the states for a big filming batch periodically, and then the actual videos come out over time as they're edited. Must be awkward to sync that up with _other_ RUclipsrs as well.
I remember being sent to the local rite-aid to buy them in the middle of a party. I was a kid in the 70s when these things were at their peak. But they died very quickly. I had no idea these started in 65. I thought they were much older. By 1980 they were gone.
Me too - born in 1969, played with the used Magicubes from my parents’ cameras as a kid, and then my first camera in 1980 was a Kodak that both took 110 film cassettes and had a built-in electric flash that slid open and shut, so you replaced batteries instead of the bulb. They also used a 16mm film camera for home movies and the light for that was also as bright as the sun, it seemed, so all those indoor home movies have us kids squinting and holding up hands against the light. I also half-remember all the smells involved with the Magicubes and the film camera and playing the movies. You don’t get those with phones…
I'm not ashamed to share that I once picked up an already-opened box of magic cubes and they all slid out and hit the garage floor and ALL went off at once. That was an expensive lesson back in the day.
As soon as Alec showed the mechanism I wondered to myself if they could go off if someone dropped them. So that's a yes then. It's like a ninja smoke bomb haha.
@@Fan-lq6uvHell, I'd be slightly concerned about the amount of light generated by a potential 12 flashes going off *simultaneously,* causing the cardboard package to ignite from all the heat! (... and incase anyone wants to think that's _not_ possible, just remember what the sun + a magnifying glass can do 😅)
I want to bottle the feeling I got upon hearing you say "slow mo guy"... and then not just pass it off as a joke! I can't believe you didn't clickbait Gav when it would've been so easy to and it lead to such a delightful surprise as I had not looked at the description nor comments yet. So, thank you for that. It brought joy to my heart.
Around 3mins in I was literally drafting a comment in my head about how it would be so cool to see these flashes go off in slow motion, and of course a collab with Gav (and/or Dan) came instantly to mind. Seconds later I was grinning ear to ear, cursing myself for ever doubting Alec 😅😅😅
They should have just called Michael Bay’s cameraman and asked him how he got those slo-mo flashbulb shots in “Pearl Harbor”. That’s the movie that taught me that cameras were a lot more explodey back in the day.
I did a second year university project on the materials and processes within the Magicube in 1986 - when they were still a current technology. The oxygen inside is pressurized so as to allow a greater mass of burning zirconium per bulb for a brighter flash. The ignition tube encloses a wire post, centred up the middle. The post is coated with a pyrotechnic compound, so that when the striker wire hits the outside, the tube is crushed onto the post, pressurizing the pyrotechnic coating hammer and anvil style for a more reliable ignition. A fantastic project. Thanks to Prof. Jim Williamson for that opportunity!
As a kid (born in '78) I would dismantle the blue dot flash cubes and throw the bulbs on the concrete (post down, of course) for magic ninja escapes when playing with friends after sunset. Until my parents discovered we suddenly had no flash cubes.
As a kid, I think possibly they didn't figure out I needed glasses yet at that point, I thought the bulb was solid glass with a solid metal post sticking into it. I didn't realize it was hollow, and that the "post" was also hollow and contained a fulminate of some sort.
Yes, I used to do the same. I would even heat the bulb to remove the film, so it would literally explode. Yes, it's a wonder I lived to the ripe old age I am now, and with all my fingers!
The fact that this is one of the rare times in Slow Mo Guys history where there was actually too _much_ light for the camera really says a lot about how insanely bright these things burn Also, love the shot at 30:47
You just answered an old mystery of mine by sparking an old memory. When I was a young whippersnapper probably under the age of 8 I discovered electricity. I would like to hook a bunch of batteries together in series and connect random things to them(motors, leds, random components that would just get hot). One of the things was an interesting looking light bulb that looked just like the ones you're showing... I connected it to probably about five or six C cells. Then BAM! Mega flash blinded me scared the shit out of me I was like I need to respect the batteries more. At that time I thought I just blew the thing up now I know it worked as design. Remember my grandma watching in the background and giggling.. That evil woman taking joy in my response 😅 ❤ lol. All this time now i know!
There is a saying in Russian: every man is a boy who survived by accident. Considering the much riskier experiments we did as kids in the 90-s, I can say that I survived by an accident too. Flashcubes don't even come close to our experiments.
The Blue Dot in the bulb (known as the Sylvania Blue Dot) is actually to indicate whether or not the bulb has leaked its sealed low pressure oxygen atmosphere, if the blue dot turns pink, the bulb has leaked and is likely to explode.
I remember the commercials advising that if the blue dot was black it was a sure way to know the bulb was spent (but they used much smoother language). I thought it was ridiculous since every bulb that fired melted almost all the way through the shield.
@@16vSciroccoboi because it's a LOW PRESSURE oxygen rich atmosphere, which is BELOW ambient atmospheric pressure. Being AT atmospheric pressure could potentially mean there's more oxygen inside than intended for a controlled reaction.
Agreed, the various clips were captivating, some of the best slow-mo footage I've watched. It reminds me of those movie reels from the Space Shuttle liftoff pad ("Best of the Best").
In my college years in the early 80's I was in the co-op Engineering program at General Electric. I worked at a plant that made flashcubes. We conducted reliability testing by exposing the flashcubes to high humidity for several weeks. Once the data was collected and the tests were completed, I would take the flash lamps out of each cube and combine them in a large grocery bag which was quite dangerous due to 'sympathetic flash', which means when one lamp flashes, they all flash. I'd connect 2 wires to one lamp, put it in the middle of the bag which held several hundred lamps, place it on the porch at night and wait for my roommate to come home. Touch the 2 wires to a 12 volt battery and you'd get what looked like a small nuclear explosion scaring the hell out of him. Great fun back in the day. 33:52
Several... several hundred... yeah I'd laugh if it were just the roommate, _maybe,_ that still sounds kinda dickish, but it sounds like this was done outside, on a porch, where it could scare neighbors and pets. At night.
The craziest part would be how silent it would be! Like, with a flash that big, you expect a massive bang as well, like a bomb just went off, but it's just a quick, silent flare out of nowhere!
As a 62 year old man, I think it’s hysterically funny that young people, as in this content creator are so fascinated by the way things were done only 40 years ago. Yet, it’s the same curiosity as I have about generations before my time as in the 1930’s thru 1950’s.
Being 41 myself, I find it amazing just how many things that used to be parts of my everyday life have become ancient relics of a bygone era…seeing younger generations coming along and rediscovering these relics…and really deep diving into them like Alec does, just brings a smile to my face every time… It’s why I’m a subscriber…☺️
i love old things to the point where i want to someday collect old hardware. my current stock of old hardware is a commodore64, ti99a4, and an original atari (which is sadly hit or miss when it comes to working). I'm 19 and id absolutely love to own more hardware, rarer hardware from back in ye olde days
Lol. I'm 38 and i work with guys who are mostly around your age. I'm starting to embrace being the old guy. I got my first flip phone in 2004 when i was 18. Imagine a 19 year old in 20 years saying the iphone is older than them. 😂 @blakksheep736
Out of college, I worked for an aerospace company. The plant started during WWII as a small/medium caliber ammo producer. After the war, they got into other things. During the 50's and 60's, they had a contract to make flash bulbs for Kodak. They converted one of the buildings they used to make .50 cal rounds into a mechanically controlled automated flashbulb line. The line was not overly safe or reliable. When you are working with molten glass, primer, high o2 levels, and a lot of other things that burn really well, there were a lot of fires on that line. Somehow that managed to turn a profit until the 70's when they finally took the line out. Somehow they managed to keep a descent safety record and not burn the building down, despite many fires on the production line over the years. They actually had some of the equipment in storage into the late 2000's because they couldn't scrap it due to contracts with Kodak. No one wanted to even attempt recommissioning that line. It would never fly with modern safety and quality control standards for handling explosives. It would have required a total redesign of the process. Eventually, they finally decontaminated and scraped the equipment when Kodak went under in 2012.
Amazing thing was Kodak engineer invented the digital camera in the 1970's but they were never a leader there. I guess when your business model is selling film you don't introduce a product to undermine it. They are a shell of their former selves today post-bankruptcy but still supplying film, chemicals etc.
Is it really though? How consistent is the burn and produced light between individual flash bulbs? How consistent is each shot on a cube, how consistent are cubes amongst each other?
The gas in the bubbles is probably zirconium or zirconium dioxide (zirconia) vapor. When zirconium burns in pure oxygen it produces the hottest known metal fire, burning at an estimated 4930 Kelvin, well above the boiling point of zirconium (4650K) or zirconia (4300K). This extremely high flame temperature is why zirconium was chosen for the flashbulbs, because it's not only exceptionally bright but also needs only a little bit of help from a lightly blue tinted filter to match sunlight in colour temperature as well. Edit: BTW, the flame "sucking in" the unburnt zirconium wool is probably due to the high temperature as well. The zirconium near the advancing flame first melts, and surface tension then pulls in the still solid parts of the zirconium strands.
Hot but not as hot as the 6500K for a particular "illuminant". I wondered how a photo flash was going to equal the sun's 4watts per square metre arriving on Earth.
also the zirkonium dioxide is like 5 times denser than oxygen, so as it burns up from the inside out it probably creates a low pressure zone that sucks in the surrounding gas
@@20chocsaday At sea level full sunlight is about 1000W/m^2, not 4W/m^2. But the key is that you don't have to illuminate the entire Earth. To illuminate 10 square meters to an equivalent level you need 10 kW. If you do that for the time that a flash lasts (around a thousandth of a second) the energy needed is only 10 J. That's not all that much.
I was wondering about this unaddressed point in the video, because the blobs are VERY clearly *producing* significant amounts of gas as they burn, getting larger and popping in the weightlessness of freefall in exactly the same way as the molten blobs of Nighthawkinlight's senko hanabi fireworks, or astronaut Don Pettit's Alka Seltzer in water blob experiment on the space station. thx.
I think I once did the math to find than an indoor area that I thought had fantastic lighting was still something like 10 stops dimmer than it was outside, an that might have been the shade. The conscious side of the brain just refuses to believe how much the visual side of the brain is lying to it.
Today I learned we innovated on the lightbulb, which was initially famous for its long life by having a durable compact filament in an enclosure with no oxygen... by creating a bulb famous for its short life, by having a volatile, long filament in an enclosure of pure oxygen. BRILLIANT!
The issue with longer lasting ones is that they only last so long if you're not turning it on or off constantly. It practically needs to stay on to last long.
I probably had not thought about those since 1981:. In college I disassembled a lot of Magicubes. I did study them with interest, but mostly I got a bunch of packs cheap, and used them as fireworks. I also got ""into"" trouble once with them. And, by into, I literally mean out of. My first-hand experience says, thrown onto pavement from a moving vehicle, they had about a 70% chance of triggering. At night most people can't continue to drive, for at least a couple of minutes, if they were looking right there. So throw three to get the job *done* and get out. POOF and vanish like a magician.
When I was about 10 years old, we used these _flashcubes_ on a Kodak Instamic 60. I come from a poor family. The camera was a gift and we were very, very selective as to when we took a picture. We couldn't really afford the films, the processing and the _flashcubes._ So basically, taking pictures in a very small number was limited mostly to Christmas parties and special events such as weddings. Forget birthdays ! We were five children so it was too expensive. That meant that sometimes, it would take more than a year (multiple events) to get the pictures. That's what being poor seemed like back then.
I think this is the biggest difference between film and digital: when we used film we just waited for the best moments and opportunities to take a picture, it was something really special, from a moment you really want to save for your whole life. Film and development were expensive and limited, so we didn't want to waste poses. Then digital came and photos became something easy, unlimited and trivial.
@@Subiromba while true, and i lived as such, i dont disagree with modern times, my daughter (5yrs) just took , i want to say abut 30 photos on her little digital camera just this afternoon, it has a thermal printer and she printed off 10 of them . had I had that opportunity as a child id have a lot more memories saved of dens projects and life in general.. hopefully she appreciates im collecting all these photos , and perhaps not her adolescence, but adulthood she can look back on them!
@@denisohbrien Still, today we tend to think that most people can afford a printer but most of all, the ink cartridges. It's not the case. The business model remains the same. Sell them one thing for cheap, a thing that requires regular use items that will become your main sources of incoming revenues. Anyway, I'll go get my cup of Nespresso freshly prepared with the help of Alexa and watch a poorly rated film, an Amazon Prime Exclusivity, on my Fire TV.
You don't only feel, you are (and so do I by the way) I remember my mum getting angry after me just because I took fun by triggering some electric type cube with a 4,5V battery !
@@kimchristensen3727 I think I saw a flashcube once in an older episode of The Simpsons. Gotta say, while I never saw these things IRL in all my 31 years, I think their engineering is very clever and cool.
THANKS for this video. 60 year old photographer here that used those flash bulbs, flash cubes, magic bulbs, 1960s Honeywell Xenon flash, apparently understood nothing of those single use bulbs like I thought I did.
@@stamasd8500 60 year old here whose first camera was a 126 used Magicubes. Once used I dismantled a few but never worked out how they worked. By the late 1970s I upgraded / downgraded to a 110 with a built in Xenon Flash. I would have to dig it out but think it used four AAA batteries to operate it.
@@stamasd8500 See if you can scrounge up an old cheap one like in the video, and then a couple of cubes, see what it's like to use these. Not cutting edge anymore, but to make a comparison, it's still fun to shoot an old fashioned musket, even though they're antique technology. That they're such a different experience to modern guns makes them novel and interesting to try, some consider them far more fun and enjoyable.
@TechnologyConnections @TheSlowMoGuys This was most excellent!! I always wondered about the process of how these tiny and yeah amazing bright flash elements worked and you folks showed it all in intricate detail! Thank You!!
32:07 If anyone is wondering why they couldn't just run a current through the zirconium, the issue is zirconiums resistance and available battery power. Its resistance is x8 higher than tungsten you can't push any current across it with an amount of volts you'd be comfortable lugging around and no current means no heat.
Tangential fun fact: most flashlights that take 3 AAAs in those little round holders dont even have current limiting resistors in them to protect the LEDs. They rely on the relatively slow chemical reaction to limit the current available to the LED array. Also, if you want a brighter light, just pop a lithium battery in! I use a 14mm by 48mm (50mm including button contact on top...whatever that translates to in battery dimensions....14480? 14500?) harvested from a cheap wireless mouse that is the perfect length, and some spacer rings cut from a paper towel tube to keep it centered. ....though I do recommend adding a resistor if you go that route as you can burn out the LEDs a lot faster with the kinds of current a lithium battery can instantaneously provide....
I mean it is kind of pointless, a decent rechargeable flashlight with replaceable lithium battery can be had for 10 dollars if you know what to look for.@@mandi8345
@@mandi8345 I discovered it the bad way. I bought a quite bright used LED underwater flashlight with alkaline batteries inside (~10W) without manual(!). Then I changed to NiMh batteries and it didn't last long because it just burned up the LED which was directly connected to the batteries. No electronics, no resistor. Older flashlights and cameras with flashlights sometimes had a warning in the manual that you MUST NOT use rechargable batteries.
I am 60 and I remember these very well. You said it was such an ordeal to do all this. But at the time it wasn't. We did not have the luxury of the mobile phone and we knew nothing different. Most of us used to carry our cameras in a camera bag which had space for flashbulbs, flash cubes, batteries, spare film etc. It also meant that we had to become very familiar with exposure rates and the types of films we needed to get the shots we wanted to get. Yes, there was an expense involved, but that just meant we gave a lot of thought to the pics we wanted to take and we did not waste exposures on trifling trash like pictures of a meal we were just about to eat. It also meant that we ended up with photo albums galore and drawers full of photo's. So there was good and bad. Even now I look through pictures of my childhood and I compare them to pictures of my grandchildren that I have taken on my phone. The joy for us nowadays is the spontaneity of taking a pic of a situation. However with the earlier cameras, like the Kodaks and then later, the SLR cameras, we had the joy of getting the picture "Just right" and then the nervous wait of getting the film processed only to realise we had left the lens cap on. So it was not an "Ordeal", it was simply all we had at the time and we made the most of it.
I did not know that. But how did flashbulbs accidentally go off in their pockets unless they had pockets big enough to carry pre-loaded flash units with the power source connected? Only the Magicubes had self-powered detonators. Flash bulbs and regular Flashcubes needed an external power source.
Old school photography and timekeeping just endlessly fascinate me. So many cool electro-mechanical solutions to problems that you can do today with a micro-controller.
Also a lot of ELEGANCE in those mechanisms. Getting slide film (positive image) in a photochemical structure which is fundamentally creating a negative image is even more interesting. Also, you can develop slide film as a negative and get a negative image just like as with traditional negative film, but with a slightly different color balance (which would be corrected for in the printing dark room, because the slide film base is clear, whereas film made to produce negatives is built on an orange base, so printing negative-developed slide film requires dialing in the LOT of orange before it's close to the right filtration to get a proper-looking positive print)
Very neat things indeed, such interesting designs and problem solving! Also re @akulkis I really liked cross-processing techniques. My friend is trying to build a darkroom in their new home. I'm definitely looking forward to playing with dark room processing techniques again!
I'd thought that this channel is already perfect until I saw this video. This is next level, absolutely stunning! You did it again Alec, thank you for a lovely 30 minutes of awe!
There was another competing system for 110 flash photography in the late seventies, maybe into the early eighties, called the "flip-flash." If I'm remembering correctly, it was basically a slab of plastic containing 10 small flash bulbs, and five of them were wired to a connector on each end of the slab. Once you'd gone through the five at one end, you flipped it over and used the five at the other end. What I never managed to figure out from tearing apart my mother's used flip-flash units was how the camera fired only one, and how it chose which one to fire. I've always assumed that the heat of the flash either created or destroyed some sort of electrical link, but it'd be really interesting to find out for sure, once and for all.
Yes! I remember this as well, though I had forgotten that it was two-sided. I always wanted to know the same thing: how was it designed such that only the *next* unused bulb would be fired? I wonder if it was mechanical like the Magicube or some kind of electrical circuit cleverness.
It's 2024, we have the Internet. I did a quick search for Flip-flash and got the answers. The thermal events disconnect the spent bulb and wire in the next. It's easy enough to break a circuit with heat but making a connection is more interesting. It's described in patent US3458270A.
@@j_taylor It was definitely different from the number of exposures in a 110 film cartridge, which I recall being the standard 12 or 24 exposures. But of course, you didn't always want to use the flash, so they probably weren't going to match up anyway.
Someone my age or older might have reminded you that the explosion is how they took pictures in the 1800's and why there are photos of even President Lincoln that exist. They would have a pile of flash powder on a device that was controlled by the photographer who would hide under a protective blanket of sorts while the shot was taken. People would have to hold perfectly still because the camera would get a blurry shot if you moved at all during the process. I'm old enough to have lived through the use of all of the products you showed, and since my family was poor, we relied on natural light most of the time. We had cameras that used both types of these flashes, and I remember when we saw commercials for the new Magicubes released in the early 70's. It was amazing, and I even owned one. Those cameras were cheap as they were a loss leader for Kodak and Polaroid so we could take photos in low light. Polaroids were amazing to us too, because we didn't have to take the film to the local drug store to drop them off to get them a few days later. I never saw a fire started, but we would try to see who could hold a flash after it burned and for how long. They were freaking hot! Great video.
The dark cloth ("blanket") is mainly not to protect the photographer but to keep any external light out to allow him to see the rather dim (and upside down and mirrored) image on the ground glass focusing screen to focus and compose the shot. When the composing and focusing is done the photographer would put a film or plate in a light tight holder in place either replacing the ground glass or moving it back so the film will be in the same plane. He would then close the shutter or on very early cameras put on the lens cover, remove the dark slide (a light tight piece of sheet metal covering the film when the holder is out of the camera) from the film/plate holder, open the shutter or remove the lens cover (a hat or something similar could also be used), fire the flash, close the shutter/lens cover, replace the dark slide and remove the holder. Photographer taking a picture while being under the dark cloth is a modern misconception, usually they were (and still are, one of my hobbies is large format photography so I have done "the dance" many times myself) outside of the dark cloth at the side of the camera when actually taking the photograph as they would not see anything at that stage anyway with the film taking the place of the focusing screen. You don't want to be touching the camera during the exposure so you'll stand clear of it.
@@TryAlex23you gotta admit, the “I ain’t reading all that” threshold has gone down from like 10+ paragraphs to just 2. Heck, one of them doesn’t even fill my phone screen and it’s a pretty small phone.
Just out of interest, the blue coating on the bulb is to filter out the brown of the tungsten light. I remember when I started photography with a Kodak Brownie 127 back in the 70s and I used many of the Flash Cubes. I progress up to Hanimex 110 and eventually a high end 35mm SLR. I had to use a blue Cokin lens filter to correct the browning of photos under tungsten lighting, and a pink lens filter to correct the greening of photos under florescent lighting. We used to use Flash to eliminate shadows, but the more modern HiD flash would wash out a lot of indoor photos. I absolutely loved photography and I've never got the feel of a digital camera, so I slowly faded away from photography. I still see my photos that I took in the early 90s being published. This video really brought back good memories. Thank You Alex 👍
The Magicubes I remember using- and, from what I can see, the ones in the video- didn't have or need the blue colour-correction coating on the bulbs. I'm sure I read why that was somewhere, IIRC it was because they changed to a different metal that burned with a bluer light.
The coating on exposed flash bulbs HAD to be there to keep the glass bulbs from exploding and sending shrapnel into people's faces. And yes, it was a blue tint to help correct the color. The Magic Cube bulbs were enclosed inside the plastic box, if one did explode, it would be contained behind the clear plastic lens. The magic cubes probably did have a different color temperature also, because they were a purely mechanical device. They didn't use electricity to fire off the fine "steel wool" inside of the bulb. They used a type of percussion cap inside that when struck with the firing pin of the camera, would set off a tiny "explosion" inside the bulb.
Any chance you could talk about some of the photos you still see around being published? Would be cool to check out your old work! Thank you for the insight as well!
When you heat up a metal wire of certain composition, it will form beads prior to melting. This was done on the _Periodic Videos_ episode "Exploding Wires,", around the six minute thirty second mark.
yes, it seems fairly clear that the beads here only appear after heating ... I was struggling to remember which channel I'd seen it on before, Periodic Videos is the one!
Molybdenum wire does that. The oxide has a lower melting temperature than the metal. That would make it oxidize quickly and produce extra heat. It might be molybdenum wire.
In 1972, when the Magicube came to market, my dad was an engineer working for Sylvania and the Magicube was manufactured at his plant. I remember perfectly the differences between Flashcubes and Magicubes and dismantled and fired many Magicubes for the fun of it. My dad was adamant that Magicubes were the best innovation in flash technology since the beginning of photography. However, he became pissed at Kodak when it issued new cameras that activated Flashbars which were electrical devices, just for selling a new fashion in cameras, and thus letting go of Magicubes. That was the first time that I could see the birth and the death of a technology that I manipulated. The next time was the fax machine.
I remember those Magicube flash-cubes from the '70s and early '80s when I was a kid. Man, those things were *SO* expensive!! You had to be very selective of what you took a picture of indoors, not only because you had a limited number of pictures on a roll of film, but also because you only ever seemed to have one of these Magicubes, and at least one of the flashes had already been used, if not 3 of them. LOL!
What annoyed me about both my Magicube cameras was invariably, when inserting the flash unit, one would go off just by inserting. Not sure if it was my 4-7 year old fumbling, or a design fault. The flash sticks (not sure if that had a catchy name, but they had like 10 bulbs per stick), which used electricity, avoided this problem.
@@tjncooke Oh yeah -- my aunt had one of those cameras that used the flash stick (whatever it was called). I'd forgotten about that. They were definitely better than the MagiCubes, no doubt. I never had a MagiCube go off by accident, not that I can remember anyway. But I can totally see how it could happen -- just get anything up inside there, poke that wire, and **poof!** It'd probably have scared the shit out of me, had I done it. 😂
The way your face with that expression of pure insanity just fades into existence at 30:52 is probably the funniest thing I've ever seen on your channel. I just keep replaying it and I can't stop laughing.
Thank you for bringing back my childhood! We LOVED macicubes. Neither of my parents was mechanical enough to handle batteries in a camera, and I can attest to the reliability of these. They simply worked. But, oh yes, were we careful. When we'd have a party, we'd probably take 4-8 flash photos. That was all we wanted to pay for. My father had an SX-70 polaroid - that thing had a 10 bulb flash strip. Make no mistake - a magicube WOULD burn you if you grabbed it right off, but those 10 bulb strips were worse. They got HOT. They used to melt and bulge all over the place. But, again, they were reliable. And, I've got the "deer in the headlights" pictures of our '70s parties to prove it! I remember that, when I purchased my first electronic flash, I was so fascinated that I went through a full set of batteries just making it do its thing. LOL
I also have one of those bars for a Polaroid 2000. What I don't really understand is how the camera (or the bar itself) knows what bulb is set to fire, since there are five on each side?
Unrelated to what a fantastic and informative piece your videos always are, but... wow. The bokeh on that first shot of the open-air filament actually made me go 'whoa' out loud. Perfect circular bokeh, and plenty of it! The slow-mo adds so much to the explanations of how the flash bulbs work.
Yes I remember that charging the capacitor whine as I got a huge electric shock taking one apart poking one with metal screwdriver as a kid....hurts like hell, got more kick than any 240v shock I've ever hqd
I remember taking one apart as a kid. It was a newer camera that used xenon flash tubes. I never got shocked. However, I did get an unpleasant surprise when something shorted the capacitor and made a nice little fireworks display@@foxxy46213
This teamwork with Gav surely was the most awesome video you ever made! Thanks so much for the effort! I vividly remember those bulbs from my childhood. Used bulbs sizzling and smoking, carefully popped into an ashtray, "don't touch, boy!!". The whole process was fascinating and a bit scary. "Watch out, daddy's going to take a flash picture!" But up to now, I never knew how they really worked. Great footage, great job, thanks again 👍🏼👍🏼
I'd like to point out that the blue translucent coating on the flashbulb does not _add_ blue, it removes some of reds and yellows and greens instead! For it to add blue the backing light need to be in the UV/xray spectra, so it can re-emit those photons at lower energy level (fluorescence).
I was not expecting a Slow Mo Guys collab, this is amazing! Also the fact that Gav knows the outro music makes me so happy ❤ So 28:32 may be one of the prettiest shot's I've seen from Slow Mo Guys, or at the very least the most "that doesn't look like it should be real" shots. Incredible.
Another old guy reports: SO bright they would leave a spot on your vision for a minute or so. I actually owned an X-15 just like that one as a youngster. I got it when I was 11 or 12 (1971 or 72). And yeah, taking pictures was spendy. Flashcubes even more so. They really were the ultimate point & shoot. Later in my teens I got into real photography and owned an SLR. Then I realized how limited the X-15 was. But to a kid, it was great fun. I don't recall a flash ever failing, but it did happen very occasionally. I remember the older units too, used by adults when I was a kid. I can still see them pulling out the hot bulbs with a hanky. Every picture had to count in those days. You paid for the film, then you paid to have it developed and printed. You might even pay again to have a negative reproduced in a larger format, perhaps having it framed and hung on the wall. Yeah, I'm old.
Oh yeah, I remember the black spot in your vision after one of these things went off. I remember both the individual bulbs (and the curiously bubbled and "crunchy" state they ended up in afterwards) and the magicubes. My dad was more the photographer in our family (he preferred slides, had a light meter, etc), I was never all that into it, but did have an instamatic. I really didn't enjoy the taking-photos process, which was an actual process back in the day. The expense of film photography and everything that went with it (like the expense of flash bulbs) tells you what an insanely great business this all was for companies like Kodak or Fuji or Agfa or Sylvania and tells you how much value the average person put on photos. Yes, it was spendy, but it was spend that people viewed as pretty important. What I remember was the curious mix between how prevalent was photography and yet how careful people were with it as well. On the one hand, yes, your instamatic was point-and-click, on the other hand, you were aware of how expensive it was to buy and process film. Today, of course, if you take photos it's all about quantity, then you go back and select one you like. For the average human, 50 years ago that was simply cost prohibitive.
@@cv990a4spamming photos to select the best one to keep gets called “chimping” among photography buffs today. There’s many arguments about whether DSLRs are making them into worse photographers, because selecting after-the-fact doesn’t exercise those compositional muscles as much. For what it’s worth, even though I moved from film to digital when I was 11 or 12, the film-style of carefully lining up my shots has always stuck with me. I feel excessive when I take 3-5 slightly differently framed photos instead of 1, let alone 50! It really is a different world nowadays.
Thanks for making this video...brought back a lot of memories...Dad was heavily into photography...has LOTS of toys that need to be assessed for monetary value...did his own developing, printing, enlarging...darkroom downstairs with old school clolourhead enlarger...fridge and freezer FULL of Kodak film and printing paper...Hasselblad, Leicas, Canons...lenses that must be worth thousands by todays' standards...know anybody who still uses print film and needs some badly...?!? 😂
I have to ask - have you been on the receiving end of a modern MILC/DSLR flash unit like a Godox 850 or higher? I feel like some of the same issues still exist for photography enthusiasts - we still have a separate unit with it's own batteries that we have to screw down on the hotshoe or use a remote trigger for. Back to my initial point - these things can get *bright*. It's just that they're really adjustable and we usually try and not use at 1/1 for battery life and to actually get the exposure we want. I just recall the first time I started using the Godox ones I was like - this is a lot more light than I'm used to from on camera flash - and the cell phone led lights are just laughable. To digress a bit more, it's still surprising to many how little light even 35mm modern sensors with f2.8 or even f1.4 lenses can actually gather in 1/100 a second or so to freeze some motion and make up for hand shake etc. Flash is still pretty necessary inside because most houses (at least where I live) are actually rather dim and don't really have a lot of light put out by their lighting.
I always carry a box of crap with me. I'm relatively confident in my ability to acquire an adequate supply over time, but I never know when I might not be able to produce the immediately required amount on demand....
OMG SECRET COLLABORATION!? I’ve been happy bamboozled! What a great combo! I bet there’s a bunch of fun things you have in mind for more projects. Always find your thorough explanation of complex processes mesmerizing and enlightening. Thanks so much for another awesome video!!
My opinion is that the primer does not contain "explosive beads". Having 5 years of welding experience, every wire I've ever melted immediately beads up. A sphere is the least resistant shape in terms of surface tension or whatever, for example it's why rain drops aren't shaped like a square lol. A good example of this is water on the space station... when they squirt water from their little baggies, instead of smooth laminar flow it almost immediately beads up. Even in this video, there are absolutely no signs of beads in the primer until AFTER it reaches its melting point and only then do we see any "beads"... which again I believe is just the natural course for a molten wire to take. I can't remember the compound exactly, but perhaps there is a very thin coating around the wire filament in the primer which causes all the sparking to occur, or maybe it could even be tungsten like you said earlier. All I know is, I just don't think they used explosive beads lol.
I work in fire protection. We use flashbulbs for testing the operation of clean agent extinguishing systems (halon or FM-200) in places like data centers. Those systems can be activated by a squib - we can't actually test the squib because testing will destroy it, but we will test the electrical circuit leading up to the squib. The best way is to wire in a flash bulb. When the current is sent to the system for activation, the bulb flashes.
In my high school marching band (early 80’s), we performed one song using Magicubes as a special effect. Each musician taped a ‘cube to the outside of his or her instrument, and at a certain point in the performance, we all used paper clips to press the firing pins. I don’t know if it was particularly memorable, and I especially didn’t realize how expensive those cubes were! Thanks so much, Alec and Gav, for this great work!
We did the same except they were pinned to our uniforms. One of the band parents video'd* the performance and the effect was pretty cool. *Pre-camcorder days -- the camera and tape unit were separate, bulky, and very heavy.
Back in 1973, i experimented with these cubes. One day I tried putting 34 volts into one and had it set up on a bench. As I leaned over to make final connection and touched the wire, it set off the cube with an explosion in my face. I had forgot to unplug the transformer I was using. The bright flash almost blinded me but thank goodness no glass got into my eyes. The cube came apart. I think the normal voltage was like 3 volts or less and I gave it 34. I was seeing a dot floating around in front of me for 2 weeks. Very hard to read my lessons with that dot getting in the way. Lesson learned and I am now 69 in March and have yet to need glasses.
I've used Magicubes in the past. They were very popular with the cameras of the time. As for developing, Cinderella is still waiting for the last roll of film she sent off to be returned but she still has hope and you often hear her say, "Some day my prints will come..." I'll get my coat 😉
I remember Dad using those, and bitching about the cost if a picture was ruined. That footage is very interesting, and I had no idea that they used a primer type system instead of a battery. One of the coolest videos you've ever made.
Yeah, I remember that my Mum's camera used the older flashcubes that required batteries, but the Magicubes my camera took didn't. I wish I'd known how they worked- and all that stuff about the primer- back then.
Rooms where several Photos were taken, showed many Scars on the Ceiling from the Flash Tray. They were doing Bounce Flash long before it became Fashionable
According to US patent US3312085A the primer could be "a mechanical mixture of finely divided zirconium powder, of above-described grain size, lead dioxide up to 35% by weight and about 2% by weight of polyvinyl alcohol. Potassium perchlorate may be substituted for or included with the lead dioxide". Yummy. Thanks for the video. Those slo-mo images are wonderful ! True joy to understand now those cubes I was playing with as a child.
That's an electrically-driven primer, and not the flash tube used in the Magicube. All of the patents related to the Magicube discuss "recently developed" "percussivelly-activated" flash bulbs as if they were an off-the-shelf item. I'm guessing that they were unable to patent the bulb itself.
@@jpdemer5 yep, as he said the Magicube probably uses some gun powder. I was looking for the composition of the "primer beads" around the filament in the non-magic bulb.
Ok I was absolutely giddy when I saw Gavin come on screen. This was a team up I wasn’t expecting but glad it happened. I watch both these guys for years now.
Having used 110 cameras with flash bulbs, it is super satisfying to see them in action. I also love YT collaborations. It's great to see people sharing skills and equipment. Thank you for sharing too.
Did your 110 use cubes or one of those stacked flash-bar things? Not mentioned in this video, there were disposable flash bars mostly used on 110 type cameras. I don't remember how many bulbs were in each bar.
We had a couple of 110 cameras during the 1980s. The bar inserted into a slot on top. IIRC it was five on each side of the bar. You'd turn it upside down for a total of 10 flashes. It looked like an electrical connection but no batteries and no obvious turning mechanism either. I was always fascinated about how it worked.
It's the stacked one I was most interested in him taking apart. There was the four tubes on one side, then you'd flip it and have four more. There was also a small window, green as I recall which would show how many good tubes you still had on the side which would go black when it was spent. How did the camera use only one at a time? How did the indicator work?
everyone's talking about gav's TC jazz but I also appreciated "so what did we learn today?" to start off the outro. amazing video as usual. thanks for making it!
Flash bulbs are insanely bright. Even the small AG1 can rival most modern consumer flashguns, but bigger ones like PF5, M3, GE5 etc. can out shine (hehe, get it?) basically any professional hotshoe mounted flashgun. Then there are those huge E27 screw ones which look like 100W bulbs and even bigger - those are sill used for cave photography. Also shooting people with flash bulbs is insanely fun - most people are used to electronic flashes, but when you hit them with one of these bad boys they get stunned for like 5 seconds.
Wow, I didn't expect Gavin to appear. Awesome! I also love that Gav sang the end credits song at the end, probably watches these episodes also it seems.
I turn 65 this year. I remember flashbulbs and flashcubes quite well... My father had a camera (usually used to shoot slides) that used flashbulbs, and one of the problems was -- once the spots in front of your eyes cleared -- the absolute need for a heavy handkerchief to remove the bulb without burning yourself. Of course, there were a couple of times when the bulb would shatter or break, leaving one to figure out how to extract its remains from the camera before taking another photo. Flashcubes were certainly an improvement, although I remember a few times when only 3 (or even 2!) of the bulbs would go off. I also remember the painful difficulty of taking photos with a MagiCube on a small 110 camera -- which is why some of the later 110 cameras came with a tall, black plastic "tower" that would raise the cube far enough from the location of the photographer's eyebrow to prevent most injury (and also help avoid "redeye" photos). The alternative was one of those hot shoe electronic flashes that -- of course -- ate batteries at a ridiculous pace. Now, about that lightbar with four massive floodlamps my father used to have to hold up to take 16mm motion pictures with a wind-up camera... Aah, the memories... 8-D
As an early entrant for the Darwin Award, I remember holding them right up to my eye and setting them off. Trippy phosphenes - can’t believe I didn’t permanently damage or lose my eyesight.
@@awgn70 They used to make a self-defense tool that was a curved mirror you could plug a magic cube into. Point it at your attacker and give it a squeeze, and it set off all four at once, projecting it into bad-guy's face. Hope there's only one of them.
Neat. Not mentioned: before flash bulbs there were also flash lamps up until about the 1930s, basically igniting magnesium (early on) or flash powder (later) to get the flash. So the percussion-ignited flash cubes are just coming full circle!
As a kid in the 80s, I had a cheap Kodak camera that took Magicubes- and you're right, I remember that they almost doubled the cost of taking a photo. (Electronic flash was starting to become more common then, but not yet on the cheapest models). With hindsight, I wish I'd known back then how they worked- I didn't find that out until 25+ years later. And even though I knew the basics by now, this video explained the details in far more depth than I'd seen before, thank you. It makes you appreciate how- despite the technology on one level appearing bizarrely anachronistic and primitive in today's electronic world- these devices were very cleverly designed and well-engineered. Similarly, the way the "Flip-Flash" design (an alternative to Magicubes) "keeps track" of which of the five bulbs have been used is another clever piece of design.
![ARGENTINA vs. PERÚ [1-0] | RESUMEN | ELIMINATORIAS SUDAMERICANAS | FECHA 12](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/xtI25ENDDSY/mqdefault.jpg)
Brighter and goopier than I could have possibly imagined.
Dan looks weird in this video
I love that my favorite RUclips channels are collaborating together more and more.
It’s a regular RUclipsr extended universe
Awesome 😲
How did you already watch the vid? its only been out for 14 minutes and the vid its self is 30 mins
@@brightsde3511 you get to watch videos a day or so early if you're a supporter on Patreon
I’m a little disappointed we didn’t get a “And through the magic of buying two of them!” as Dan stepped into frame at the start there
Biggest missed opportunity in youtuber crossover history
Same, i even said it while watching hoping he was going to say it too
I was completely prepared for this to happen
Agreed!
I was disappointed we didn't get any Dan as well, even if it was only a 'Dan walking in from stage right with a good old British "What the bloody 'ell is goin' on 'ere then?" in the outtakes at the end.
Using 2020s era photo tech to see 1960s era photo tech at single digit microsecond time intervals is an actual technology connection. ❤
I'm sure the engineers at Sylvania, GE, and Kodak would have killed for a camera like that during the development process...
1963: there's not enough light!
2023: there's too much light!
@@bobweiss8682that’s what I was thinking too. The people who made these did so without the benefit of being able to see what is happening. I’m sure they would love the footage and it makes me wonder if they would be surprised by anything or just say, yep that’s how I designed it
@@bobweiss8682 Some form of the tech probably existed but for governments/military, to expensive for them.
@@shaider1982 not single digit microsecond exposures
As a person who worked in a G.E. Lamp Plant for over 20 years making the actual bulbs for the FlashCube, SuperCube, HiPower, MagiCube, & FlipFlash (names such as GE, Osram, Wootan, & several store brands); your assessment of the parts (glass bulb, glass beads, zirconium/magnesium foil, tungsten filament, oxygen, primer, etc...) were spot-on. The most dangerous part of the process was the use of the primer for MagiCube, which the post was dipped into. (A safer & different primer was used to dip the tungsten filament & electrical posts for the other flash bulbs. That primer wasn't as pressure sensitive.) The cup that held the primer was changed every 3-4 hours. As long as the primer wasn't dried out on the inside of the dip cup; which happens as the level in the cup drops, it was safe. BUT dried primer was extremely volatile & accidents have happened. As a side note... back in the heyday of chemical flash; our plant was just one of several that ran over 100 machines; each machine producing 2000-2500 bulbs/hour, 24 hours a day, 6+ days a week, for about 20 years. THAT'S A LOT OF BULBS!!
That's almost 30 billion bulbs!
Wow!
I’m
Thank you, LtJMP, you popping in here with your experience is a wonderful reason behind what makes the internet so great!
@@wta1518 My calculations is about 300 million: 2000 x 24 x 6 x 52 x 20.
I love Gav going “na na na naa na na na” at 32:42 It makes me feel like he’s a genuine fan of your channel.
Yeah, I had the same thought. Yay.
Definitely a fun collab to see! Thanks, both! 🎉📸
I had subtitles on. Thats when the "blindingly smooth jazz" starts.
I think Alec should have synchronized this part with an actual music.
I watch and listen to Gav’s other stuff through Rooster Teeth, and I want to say he’s mentioned enjoying watching Technology Connections before.
@@isaacfortnercan confirm, I remember him mentioning it
My Uncle, Bernard Kopelman, invented the Magicube. He was the head of research at Sylvania Lighting. I remember him explaining how it worked back around 1970 when I was a teenager. He was a material scientist and before working at Sylvania he was involved in the Manhattan Project developing materials for nuclear reactors. Sylvania (GTE) rewarded him for his work on the Magicube by making him the Vice President of their materials division. He regretted the promotion the rest of his career since he was an inventor at heart and did not enjoy being a manager. My uncle got me a summer job at the Sylvania factory in 1976 when they were developing a machine to make a million electronic flash tubes.
That's awesome. Shame your uncle didn't get to keep inventing things like he wanted. This is a very common feeling talented engineers have even today.
Wow, your uncle was a wizard?
Woah, you should into contact with Alec!
So which fulminate did they use?
This is such an American type of story that doesn't hardly exist today at all. All our innovation seems like it is just gone.
I love how so many youtubers bring Gavin on not because of clickbait, but because of his equipment and experience. Like, barely anyone mentions that they got him on in the title or thumbnails, so you just get surprise Gavin in the middle of a video, and honestly I love that.
Yeah. It makes me feel bad for Dan. When are other RUclipsrs going to need an almost-disposable english dude for some hazardous tests? He deserves some love, too!
How collabs should be
@@AviertjeDoesn't Dan still live in the UK? I was under the impression he travels to the states for a big filming batch periodically, and then the actual videos come out over time as they're edited. Must be awkward to sync that up with _other_ RUclipsrs as well.
It's mostly the million dollar camera
what other non slow mo guys videos has he been in?
That face at 30:52 is just priceless. The eyebfow raise the way the face just becomes unveiled from the darkness. Just perfect.
Came to make sure someone had already brought this magnificient moment to light. My favorite shot too.
@@ardamilk7606I like the pun in your reply,
33:41 the box of crap is SUPER important.
Like a mix of Doctor Who and Mr. Bean
I do remember people using those Magicubes!!! eh... I'm old I guess...
i see some people using these to this day
*I* used them - have boxes of pics I took with an old Kodak w the Magicubes!!
I remember being sent to the local rite-aid to buy them in the middle of a party. I was a kid in the 70s when these things were at their peak. But they died very quickly. I had no idea these started in 65. I thought they were much older. By 1980 they were gone.
Me too - born in 1969, played with the used Magicubes from my parents’ cameras as a kid, and then my first camera in 1980 was a Kodak that both took 110 film cassettes and had a built-in electric flash that slid open and shut, so you replaced batteries instead of the bulb. They also used a 16mm film camera for home movies and the light for that was also as bright as the sun, it seemed, so all those indoor home movies have us kids squinting and holding up hands against the light. I also half-remember all the smells involved with the Magicubes and the film camera and playing the movies. You don’t get those with phones…
@@malinicula797 I remember seeing a camera with a cube stick on it in about 1973.
I'm not ashamed to share that I once picked up an already-opened box of magic cubes and they all slid out and hit the garage floor and ALL went off at once. That was an expensive lesson back in the day.
As soon as Alec showed the mechanism I wondered to myself if they could go off if someone dropped them. So that's a yes then.
It's like a ninja smoke bomb haha.
Makes one wonder how the store dealt with customer complaint that a new box were full of blown bulbs because it got dropped?
@@Gractus More like a ninja flashbang...
@@Fan-lq6uvHell, I'd be slightly concerned about the amount of light generated by a potential 12 flashes going off *simultaneously,* causing the cardboard package to ignite from all the heat!
(... and incase anyone wants to think that's _not_ possible, just remember what the sun + a magnifying glass can do 😅)
@@Fan-lq6uv Come to think of it, I wouldn't want to be the USPS worker handling those.
I want to bottle the feeling I got upon hearing you say "slow mo guy"... and then not just pass it off as a joke! I can't believe you didn't clickbait Gav when it would've been so easy to and it lead to such a delightful surprise as I had not looked at the description nor comments yet. So, thank you for that. It brought joy to my heart.
I want to get rid of the feeling I got upon hearing him say "slow mo guy" instead of "one of the slow mo guys" - its daneraser
1:22 @@MrBattlecharge
Xxx
same
Around 3mins in I was literally drafting a comment in my head about how it would be so cool to see these flashes go off in slow motion, and of course a collab with Gav (and/or Dan) came instantly to mind.
Seconds later I was grinning ear to ear, cursing myself for ever doubting Alec 😅😅😅
They should have just called Michael Bay’s cameraman and asked him how he got those slo-mo flashbulb shots in “Pearl Harbor”. That’s the movie that taught me that cameras were a lot more explodey back in the day.
I did a second year university project on the materials and processes within the Magicube in 1986 - when they were still a current technology. The oxygen inside is pressurized so as to allow a greater mass of burning zirconium per bulb for a brighter flash. The ignition tube encloses a wire post, centred up the middle. The post is coated with a pyrotechnic compound, so that when the striker wire hits the outside, the tube is crushed onto the post, pressurizing the pyrotechnic coating hammer and anvil style for a more reliable ignition. A fantastic project. Thanks to Prof. Jim Williamson for that opportunity!
As a kid (born in '78) I would dismantle the blue dot flash cubes and throw the bulbs on the concrete (post down, of course) for magic ninja escapes when playing with friends after sunset. Until my parents discovered we suddenly had no flash cubes.
what do you mean by "post down"?
@@deltaradiationthe part with the fulminant
As a kid, I think possibly they didn't figure out I needed glasses yet at that point, I thought the bulb was solid glass with a solid metal post sticking into it. I didn't realize it was hollow, and that the "post" was also hollow and contained a fulminate of some sort.
@@NoahErickson ohhh i thought you meant post as in like after, thanks for the explanation
Yes, I used to do the same. I would even heat the bulb to remove the film, so it would literally explode. Yes, it's a wonder I lived to the ripe old age I am now, and with all my fingers!
The fact that this is one of the rare times in Slow Mo Guys history where there was actually too _much_ light for the camera really says a lot about how insanely bright these things burn
Also, love the shot at 30:47
That and the recent "shaped charge" video, yes.
@@darrennew8211 There also was a video about actual thunderbolts.
I love how Gavin knew and performed the ending jingle, now that's a true friend!
Exactly my thought, it was such an amazing ending, with a so smooth and heartful transition, the music slowly creeping in. Just perfect!
You just answered an old mystery of mine by sparking an old memory. When I was a young whippersnapper probably under the age of 8 I discovered electricity. I would like to hook a bunch of batteries together in series and connect random things to them(motors, leds, random components that would just get hot). One of the things was an interesting looking light bulb that looked just like the ones you're showing... I connected it to probably about five or six C cells.
Then BAM! Mega flash blinded me scared the shit out of me I was like I need to respect the batteries more. At that time I thought I just blew the thing up now I know it worked as design. Remember my grandma watching in the background and giggling.. That evil woman taking joy in my response 😅 ❤ lol. All this time now i know!
Grandma knew what she was doing. You were supposed to find that flash bulb.
There is a saying in Russian: every man is a boy who survived by accident. Considering the much riskier experiments we did as kids in the 90-s, I can say that I survived by an accident too. Flashcubes don't even come close to our experiments.
this is the my wholesome comment ever
The Blue Dot in the bulb (known as the Sylvania Blue Dot) is actually to indicate whether or not the bulb has leaked its sealed low pressure oxygen atmosphere, if the blue dot turns pink, the bulb has leaked and is likely to explode.
Thank you for that. I was hoping he might talk about what it was for but he didn't. I was wondering a out it
I remember the commercials advising that if the blue dot was black it was a sure way to know the bulb was spent (but they used much smoother language). I thought it was ridiculous since every bulb that fired melted almost all the way through the shield.
blue dot, in sealed bulb
Why would it explode? If it's leaked wouldn't it be less likely to explode? It goes from full Oxygen environment to atmosphere
@@16vSciroccoboi because it's a LOW PRESSURE oxygen rich atmosphere, which is BELOW ambient atmospheric pressure. Being AT atmospheric pressure could potentially mean there's more oxygen inside than intended for a controlled reaction.
That shot at 30:47 might be the best thing out of many very good things to have happened on this channel. It's so perfect in composition and framing.
My thoughts exactly
Might need to be the new channel profile picture
Actually, I found the burn of the broken tube at 28:30 rather unexpected...
The Big Bang
Stupid idea: Make each frame of this shot a picture and set it as a Desktop Wallpaper slideshow where it'll get brighter each hour
I love the collab, that filament explosion at 28:32 is some of the most beautiful footage I’ve ever seen
Right? I NEED a 4k wallpaper of that
I didn’t think it was even real for far too long
It was gorgeous. Reminds me of early CG art from the 90s.
Even more beautiful than the sequence at 30:47?
Agreed, the various clips were captivating, some of the best slow-mo footage I've watched. It reminds me of those movie reels from the Space Shuttle liftoff pad ("Best of the Best").
In my college years in the early 80's I was in the co-op Engineering program at General Electric. I worked at a plant that made flashcubes. We conducted reliability testing by exposing the flashcubes to high humidity for several weeks. Once the data was collected and the tests were completed, I would take the flash lamps out of each cube and combine them in a large grocery bag which was quite dangerous due to 'sympathetic flash', which means when one lamp flashes, they all flash. I'd connect 2 wires to one lamp, put it in the middle of the bag which held several hundred lamps, place it on the porch at night and wait for my roommate to come home. Touch the 2 wires to a 12 volt battery and you'd get what looked like a small nuclear explosion scaring the hell out of him. Great fun back in the day. 33:52
Sympathetic what! Oh Lord! That sounds like a heck of a prank.
Several... several hundred... yeah I'd laugh if it were just the roommate, _maybe,_ that still sounds kinda dickish, but it sounds like this was done outside, on a porch, where it could scare neighbors and pets. At night.
The craziest part would be how silent it would be! Like, with a flash that big, you expect a massive bang as well, like a bomb just went off, but it's just a quick, silent flare out of nowhere!
@@micahphilson
Exactly
It's a homemade (and a very expensive) flashbang
As a 62 year old man, I think it’s hysterically funny that young people, as in this content creator are so fascinated by the way things were done only 40 years ago. Yet, it’s the same curiosity as I have about generations before my time as in the 1930’s thru 1950’s.
Being 41 myself, I find it amazing just how many things that used to be parts of my everyday life have become ancient relics of a bygone era…seeing younger generations coming along and rediscovering these relics…and really deep diving into them like Alec does, just brings a smile to my face every time…
It’s why I’m a subscriber…☺️
Give us a break. 😆 I'm nineteen. Flip phones have been around longer than me. This, to me, is incredible.
i love old things to the point where i want to someday collect old hardware. my current stock of old hardware is a commodore64, ti99a4, and an original atari (which is sadly hit or miss when it comes to working). I'm 19 and id absolutely love to own more hardware, rarer hardware from back in ye olde days
As an 18 year old, I do not know how to use photoshop, but I can shoot, develop, and print large format.
Lol. I'm 38 and i work with guys who are mostly around your age. I'm starting to embrace being the old guy. I got my first flip phone in 2004 when i was 18. Imagine a 19 year old in 20 years saying the iphone is older than them. 😂 @blakksheep736
Out of college, I worked for an aerospace company. The plant started during WWII as a small/medium caliber ammo producer. After the war, they got into other things. During the 50's and 60's, they had a contract to make flash bulbs for Kodak. They converted one of the buildings they used to make .50 cal rounds into a mechanically controlled automated flashbulb line.
The line was not overly safe or reliable. When you are working with molten glass, primer, high o2 levels, and a lot of other things that burn really well, there were a lot of fires on that line. Somehow that managed to turn a profit until the 70's when they finally took the line out. Somehow they managed to keep a descent safety record and not burn the building down, despite many fires on the production line over the years.
They actually had some of the equipment in storage into the late 2000's because they couldn't scrap it due to contracts with Kodak. No one wanted to even attempt recommissioning that line. It would never fly with modern safety and quality control standards for handling explosives. It would have required a total redesign of the process. Eventually, they finally decontaminated and scraped the equipment when Kodak went under in 2012.
Was this the Montoursville PA Sylvania plant? They made proximity fuses for WWII, then radio tubes, then light bulbs and flashcubes.
@@m1goodwin what a set of things that sound totaly unconnected but when you think about it have a lot in common
Amazing thing was Kodak engineer invented the digital camera in the 1970's but they were never a leader there. I guess when your business model is selling film you don't introduce a product to undermine it. They are a shell of their former selves today post-bankruptcy but still supplying film, chemicals etc.
"Very calibrated, easy to set-off firework"
is also match-grade ammunition
Is it really though? How consistent is the burn and produced light between individual flash bulbs? How consistent is each shot on a cube, how consistent are cubes amongst each other?
@@0neDoomedSpaceMarineProbably more consistent than the steel core ammo we're outshooting you with
@@asacreglow6422 ??? outta pocket behavior
This is quite possibly my favourite video of all time. Well done to both you and Gav.
The gas in the bubbles is probably zirconium or zirconium dioxide (zirconia) vapor. When zirconium burns in pure oxygen it produces the hottest known metal fire, burning at an estimated 4930 Kelvin, well above the boiling point of zirconium (4650K) or zirconia (4300K). This extremely high flame temperature is why zirconium was chosen for the flashbulbs, because it's not only exceptionally bright but also needs only a little bit of help from a lightly blue tinted filter to match sunlight in colour temperature as well.
Edit: BTW, the flame "sucking in" the unburnt zirconium wool is probably due to the high temperature as well. The zirconium near the advancing flame first melts, and surface tension then pulls in the still solid parts of the zirconium strands.
Hot but not as hot as the 6500K for a particular "illuminant".
I wondered how a photo flash was going to equal the sun's 4watts per square metre arriving on Earth.
also the zirkonium dioxide is like 5 times denser than oxygen, so as it burns up from the inside out it probably creates a low pressure zone that sucks in the surrounding gas
@@20chocsaday At sea level full sunlight is about 1000W/m^2, not 4W/m^2. But the key is that you don't have to illuminate the entire Earth. To illuminate 10 square meters to an equivalent level you need 10 kW. If you do that for the time that a flash lasts (around a thousandth of a second) the energy needed is only 10 J. That's not all that much.
I was wondering about this unaddressed point in the video, because the blobs are VERY clearly *producing* significant amounts of gas as they burn, getting larger and popping in the weightlessness of freefall in exactly the same way as the molten blobs of Nighthawkinlight's senko hanabi fireworks, or astronaut Don Pettit's Alka Seltzer in water blob experiment on the space station. thx.
"The sun is pretty stinking bright". Your mastery of technical jargon really makes this channel fun.
I never fail to learn something on this channel. 😛
I think I once did the math to find than an indoor area that I thought had fantastic lighting was still something like 10 stops dimmer than it was outside, an that might have been the shade. The conscious side of the brain just refuses to believe how much the visual side of the brain is lying to it.
Today I learned we innovated on the lightbulb, which was initially famous for its long life by having a durable compact filament in an enclosure with no oxygen... by creating a bulb famous for its short life, by having a volatile, long filament in an enclosure of pure oxygen. BRILLIANT!
“Brilliant” in _both_ senses of the word! ;)
It's like taking a test and getting every answer wrong.
I see what you did there...
The issue with longer lasting ones is that they only last so long if you're not turning it on or off constantly. It practically needs to stay on to last long.
Uno revers card hahaha
I probably had not thought about those since 1981:. In college I disassembled a lot of Magicubes. I did study them with interest, but mostly I got a bunch of packs cheap, and used them as fireworks.
I also got ""into"" trouble once with them. And, by into, I literally mean out of. My first-hand experience says, thrown onto pavement from a moving vehicle, they had about a 70% chance of triggering. At night most people can't continue to drive, for at least a couple of minutes, if they were looking right there. So throw three to get the job *done* and get out. POOF and vanish like a magician.
Discount flashbangs
When I was about 10 years old, we used these _flashcubes_ on a Kodak Instamic 60.
I come from a poor family. The camera was a gift and we were very, very selective as to when we took a picture.
We couldn't really afford the films, the processing and the _flashcubes._
So basically, taking pictures in a very small number was limited mostly to Christmas parties and special events such as weddings.
Forget birthdays ! We were five children so it was too expensive.
That meant that sometimes, it would take more than a year (multiple events) to get the pictures.
That's what being poor seemed like back then.
I think this is the biggest difference between film and digital: when we used film we just waited for the best moments and opportunities to take a picture, it was something really special, from a moment you really want to save for your whole life. Film and development were expensive and limited, so we didn't want to waste poses. Then digital came and photos became something easy, unlimited and trivial.
@@Subiromba while true, and i lived as such, i dont disagree with modern times, my daughter (5yrs) just took , i want to say abut 30 photos on her little digital camera just this afternoon, it has a thermal printer and she printed off 10 of them . had I had that opportunity as a child id have a lot more memories saved of dens projects and life in general.. hopefully she appreciates im collecting all these photos , and perhaps not her adolescence, but adulthood she can look back on them!
@@denisohbrien
Still, today we tend to think that most people can afford a printer but most of all, the ink cartridges.
It's not the case.
The business model remains the same. Sell them one thing for cheap, a thing that requires regular use items that will become your main sources of incoming revenues.
Anyway, I'll go get my cup of Nespresso freshly prepared with the help of Alexa and watch a poorly rated film, an Amazon Prime Exclusivity, on my Fire TV.
@@Subiromba Phone cameras are often not that great, and photography remains a skill, thus why professional photographers never went away.
This one made me feel old. It's like you're talking about something ancient but I remember these flash bulbs.
You don't only feel, you are (and so do I by the way) I remember my mum getting angry after me just because I took fun by triggering some electric type cube with a 4,5V battery !
Mine watched in puzzlement @@lapub.
I remember the smell!
It hurt when the slow mo guy said "I've never even heard of that" about a MagiCube.
@@kimchristensen3727 I think I saw a flashcube once in an older episode of The Simpsons.
Gotta say, while I never saw these things IRL in all my 31 years, I think their engineering is very clever and cool.
THANKS for this video. 60 year old photographer here that used those flash bulbs, flash cubes, magic bulbs, 1960s Honeywell Xenon flash, apparently understood nothing of those single use bulbs like I thought I did.
54yo photographer here who never got to use the explody ones, because fancy-schmancy xenon tubes were already around. :)
@@stamasd8500 60 year old here whose first camera was a 126 used Magicubes. Once used I dismantled a few but never worked out how they worked. By the late 1970s I upgraded / downgraded to a 110 with a built in Xenon Flash. I would have to dig it out but think it used four AAA batteries to operate it.
@@stamasd8500 See if you can scrounge up an old cheap one like in the video, and then a couple of cubes, see what it's like to use these.
Not cutting edge anymore, but to make a comparison, it's still fun to shoot an old fashioned musket, even though they're antique technology. That they're such a different experience to modern guns makes them novel and interesting to try, some consider them far more fun and enjoyable.
why did I decide to watch a video about flashes on my 65 inch TV at night in the dark
The shot at 30:52 is pure perfection with you lit up in the background!
was looking for this
That's EVERYONE'S favorite shot
Gav singing na na na at the end, showing he's a fan of the channel was heartwarming.
That seemingly evil-looking shot of your mug appearing at 30:52 just cracked me up! 😅
I was repeating that time in my head until the end of the video. Such a weird thing to think of all that went into that photo getting made.
surprised Alec didn’t use it as the thumbnail 😂
I haven't laughed so hard in at least a decade 😂😂😂
🤪
That shot would be right at home in the montage of a mad scientist working just before "IT's ALIVE!"
@TechnologyConnections @TheSlowMoGuys
This was most excellent!! I always wondered about the process of how these tiny and yeah amazing bright flash elements worked and you folks showed it all in intricate detail! Thank You!!
A collab that nobody ever asked for but EVERYBODY NEEDED. Thanks a ton Alec!!!
I asked for it... don't remember in what context, but i asked.
When he said I’ll need some sort of slo mo guy I was expecting it to just be a joke
I remember Gav mentioning on a podcast a while back that he is a fan of Alec's channel and finally we have this
32:07 If anyone is wondering why they couldn't just run a current through the zirconium, the issue is zirconiums resistance and available battery power. Its resistance is x8 higher than tungsten you can't push any current across it with an amount of volts you'd be comfortable lugging around and no current means no heat.
Tangential fun fact: most flashlights that take 3 AAAs in those little round holders dont even have current limiting resistors in them to protect the LEDs. They rely on the relatively slow chemical reaction to limit the current available to the LED array. Also, if you want a brighter light, just pop a lithium battery in! I use a 14mm by 48mm (50mm including button contact on top...whatever that translates to in battery dimensions....14480? 14500?) harvested from a cheap wireless mouse that is the perfect length, and some spacer rings cut from a paper towel tube to keep it centered.
....though I do recommend adding a resistor if you go that route as you can burn out the LEDs a lot faster with the kinds of current a lithium battery can instantaneously provide....
I mean it is kind of pointless, a decent rechargeable flashlight with replaceable lithium battery can be had for 10 dollars if you know what to look for.@@mandi8345
@@mandi8345your cheap wireless mouse had a built-in lithium battery? all wireless mice I seen have slot for AA battery
@@mandi8345 I discovered it the bad way. I bought a quite bright used LED underwater flashlight with alkaline batteries inside (~10W) without manual(!). Then I changed to NiMh batteries and it didn't last long because it just burned up the LED which was directly connected to the batteries. No electronics, no resistor.
Older flashlights and cameras with flashlights sometimes had a warning in the manual that you MUST NOT use rechargable batteries.
The moment you started to imply slow motion I was like "please be a slow mo guys collab," I'm happy I wasn't let down
Your avatar is super adorable!
I am 60 and I remember these very well. You said it was such an ordeal to do all this. But at the time it wasn't. We did not have the luxury of the mobile phone and we knew nothing different. Most of us used to carry our cameras in a camera bag which had space for flashbulbs, flash cubes, batteries, spare film etc. It also meant that we had to become very familiar with exposure rates and the types of films we needed to get the shots we wanted to get. Yes, there was an expense involved, but that just meant we gave a lot of thought to the pics we wanted to take and we did not waste exposures on trifling trash like pictures of a meal we were just about to eat. It also meant that we ended up with photo albums galore and drawers full of photo's. So there was good and bad. Even now I look through pictures of my childhood and I compare them to pictures of my grandchildren that I have taken on my phone. The joy for us nowadays is the spontaneity of taking a pic of a situation. However with the earlier cameras, like the Kodaks and then later, the SLR cameras, we had the joy of getting the picture "Just right" and then the nervous wait of getting the film processed only to realise we had left the lens cap on. So it was not an "Ordeal", it was simply all we had at the time and we made the most of it.
Press photographers from the era would often have burn marks on their legs from flash bulbs that accidentally went off in their pockets.
The good ol days before liability lawsuits
I did not know that. But how did flashbulbs accidentally go off in their pockets unless they had pockets big enough to carry pre-loaded flash units with the power source connected? Only the Magicubes had self-powered detonators. Flash bulbs and regular Flashcubes needed an external power source.
@@mar4kl Static charge from wool fabric.
Can you please source this? I can't find anything talking about that
@@vwestlife, wow, I never would have thought of that (and apparently they didn't, either😬), but it makes sense.
Old school photography and timekeeping just endlessly fascinate me. So many cool electro-mechanical solutions to problems that you can do today with a micro-controller.
Also a lot of ELEGANCE in those mechanisms.
Getting slide film (positive image) in a photochemical structure which is fundamentally creating a negative image is even more interesting.
Also, you can develop slide film as a negative and get a negative image just like as with traditional negative film, but with a slightly different color balance (which would be corrected for in the printing dark room, because the slide film base is clear, whereas film made to produce negatives is built on an orange base, so printing negative-developed slide film requires dialing in the LOT of orange before it's close to the right filtration to get a proper-looking positive print)
Very neat things indeed, such interesting designs and problem solving! Also re @akulkis I really liked cross-processing techniques. My friend is trying to build a darkroom in their new home. I'm definitely looking forward to playing with dark room processing techniques again!
Oh. My. God. I wish you could have seen the smile on my face when the scene cut to you and Gav. Legendary colab.
SAME
Him talking about slow mo I was like "no way it's Gav", then he said "slow mo guy" and I absolutely lost it haha
My smile was so big I almost swallowed my own ears.
Same here it was so delightful!
I'd thought that this channel is already perfect until I saw this video. This is next level, absolutely stunning! You did it again Alec, thank you for a lovely 30 minutes of awe!
What a lovely Agfa T-shirt !
For anyone wondering, it was designed by Swiss poster artist Herbert Leupin back in 1956.
Congratulations on flashing thousands of people and not even getting a content strike.
Yep. That's it. I don't have to leave my obligatory Patreon comment now. This one beats anything I could possibly come up with.
@@newqyou're nothing in comparison
@@quantumblur_3145 what even is your Comment?
@@FFKonoko I could ask the same thing about what I replied to.
You missed a joke with Gav and Dan about "through the magic of buying 2 of them" 🤣
I waited the whole video for this joke!
Absolutely!!
I was more disappointed at the absence of "the magic of having four of them!" when introducing the cubes.
I mean. Do we really want Alec to go to prison for taking apart a slow-mo guy?
@@ranolden9717 excellent point
Loved that you went to Gavin for this. His knowledge of slo-mo photography / filmography is incredible.
the bokeh effect at 28:32 is INCREDIBLE. Great video
Funny seeing you here
It really is beautiful
reminds me of christmas lights instantly
I really thought grandma would be waving at me from the light.
That was beautiful!
There was another competing system for 110 flash photography in the late seventies, maybe into the early eighties, called the "flip-flash." If I'm remembering correctly, it was basically a slab of plastic containing 10 small flash bulbs, and five of them were wired to a connector on each end of the slab. Once you'd gone through the five at one end, you flipped it over and used the five at the other end.
What I never managed to figure out from tearing apart my mother's used flip-flash units was how the camera fired only one, and how it chose which one to fire. I've always assumed that the heat of the flash either created or destroyed some sort of electrical link, but it'd be really interesting to find out for sure, once and for all.
Yes! I remember this as well, though I had forgotten that it was two-sided. I always wanted to know the same thing: how was it designed such that only the *next* unused bulb would be fired? I wonder if it was mechanical like the Magicube or some kind of electrical circuit cleverness.
It's 2024, we have the Internet. I did a quick search for Flip-flash and got the answers. The thermal events disconnect the spent bulb and wire in the next. It's easy enough to break a circuit with heat but making a connection is more interesting. It's described in patent US3458270A.
I'd forgotten about these, but now remember after reading your description.
We had those for our Polaroid!
Wasn't the number of flashes in the stick different from the number of photos in the pack of film?
@@j_taylor It was definitely different from the number of exposures in a 110 film cartridge, which I recall being the standard 12 or 24 exposures. But of course, you didn't always want to use the flash, so they probably weren't going to match up anyway.
Someone my age or older might have reminded you that the explosion is how they took pictures in the 1800's and why there are photos of even President Lincoln that exist. They would have a pile of flash powder on a device that was controlled by the photographer who would hide under a protective blanket of sorts while the shot was taken. People would have to hold perfectly still because the camera would get a blurry shot if you moved at all during the process. I'm old enough to have lived through the use of all of the products you showed, and since my family was poor, we relied on natural light most of the time. We had cameras that used both types of these flashes, and I remember when we saw commercials for the new Magicubes released in the early 70's. It was amazing, and I even owned one. Those cameras were cheap as they were a loss leader for Kodak and Polaroid so we could take photos in low light. Polaroids were amazing to us too, because we didn't have to take the film to the local drug store to drop them off to get them a few days later. I never saw a fire started, but we would try to see who could hold a flash after it burned and for how long. They were freaking hot!
Great video.
The dark cloth ("blanket") is mainly not to protect the photographer but to keep any external light out to allow him to see the rather dim (and upside down and mirrored) image on the ground glass focusing screen to focus and compose the shot. When the composing and focusing is done the photographer would put a film or plate in a light tight holder in place either replacing the ground glass or moving it back so the film will be in the same plane. He would then close the shutter or on very early cameras put on the lens cover, remove the dark slide (a light tight piece of sheet metal covering the film when the holder is out of the camera) from the film/plate holder, open the shutter or remove the lens cover (a hat or something similar could also be used), fire the flash, close the shutter/lens cover, replace the dark slide and remove the holder.
Photographer taking a picture while being under the dark cloth is a modern misconception, usually they were (and still are, one of my hobbies is large format photography so I have done "the dance" many times myself) outside of the dark cloth at the side of the camera when actually taking the photograph as they would not see anything at that stage anyway with the film taking the place of the focusing screen. You don't want to be touching the camera during the exposure so you'll stand clear of it.
I ain't reading all'at 🙏💀
@@TryAlex23 it's so weird to me that some people seem proud of being functionally illiterate, so they actually brag about it.
@@railgap ok
@@TryAlex23you gotta admit, the “I ain’t reading all that” threshold has gone down from like 10+ paragraphs to just 2. Heck, one of them doesn’t even fill my phone screen and it’s a pretty small phone.
The fact that Gavin knew Alec’s outro song is RUclips magic.
Just out of interest, the blue coating on the bulb is to filter out the brown of the tungsten light.
I remember when I started photography with a Kodak Brownie 127 back in the 70s and I used many of the Flash Cubes.
I progress up to Hanimex 110 and eventually a high end 35mm SLR. I had to use a blue Cokin lens filter to correct the browning of photos under tungsten lighting, and a pink lens filter to correct the greening of photos under florescent lighting.
We used to use Flash to eliminate shadows, but the more modern HiD flash would wash out a lot of indoor photos.
I absolutely loved photography and I've never got the feel of a digital camera, so I slowly faded away from photography. I still see my photos that I took in the early 90s being published.
This video really brought back good memories. Thank You Alex 👍
The Magicubes I remember using- and, from what I can see, the ones in the video- didn't have or need the blue colour-correction coating on the bulbs. I'm sure I read why that was somewhere, IIRC it was because they changed to a different metal that burned with a bluer light.
The coating on exposed flash bulbs HAD to be there to keep the glass bulbs from exploding and sending shrapnel into people's faces. And yes, it was a blue tint to help correct the color. The Magic Cube bulbs were enclosed inside the plastic box, if one did explode, it would be contained behind the clear plastic lens. The magic cubes probably did have a different color temperature also, because they were a purely mechanical device. They didn't use electricity to fire off the fine "steel wool" inside of the bulb. They used a type of percussion cap inside that when struck with the firing pin of the camera, would set off a tiny "explosion" inside the bulb.
Film photography is having a second wave! We would like you back in the game!
You sound like my mother (in a good way). She was a professional photographer from the 70s to the 90s.
Any chance you could talk about some of the photos you still see around being published? Would be cool to check out your old work! Thank you for the insight as well!
I’ve been noticing for a while that Alec is “your favorite RUclipsr’s favorite RUclipsr.” Glad to see he’s benefiting from that!
When you heat up a metal wire of certain composition, it will form beads prior to melting. This was done on the _Periodic Videos_ episode "Exploding Wires,", around the six minute thirty second mark.
Thanks for that suggestion, looks identical!
yes, it seems fairly clear that the beads here only appear after heating ... I was struggling to remember which channel I'd seen it on before, Periodic Videos is the one!
THANK YOU!
I couldn't remember where I saw this phenomenon.
Molybdenum wire does that. The oxide has a lower melting temperature than the metal. That would make it oxidize quickly and produce extra heat. It might be molybdenum wire.
That is very interesting!!
In 1972, when the Magicube came to market, my dad was an engineer working for Sylvania and the Magicube was manufactured at his plant. I remember perfectly the differences between Flashcubes and Magicubes and dismantled and fired many Magicubes for the fun of it. My dad was adamant that Magicubes were the best innovation in flash technology since the beginning of photography. However, he became pissed at Kodak when it issued new cameras that activated Flashbars which were electrical devices, just for selling a new fashion in cameras, and thus letting go of Magicubes. That was the first time that I could see the birth and the death of a technology that I manipulated. The next time was the fax machine.
I remember those Magicube flash-cubes from the '70s and early '80s when I was a kid. Man, those things were *SO* expensive!! You had to be very selective of what you took a picture of indoors, not only because you had a limited number of pictures on a roll of film, but also because you only ever seemed to have one of these Magicubes, and at least one of the flashes had already been used, if not 3 of them. LOL!
I wonder how much in original money was spent making this episode
What annoyed me about both my Magicube cameras was invariably, when inserting the flash unit, one would go off just by inserting. Not sure if it was my 4-7 year old fumbling, or a design fault. The flash sticks (not sure if that had a catchy name, but they had like 10 bulbs per stick), which used electricity, avoided this problem.
@@tjncooke Oh yeah -- my aunt had one of those cameras that used the flash stick (whatever it was called). I'd forgotten about that. They were definitely better than the MagiCubes, no doubt.
I never had a MagiCube go off by accident, not that I can remember anyway. But I can totally see how it could happen -- just get anything up inside there, poke that wire, and **poof!** It'd probably have scared the shit out of me, had I done it. 😂
The way your face with that expression of pure insanity just fades into existence at 30:52 is probably the funniest thing I've ever seen on your channel. I just keep replaying it and I can't stop laughing.
alec jumpscare
I know right?!?! xD
A true mad scientist.
It's like the manic grin in the reflection on the toaster.....
Thank you for bringing back my childhood! We LOVED macicubes. Neither of my parents was mechanical enough to handle batteries in a camera, and I can attest to the reliability of these. They simply worked. But, oh yes, were we careful. When we'd have a party, we'd probably take 4-8 flash photos. That was all we wanted to pay for.
My father had an SX-70 polaroid - that thing had a 10 bulb flash strip. Make no mistake - a magicube WOULD burn you if you grabbed it right off, but those 10 bulb strips were worse. They got HOT. They used to melt and bulge all over the place. But, again, they were reliable. And, I've got the "deer in the headlights" pictures of our '70s parties to prove it!
I remember that, when I purchased my first electronic flash, I was so fascinated that I went through a full set of batteries just making it do its thing. LOL
I had forgotten about those 10 bulb strips. And yes - they did get awfully hot.
The flash gun charge cycle noise was an iconic sound of my childhood.
Yeah very nostalgic to see these again, beautiful pieces of tech.
I also have one of those bars for a Polaroid 2000. What I don't really understand is how the camera (or the bar itself) knows what bulb is set to fire, since there are five on each side?
Would you say that the Magicube greatly increased camera use by people?
Or say, caused EXPLOSIVE growth?
Unrelated to what a fantastic and informative piece your videos always are, but... wow. The bokeh on that first shot of the open-air filament actually made me go 'whoa' out loud. Perfect circular bokeh, and plenty of it! The slow-mo adds so much to the explanations of how the flash bulbs work.
I like that blooper at the end: "You still have to carry this and a box of crap"... priceless
LMAO
This has to be one of the more unexpected, yet welcome crossover episodes 😆
I love the little turbo whine that the electric flash bulbs had when revving up to fire.
1:52 I had the same reaction! It was a pleasant and nostalgic brain tickle.
Yes I remember that charging the capacitor whine as I got a huge electric shock taking one apart poking one with metal screwdriver as a kid....hurts like hell, got more kick than any 240v shock I've ever hqd
@@foxxy46213 i did the same with a disposable camera not once, but twice as a kid xD
@@sunnyokapi yep same..had to poke it twice as I thought how can 3v zap like that
I remember taking one apart as a kid. It was a newer camera that used xenon flash tubes. I never got shocked. However, I did get an unpleasant surprise when something shorted the capacitor and made a nice little fireworks display@@foxxy46213
This teamwork with Gav surely was the most awesome video you ever made! Thanks so much for the effort!
I vividly remember those bulbs from my childhood. Used bulbs sizzling and smoking, carefully popped into an ashtray, "don't touch, boy!!". The whole process was fascinating and a bit scary. "Watch out, daddy's going to take a flash picture!"
But up to now, I never knew how they really worked.
Great footage, great job, thanks again 👍🏼👍🏼
I'd like to point out that the blue translucent coating on the flashbulb does not _add_ blue, it removes some of reds and yellows and greens instead!
For it to add blue the backing light need to be in the UV/xray spectra, so it can re-emit those photons at lower energy level (fluorescence).
Imagine being the engineer who designed these and finally being able to see how it works not just understand it theoretically or in testing.
I was not expecting a Slow Mo Guys collab, this is amazing! Also the fact that Gav knows the outro music makes me so happy ❤
So 28:32 may be one of the prettiest shot's I've seen from Slow Mo Guys, or at the very least the most "that doesn't look like it should be real" shots. Incredible.
A surprise to be sure, but a welcome one
29:38 amazing how much the aftermath of such a tiny explosion resembles outer space...
Another old guy reports: SO bright they would leave a spot on your vision for a minute or so. I actually owned an X-15 just like that one as a youngster. I got it when I was 11 or 12 (1971 or 72). And yeah, taking pictures was spendy. Flashcubes even more so. They really were the ultimate point & shoot. Later in my teens I got into real photography and owned an SLR. Then I realized how limited the X-15 was. But to a kid, it was great fun. I don't recall a flash ever failing, but it did happen very occasionally. I remember the older units too, used by adults when I was a kid. I can still see them pulling out the hot bulbs with a hanky. Every picture had to count in those days. You paid for the film, then you paid to have it developed and printed. You might even pay again to have a negative reproduced in a larger format, perhaps having it framed and hung on the wall. Yeah, I'm old.
Oh yeah, now I remember the black spot afterimage from standing in front of a flashbulb and looking at the camera lens.
Oh yeah, I remember the black spot in your vision after one of these things went off. I remember both the individual bulbs (and the curiously bubbled and "crunchy" state they ended up in afterwards) and the magicubes. My dad was more the photographer in our family (he preferred slides, had a light meter, etc), I was never all that into it, but did have an instamatic. I really didn't enjoy the taking-photos process, which was an actual process back in the day.
The expense of film photography and everything that went with it (like the expense of flash bulbs) tells you what an insanely great business this all was for companies like Kodak or Fuji or Agfa or Sylvania and tells you how much value the average person put on photos. Yes, it was spendy, but it was spend that people viewed as pretty important.
What I remember was the curious mix between how prevalent was photography and yet how careful people were with it as well. On the one hand, yes, your instamatic was point-and-click, on the other hand, you were aware of how expensive it was to buy and process film. Today, of course, if you take photos it's all about quantity, then you go back and select one you like. For the average human, 50 years ago that was simply cost prohibitive.
@@cv990a4spamming photos to select the best one to keep gets called “chimping” among photography buffs today. There’s many arguments about whether DSLRs are making them into worse photographers, because selecting after-the-fact doesn’t exercise those compositional muscles as much.
For what it’s worth, even though I moved from film to digital when I was 11 or 12, the film-style of carefully lining up my shots has always stuck with me. I feel excessive when I take 3-5 slightly differently framed photos instead of 1, let alone 50! It really is a different world nowadays.
Thanks for making this video...brought back a lot of memories...Dad was heavily into photography...has LOTS of toys that need to be assessed for monetary value...did his own developing, printing, enlarging...darkroom downstairs with old school clolourhead enlarger...fridge and freezer FULL of Kodak film and printing paper...Hasselblad, Leicas, Canons...lenses that must be worth thousands by todays' standards...know anybody who still uses print film and needs some badly...?!? 😂
I have to ask - have you been on the receiving end of a modern MILC/DSLR flash unit like a Godox 850 or higher? I feel like some of the same issues still exist for photography enthusiasts - we still have a separate unit with it's own batteries that we have to screw down on the hotshoe or use a remote trigger for. Back to my initial point - these things can get *bright*. It's just that they're really adjustable and we usually try and not use at 1/1 for battery life and to actually get the exposure we want. I just recall the first time I started using the Godox ones I was like - this is a lot more light than I'm used to from on camera flash - and the cell phone led lights are just laughable.
To digress a bit more, it's still surprising to many how little light even 35mm modern sensors with f2.8 or even f1.4 lenses can actually gather in 1/100 a second or so to freeze some motion and make up for hand shake etc. Flash is still pretty necessary inside because most houses (at least where I live) are actually rather dim and don't really have a lot of light put out by their lighting.
Love the part at 33:31 “You’d still need to carry this and a box of crap” 😂
That had me rolling xD
That's one thing I don't remember packing ...
hobbies in a nut shell
Is he wrong, though? 😛
I always carry a box of crap with me. I'm relatively confident in my ability to acquire an adequate supply over time, but I never know when I might not be able to produce the immediately required amount on demand....
OMG SECRET COLLABORATION!? I’ve been happy bamboozled! What a great combo! I bet there’s a bunch of fun things you have in mind for more projects. Always find your thorough explanation of complex processes mesmerizing and enlightening. Thanks so much for another awesome video!!
My opinion is that the primer does not contain "explosive beads". Having 5 years of welding experience, every wire I've ever melted immediately beads up. A sphere is the least resistant shape in terms of surface tension or whatever, for example it's why rain drops aren't shaped like a square lol. A good example of this is water on the space station... when they squirt water from their little baggies, instead of smooth laminar flow it almost immediately beads up. Even in this video, there are absolutely no signs of beads in the primer until AFTER it reaches its melting point and only then do we see any "beads"... which again I believe is just the natural course for a molten wire to take. I can't remember the compound exactly, but perhaps there is a very thin coating around the wire filament in the primer which causes all the sparking to occur, or maybe it could even be tungsten like you said earlier. All I know is, I just don't think they used explosive beads lol.
I work in fire protection. We use flashbulbs for testing the operation of clean agent extinguishing systems (halon or FM-200) in places like data centers. Those systems can be activated by a squib - we can't actually test the squib because testing will destroy it, but we will test the electrical circuit leading up to the squib. The best way is to wire in a flash bulb. When the current is sent to the system for activation, the bulb flashes.
would love to see a video of that
Where do you get new flash bulbs?
@@RCAvhstape
K-Mart.
@@positivelynegative9149where are there any Kmarts left? Every one within 100 miles from me closed down a few years ago... I miss Kmart.
@@positivelynegative9149 Oh, you mean the place next to Radio Shack, across the street from the Howard Johnsons, by the Bell Telephone booth.
In my high school marching band (early 80’s), we performed one song using Magicubes as a special effect. Each musician taped a ‘cube to the outside of his or her instrument, and at a certain point in the performance, we all used paper clips to press the firing pins. I don’t know if it was particularly memorable, and I especially didn’t realize how expensive those cubes were! Thanks so much, Alec and Gav, for this great work!
We did the same except they were pinned to our uniforms. One of the band parents video'd* the performance and the effect was pretty cool.
*Pre-camcorder days -- the camera and tape unit were separate, bulky, and very heavy.
Same, but in 95 I think.
As a 62-year-old man, I remember the flashbulbs of the ancient past. Thank you very much for reminding me how freaking old I am.
Thought you could remember gun powder flash granddad!
I'm same age..
Ah yes...... memories of melted flesh as you tried to change your flashbulb too quickly before it cooled!
Im older than you, but the age ratio just keeps getting smaller. You never really catch up though.
@@clayz1It's like Xeno's Paradox.
@@BertGrink Like if you have two boats you need a pair of docs?
Back in 1973, i experimented with these cubes. One day I tried putting 34 volts into one and had it set up on a bench. As I leaned over to make final connection and touched the wire, it set off the cube with an explosion in my face. I had forgot to unplug the transformer I was using. The bright flash almost blinded me but thank goodness no glass got into my eyes. The cube came apart. I think the normal voltage was like 3 volts or less and I gave it 34. I was seeing a dot floating around in front of me for 2 weeks. Very hard to read my lessons with that dot getting in the way. Lesson learned and I am now 69 in March and have yet to need glasses.
I've used Magicubes in the past. They were very popular with the cameras of the time.
As for developing, Cinderella is still waiting for the last roll of film she sent off to be returned but she still has hope and you often hear her say, "Some day my prints will come..."
I'll get my coat 😉
Isn't it always a pleasant surprise when you realise that someone you know watches some of the same geeky channels as you?
Weren't they also the only option other than the super old school flash powder or unhoused bulbs?
I remember Dad using those, and bitching about the cost if a picture was ruined.
That footage is very interesting, and I had no idea that they used a primer type system instead of a battery. One of the coolest videos you've ever made.
Yeah, I remember that my Mum's camera used the older flashcubes that required batteries, but the Magicubes my camera took didn't. I wish I'd known how they worked- and all that stuff about the primer- back then.
Slowmo guys and TC collaboration! Gah! Yes! Beyond thrilled! So happy to see TC growing to this point. Congrats Alec and keep up the good work 👍
The shot around 28:50 had something magical to it.
You may also be aware that in the VERY old days, they used powdered elemental magnesium. Talk about playing with fire...
Yes , the dish that contained the powder was called the flash pan.
@@LarixusSnydes And the powdered magnesium was called flashpowder... Left a nice white dust of Magnesium oxide...
@@LarixusSnydes Flash pan came from matchlock and flintlock firearms. It was adapted for photography because it did the same thing.
In movies, and some tv shows, you can still see that when they take a picture and the photographer holds up a T shaped device that flashes and smokes.
Rooms where several Photos were taken, showed many Scars on the Ceiling from the Flash Tray. They were doing Bounce Flash long before it became Fashionable
According to US patent US3312085A the primer could be "a mechanical mixture of finely divided zirconium powder, of above-described grain size, lead dioxide up to 35% by weight and about 2% by weight of polyvinyl alcohol. Potassium perchlorate may be substituted for or included with the lead dioxide". Yummy.
Thanks for the video. Those slo-mo images are wonderful ! True joy to understand now those cubes I was playing with as a child.
That's an electrically-driven primer, and not the flash tube used in the Magicube. All of the patents related to the Magicube discuss "recently developed" "percussivelly-activated" flash bulbs as if they were an off-the-shelf item. I'm guessing that they were unable to patent the bulb itself.
@@jpdemer5 yep, as he said the Magicube probably uses some gun powder. I was looking for the composition of the "primer beads" around the filament in the non-magic bulb.
@@PierreAlainMaire Almost certainly lead styphnate as the shock-sensitive inintiator, and probably powdered zirconium to supply the flying sparks.
Ok I was absolutely giddy when I saw Gavin come on screen. This was a team up I wasn’t expecting but glad it happened. I watch both these guys for years now.
This is some of the best slo-mo footage I've ever seen. Awesome, dude.
The slow-mo shots look gorgeous! They remind me of the ones in Oppenheimer
For a while I couldn't think of what it reminded me of. Then it came to me: the ignition of the rocket engines of the Saturn 5 for Apollo.
Having used 110 cameras with flash bulbs, it is super satisfying to see them in action. I also love YT collaborations. It's great to see people sharing skills and equipment. Thank you for sharing too.
Did your 110 use cubes or one of those stacked flash-bar things? Not mentioned in this video, there were disposable flash bars mostly used on 110 type cameras. I don't remember how many bulbs were in each bar.
We had a couple of 110 cameras during the 1980s. The bar inserted into a slot on top. IIRC it was five on each side of the bar. You'd turn it upside down for a total of 10 flashes. It looked like an electrical connection but no batteries and no obvious turning mechanism either. I was always fascinated about how it worked.
@@charlesclark3840 I remember those, my dad had a Hanimex camera that used them. Now I want to know how the sequential firing of the bulbs worked.
That's a lot of cameras, I've only used like 4 or 5
It's the stacked one I was most interested in him taking apart. There was the four tubes on one side, then you'd flip it and have four more. There was also a small window, green as I recall which would show how many good tubes you still had on the side which would go black when it was spent. How did the camera use only one at a time? How did the indicator work?
everyone's talking about gav's TC jazz but I also appreciated "so what did we learn today?" to start off the outro. amazing video as usual. thanks for making it!
That was just insane. The way the process kept unfolding…. One of my favorite TCs to date!
Flash bulbs are insanely bright. Even the small AG1 can rival most modern consumer flashguns, but bigger ones like PF5, M3, GE5 etc. can out shine (hehe, get it?) basically any professional hotshoe mounted flashgun. Then there are those huge E27 screw ones which look like 100W bulbs and even bigger - those are sill used for cave photography.
Also shooting people with flash bulbs is insanely fun - most people are used to electronic flashes, but when you hit them with one of these bad boys they get stunned for like 5 seconds.
Wow, I didn't expect Gavin to appear. Awesome! I also love that Gav sang the end credits song at the end, probably watches these episodes also it seems.
I turn 65 this year. I remember flashbulbs and flashcubes quite well... My father had a camera (usually used to shoot slides) that used flashbulbs, and one of the problems was -- once the spots in front of your eyes cleared -- the absolute need for a heavy handkerchief to remove the bulb without burning yourself. Of course, there were a couple of times when the bulb would shatter or break, leaving one to figure out how to extract its remains from the camera before taking another photo. Flashcubes were certainly an improvement, although I remember a few times when only 3 (or even 2!) of the bulbs would go off. I also remember the painful difficulty of taking photos with a MagiCube on a small 110 camera -- which is why some of the later 110 cameras came with a tall, black plastic "tower" that would raise the cube far enough from the location of the photographer's eyebrow to prevent most injury (and also help avoid "redeye" photos). The alternative was one of those hot shoe electronic flashes that -- of course -- ate batteries at a ridiculous pace. Now, about that lightbar with four massive floodlamps my father used to have to hold up to take 16mm motion pictures with a wind-up camera... Aah, the memories... 8-D
Wow. Flashbacks!
Most bulb flashguns had a lever to eject the warm flashbulb after firing, obviating the need to touch it.
@@mauritsvw Typically there was a pushbutton ejector behind the base of the flashbulb.
Ah good old 110. And countless trips to Fotomat!
I remember using them on my Ilford 126 camera.
This is one of the quietest video from slow mo guys at the event of experiment, and i loved it. It's actually like an ASMR, but way more satisfying
I remember my mom's dismay when I worked out how to set off the Magicubes with a small tool.
As an early entrant for the Darwin Award, I remember holding them right up to my eye and setting them off. Trippy phosphenes - can’t believe I didn’t permanently damage or lose my eyesight.
@@awgn70 They used to make a self-defense tool that was a curved mirror you could plug a magic cube into. Point it at your attacker and give it a squeeze, and it set off all four at once, projecting it into bad-guy's face. Hope there's only one of them.
Neat. Not mentioned: before flash bulbs there were also flash lamps up until about the 1930s, basically igniting magnesium (early on) or flash powder (later) to get the flash. So the percussion-ignited flash cubes are just coming full circle!
Ditto on the flash powder. Was it not the first form of flash for photography ?
Is that where my parents got the idea that these were full of magnesium?
@@samarnadra Could be, or just that being the most commonly-known metal that burns good.
fun fact you can trigger these flashes with the static in your hair. did it quite alot for fun as a kid.
As a photographer for the last 30 years, i had no idea how rhese *actually* worked at the finest level. Well done!
23:12 +1 for the ‽ Interrobang. Well done captionists, well done!
YES! I was wondering "did anyone else notice it?" This is the crowd for that!
that bubble boka effect from the bulb filament going off by itself at 28:30 was utterly gorgeous
As a kid in the 80s, I had a cheap Kodak camera that took Magicubes- and you're right, I remember that they almost doubled the cost of taking a photo. (Electronic flash was starting to become more common then, but not yet on the cheapest models).
With hindsight, I wish I'd known back then how they worked- I didn't find that out until 25+ years later. And even though I knew the basics by now, this video explained the details in far more depth than I'd seen before, thank you.
It makes you appreciate how- despite the technology on one level appearing bizarrely anachronistic and primitive in today's electronic world- these devices were very cleverly designed and well-engineered.
Similarly, the way the "Flip-Flash" design (an alternative to Magicubes) "keeps track" of which of the five bulbs have been used is another clever piece of design.
Oh man I remember having a camera that needed to use those cubes! I had totally forgotten about that until this video. Good God I feel old now.