This Toy Blew My Mind - 1960's Toy Using Technology I Didn't Know Existed
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- Опубликовано: 19 фев 2024
- I've been out of town clearing out my mother in law's house, which means I haven't had time to make videos, but, in the attic I found this toy which used Shape Memory Polymer technology, and I thought that this kind of thing had only been invented in the 21st century.
Ok it's not much of a toy, but it is fascinating to figure out how this worked, and how there's a link to spaceflight in this story.
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Hi Scott! I had this exact toy back in 1969. The moment you showed the plastic toys and the “machine” my brain went back 55 years to a great memory. THANKS!!!
My memory is fuzzy on it. But i do remember the little squares lol
My friend had one of these back in the day. I remember us burning ourselves several times and never telling our parents because we knew that would be the end of the fun.
yup, my brother had one also.
I still have mine
Nice!
You forgot some steps with the heat shrink tubing: You cut a piece, you solder the connection, you see that you forgot to put on the cut tube first, you unsolder the connection, you put the tube on the wire, it shrinks because the unsoldered wire was not cooled down enough, you rip it off, cut a new piece, slide it on the wire, solder the connection, slide it over the still hot solder joint where it shrinks on good enough... 😉
True!
And the first solder job was perfect, but the second time is ugly with a glob that the shrink tube barely makes it over before shrinking enough to stick where it's not quite center...
Yep, it happens with connector casings too, with a probability closely correlating to the number of wires involved, and you only realize your mistake right after finishing the soldering masterpiece of your life. Feels like it's a way more fundamental problem with the 3D nature of space, topology and knots and stuff. Someone is playing a really cruel game on us. Also this is how we learn that with enough heat applied, every plastic part is its own Strange Change Game.
The same with soldering Phono plugs you always forget to put the cover on before you solder the buggers
@@tangydiesel1886 Flux is your friend.
The 1948 Red Skelton movie "The Fuller Brush Man" uses "plastic memory" as a plot device wherein a hairbrush is deformed into a murder weapon and, upon heating, is reformed back into a brush. Perhaps shape-memory polymers have been around for a while.
At least the idea has for sure.
Interesting.
That rings a bell. 1948 Red Skelton movie "The Fuller Brush Man" Hmm. I wonder if I can download that?
Shape Memory polymers were discovered in the 1940's ... this was a movie using cutting edge technology ...
"The Fuller Brush Man" was the first thing I thought of.
What the hell, a Scott Manley found-footage horror movie?! 😂
Red Dwarf episode Polymorph, it's a clever joke.
Night of the Living WereVacuums
Some SCP where it lives in an Old House, eating unsuspecting humans/other animals, digests them, and poops out what appear to be Weathered Electrolux Vacuum Cleaners.
My dad worked for Raychem for many years. In the 60s, yes, every so often he would bring home a few of the plastic cubes, and we would throw them in a pot of boiling water for the big reveal (no need for the strange change machine). Also - I got one of the tang bottles and heated it up in the oven to get a space capsule. It was amazing to see the transformation! The funny thing about the tang bottles is that my recollection is that tang could not advertise that they would turn into a space capsule, as recently enacted safety regulations prohibited telling kids to put something in the oven. So millions of these bottles were disposed of without the owners even knowing.
Same here, but it was my Mom! Would always be bringing ThermoFit stuff home for us to play with. She loved working there, except for the commute over Dumbarton every day.
Sounds like a ' shrinky- dink ' which we still do all the time with the plastic formed cookie containers.
I used to write my kids names on the with a marker and then heat it over a stove burner to shrink it down to a block of plastic with their teenie- tiny name on it.
We had these as kids as well, but one time i went to get some and it was just sponge dinos in gel capsuels, as the ages go, the tech regresses...
My parents must have known someone who worked there too because I also recall getting one of those blocks to throw into boiling water.
@@NinjaMonkeyPrime I was thinking the same thing. I got some sort of monster figure out of a lime-green block, I think.
Its also amazing that the plastic still functions that way after all those years
A lot of old plastic is remarkably durable by comparison to modern plastic
@@personzorz must be. Most plastics dry and crack over long periods
@@salty_berserker_channelit's because old plastic formulas were designed to replace gemstones and glass
@@salty_berserker_channel I've seen epoxy turn back into liquid
@@BrandyBalloontape/cassettedeckbelts, damping foam in speakers, wrapping foamfoil in subwoofers... all turning to goo and requiring lots of work.
I never expected a Scott Manley video to include a jump scare... well done Mr. Manley, you got me good.
Yeah, got me good also, was not expecting that from one of his videos 😅
Same! Great entertainment.
I will never look at an Electrolux vacuum the same again!
11:10
You call that a jumpscare? Pft
I played with these as a kid back in the 70's, back then the plastic squares were sold at toy stores individually. No machine/toy, all you had to do was toss a square in hot water and watch them go.
I believe that I still have the octopus somewhere. It was my favorite.
I remember putting it in boiling water ... I was young ...
That was a different (but similar) toy that was more like a sponge.
@@saundby never sen one of these you talk. Mine were Mattel and were hard plastic squares, not spongy at all. Maybe it was surplus after the whole toy was removed from stores.
That time when industrial machinery was considered toys.
I'm almost 67 and those were the good old days.
The classic, we have a cool science discovery with no commercial purpose. Let's pretend it is a kids toy so nerdy parents who want a tech demo can buy it for themselves and pretend it is for their kids!
Now they're only toys when you're grown up.
Where's the Amazon Affiliate link to buy the toy this kid is playing with?
At first I thought it was an injection molding machine and thought that was a hilarious thing to give to kids. I'm actually a toy designer and I just love the idea of giving kids molten TPR or ABS to play with.
Fun fact, when they make heat shrink, it's cast to the shrunken size and then expanded to introduce stress. When it's heated it allows the stress to release, and it shrinks back down.
It also releases as much heat during stretching as it takes to recover it back down to it's original size.
Yup.
1. Make a tube at the "shrunken" diameter.
2. Electron-irradiate it pretty good.
3. Heat it, uniformly stretch it to 2x or 3x diameter, and let it cool while stretched.
4. After installation, heat it again and let it shrink.
Learn something new everyday 😂
too cool! i've been using the stuff for decades and for some reason i never looked it up. thank you!
(in the vein of "things i encounter regularly and research" -- the first 200 years of the industrial revolution happened without o-rings. first US patent was in the 1930's. wrap your head around that!)
@@herzogsbuick Considering practical pneumatic tires where introduced by Dunlap in 1888, that feels a bit off. I don't know what the US did in the meanwhile, but according to wiki: "The first patent for the O-ring is dated May 12, 1896, as a Swedish patent. J. O. Lundberg, the inventor of the O-ring, received the patent. The US patent for the O-ring was filed in 1937 (first filed application in 1933) by a then 72-year-old Danish-born machinist, Niels Christensen.
This O-ring is defined as having a circular crossection made of rubber or rubber composition. During WW2 the O-ring patent was commandeered by the US government as a war-critical item.
I kind of expect that for a long time, seals where make by metal or rubberlike gaskets. The power of O-rings really appears when they can be used with well geometrically tolerated products, which by 1910 was partially achieved at Ford by 'gauge inspection', it didn't become tool independent till around WW2.
Not exactly. You have to irradiate the heat shrinkable material while it is expanded to cause it to cross link to maintain the expanded shape. It is a very different technology than this toy employs. As I remember, they never sold a toy version with a radiation chamber. ;-/ ;-P :-)
Downsizing and emptying a house is a helluva a chore. I've been involved in a couple but had siblings involved also. My one plea: save some of the old stuff no one in your family wants, in a couple of generations someone will be glad to get it. That's how I ended up with an 1860s kaleidoscope and a unique letter from the Civil War and a big Funk & Wagnall's 1904 dictionary, as well as some cool old books.
I'm working for a hotel and at the moment we are renovating on a scale of total remodeling and new design. We needed to remove the closets and found 2 things: naughty magazines from 1990 and a hello kitty tennis game. A few people came to the hotel and picked up some furniture. We collected the magazines in a hallway. My boss walked passed it with some of the people. Later she took the magazines because it was embarrassing to walk pass the magazines with those people. I still think she wanted them for herself. I kept the hello kitty game and it still works. I may sell it or just keep it.
THIS. I shudder to think how much super high quality 19th century architecture, furniture and art was destroyed in the 40s-80s. And how much invaluable high quality mechanical tech from the 60s is being destroyed now. Manual machine tools, electrical appliances, anything electro mechanical from then is usually superior to modern stuff. Keep that stuff.
@@Zonkotron If I had the money I'd collect a few electromechanical adding machines and cash registers. The multiple rows of 1-9 keys resulted in quicker and more accurate entries. When I was just out of high school I worked in a bank and the old machines were fiercely guarded by their users - and some were *very* old. Of course a 10-key entry pad is cheaper to manufacture but it is inferior.
Mechanical tech gives a kinesthetic and audible satisfaction that newer tech can't provide.
@@Zonkotron This is so true! In that era everything had to be solved mechanically, and as such required very fundamental design just to make it function as intended. Nowadays a lot of functionality is brute-forced by electronics or solved by tightening geometric tolerances, while in the past it was mechanically optimized.
No value judgement though. When working with Sony, Philips engineers made a mechanical isolation system to avoid audio CDs to skip over bumps when used in a car. Sony had a simpler proposal by introducing a 5 seconds memory in the electronics instead. This would allow the optical tracking system enough time to get tracking again after a bump.
In the early 1990s an old Western Union building was being renovated by my employer, and they sold off all the office furniture to the employees. I picked up an old steel desk and table that I still use in my home office, and an identical set for my astronomy club. They cost like $25 the first day I came and $5 on the final sale day. I got a couple of office chairs, too.
Honestly Scott, you could do a completely non-space gardening episode and the majority of us would be happy !
Here here. (sp.?) Scott’s knack for clear description of complicated stuff, with fun had in telling, he could grow his brand ‘like mad’. Gardening would be a fun start, like tongue-in-cheek until the physics and bonkers empirical wisdom tales started.
Hey Scott, can you do a show on the physics of skateboarding fails, meaning bails or slams? I wonder how much we know about training, from experience, that keeps us safe, thinking both a baby falling safely and a cat. I should be dead by now, so I’m curious. ~8D
I’m Scott Manley. Plant safe
@@johnnyliminal8032It's "Hear! Hear!"
Triffids maybe ???
see the movie "Silent Running", space and plants!
Okay, the toy itself is amazing, but the "closet within a closet" is what's really going to stick in my mind.
Nothing good is ever found in a closet in a closet. As Scott learned.
@@pseudotasuki closepetion
I can see Scott’s wife saying “Stop playing help me clean up this place” ☮️😂
"It's not playing, it's work." So we get a video.
And he gets a tax write off for the trip 👍
@@ShamelessFNGRL Unfortunately not. IRS rules are set up so that big corporations get away with quite a bit, but small companies and sole proprietorships get hammered.
Hello, Scott - I got this toy for my birthday in September of 1968. My brothers, friends, and I spent hours squashing and reanimating various creatures. Never got burned!
I also got one for Christmas early 70s. Never got burned unlike the time my brother warned me not to touch the Creepy Crawler hot plate which I promptly did anyway. That was a painful lesson learned. Anyway, I swear Strange Change was available for more than 1 year.
@@proto-geek248 I agree! It was more than a single year AND you could buy separate packages of extra creatures. They smelled so good that we used to eat them! Mother was really angry when she busted us at it. Eh, I'm 59 and still here. So are all my buddies. Didn't do us any harm. 70's kids were tough and very hard to injure.
Same here, had a lot of fun with it. If you were good you could join two monsters into one cube.
@@ssaepa1 Best Comment! Man, I can smell the little creatures, in my mind. Mine came with this green plastic ''tableau'' of mountain terrain with cubby holes for creature hide outs. . We had the best toys. GI Joe came 12'' tall with kung fu grip! We had toy M-16's that looked just like the real thing-can't imagine that today!
@@meetontheledge1380 so glad I was born back then
As someone who pushed an orange Lux for years as a cleaner in my teens - those things never die. Change the brushes, wash the bag, and you're good for another decade.
I still have my grandmother's. Keeps on going. Lol
We were poor so a Kenmore was all we could get. I still have mine from 1970, but bags are nonexistent. They claim they have 5023 bags but they must have found the wrong template as they do not fit. The motor and vacuum still work though.
Kenmore? You were lucky. We had to pick up the dirt with our bare hands and take it to the bin outside in the rain. (Search for the Four yorkshire men sketch.)
@@simontay4851 That's because in your day children's cough syrup was laced with opium, morphine, and cocaine. That _looxury_ is how you had the stamina to walk uphill both ways to school in 10 feet of snow, in the dark, without shoes.
@@simontay4851- A bin? you were lucky you had a bin. When we found dirt on the floor, we gave it to mother and she put it into the soup!
Dangerous toys from my youth - Jarts (giant lawn darts you were supposed to gently tose into a hoop), Mattel's Thing Maker (oven and metal molds and liquid plastic goop that you would pour into the molds and cook to harden), chemistry sets with all sorts of nasty chemicals included, wood burning tools (basically a soldering iron with different sized tool ends to burn different shaped patterns into wood). Such good (harmless?) fun!
The problem with Jarts was that kids were too imaginative to use them as designed-we'd all stand in a circle, throw the things straight up as hard as we could, and the last person to run away was the winner. A friend of mine had a set, and he was an only child...eventually.
There were also the lead soldiers my dad played with, and the molds kids could use to cast their own.
The Jarts were used as intended until you eventually got bored playing the normal game. Then, of course, throw them up as high as you could.
Thing Maker was awesome, too. For Creepy Crawlers. That was around the same time as the Strange Change Machine. I remember there was a couple Christmases that I received oven-type toys. Creepy Crawlers had cool plastics and the best one was a phosphorescent version that would glow in the dark.
Chemistry sets were perfectly safe if you followed the instructions and didn't mess around - and led thousands, perhaps millions, of kids (myself included) on to a career in science and technology. Solder-free electronics kits likewise. ♥
As an electrician, a Raychem product, I use a lot as self regulating heat trace. It’s used for keeping pipes warm. It works by some semi conductor, polymer conducting electricity to generate heat, but as it warms up, it conducts less than less until it reaches it desired temperature and stops conducting. They make these depending on formula for different temperature ranges.
I used to use those heat tapes on propellant conditioning lines at a rocket factory. There's your space connection for you. :)
It’s not a semiconductor (that word has a very specific meaning, one which does not apply here). Self-regulating heaters have what’s called a PTC characteristic (positive temperature coefficient, meaning that the electrical resistance rises with temperature). Some work by using a resistive material (like thin metal film) with inherent PTC characteristics. But these RAYCHEM ones are essentially the same exact technology used in self-resetting PTC polymer fuses (“polyfuses”): a plastic with a high coefficient of thermal expansion, into which conductive particles are mixed. It’s designed so that when cold, the plastic shrinks and the conductive particles come into contact with each other. The current flow this affords causes heating. As the plastic expands, the conductive particles come into less and less contact with each other, increasing the electrical resistance and reducing current flow. So at some temperature it reaches a steady state.
@@tookitogo I find this the epitome of heat tracing because they're the best attempt to save energy and not needlessly over heat. 👍
“What are ‘em?”- the manliest of Scotts
5:32 "You put it over the connection you just made..."
Actually, I forgot to put it on at all and now I need to desolder the joint and do it again because the heatshink doesn't fit over the connectors
Then the wire transfers enough heat to the heatshrink so it shrinks in the wrong place and can't be pushed over the joint any more, so redo from start...
Sometimes I still have dreams about the larger wire harnesses....
@@andreasu.3546with a small break to have a cry. There's a reason I've mostly gone to Deutsch or jiffy connectors
every. time.
I once did some work with Mattel engineers. They were some of the most creative people I've ever met - so clever at figuring out ways to do things that seemed quasi magical with super cheap existing materials/components
People in the space age: "It either kills you or gives you super powers. I'm willing to try my luck!"
"More vacuum cleaners". When cleaning my grandma's house after she passed, we kept finding rolls of toilet paper and mega-size rolls of kitchen-paper tissues. All closed and without use of course. It was a paper roll cornucopia. They were everywhere.
LOL. My dad's storage supply of toilet paper made it to the car trunk when storage space ran out in the garage. Mom still can't get over the idea of buying more of anything that is needed in a week - a contentious argument of bulk quantity (savings) over "that's too much", LOL.
See, this kind of thing is why I love this channel. Sure, the usual space content is all good... but it's these "I found something weird and cool and got distracted by it" videos that provide an unexpected bonus to my day.
The 60s. What a time to be alive.
Indeed. I was there.
Completely off topic of the main video, if that vacuum that's a cylinder with a hose on it still works (or you can get it to work) is freaking AWESOME TO USE! And they last seemingly forever.
And you can plug the hose onto the other end to use as an air pump!
... it qualifies for a video..
As a kid..
It's a jet engine 😻
You could even see sparks from the brushes on the air outlet.
Back to the future... today..
Remember to replace the cable with 3 core because of rubber deterioration and it needs an earth.
Check for Asbestos etc...
Exactly. That's why people kept dead vacuums. You'd always hope to repair them, because the new one was never as good. I got my first Electrolux cannister vac by repairing an older one for a lady in our apartment complex. She gave me the new one as payment. I kept it running for over 20 years, then it needed rewinding and I was too busy to get to it, so I picked up a Hoover upright (from the 60s) and hoped to get back to that Electrolux when time allowed.
Sometime between the second and third move it got lost. Probably thrown away, though to be honest I miss that vacuum today.
I feel like this video disproves that notion.
She could have had a thing for vacuums?
”Nothing sucks like Electrolux”
True advertisement of the Swedish vacuum cleaners from the 1960's.
And ”It was entirely intended as a double entendre. You know, make ’em smile...”
This is supposed to have resulted in a significant number of visits to A&E - a common explanation being: "I was vacuuming the stairs in my dressing gown when it fell open"!!!
It was 'Nothing sucks like an Electrolux' and was from a UK campaign in the 70s - confirmed by the Electrolux Group website.
They missed a pun there. They should've spelt sucks as sux.
@@simontay4851 In the 1960's readers were perfectly capable of detecting the joke without resorting to blatantly obvious pandering and misspelling. The joke is already about as subtle as a brick.
Not just a double but a triple entendre is one considers the American colloquialism. ;-)
Sorry to hear about your Mother-In-Law, Scott. I've had two aunts die in the last two years and I've been executor for both of them. Currently eight months into clearing the second one's house and only just beginning to see light at the end of the tunnel, so I feel for you and know exactly what you're dealing with. And yeah, vacuum cleaners...🙄
Yeah, I remember the Raychem infrared heat gun I used to use when I was at McDonald’s Douglas, while building wire harnesses
McDonald's Douglas... I just got this vivid image of Ronald... in full costume.. making the Apollo wiring harness. 🤡
It was purchased by Boeing, that's not your imagination@@lancelotlake7609
They can keep the fries warm, too.
@@lancelotlake7609 it is actually McDonnell Douglas voice to text doesn’t work that well
I'm picturing Ronald with his son Douglas@@lancelotlake7609
Just watch, there turns out to be a collector market for vintage Electrolux units and you hit the big one with this load.
I worked in a factory using this process to harden polyethylen pipes for salt water or other strong chemicals. They call the material PEX, for Poly Ethylen Crossed because of the molecule cross links. Yes, they use radiation to create those cross links but can also use slow cooling to achieve similar result
Oh... so THAT'S what PEX means!
I see it all the time on the recycling label.
Pex is very common now for home plumbing
A similar process is using an additive like peroxide to rotational moulding powders. Used in plastic kayaks etc. In this form its called XPE or XLPE.
I had one of those and loved it! Never got burnt, or at least not more than once. I never had problems cycling the creatures between their two states. You also could heat up two or more creatures and put them in the compactor together to make bigger multi colored blocks.
😂 I see, Scott inadvertently found the mimic, hiding in the closet at the end. 😂😂
Electrolux vacuum cleaners are an example of really good industrial design, I love that 50s/60s machine look and the logo.
Was just buying a vacuum cleaner this week, recalling that type - I can't see how that was convenient.
Somebody's gonna be all over those vacuums!
Those bottles are maybe the coolest thing I've ever seen.
I had one of these. Squishing them back down into the same block without gaps as when they were fresh was tricky. If you left the softened figure in the chamber too long, it would scorch...and that charred section of plastic was charred forever more. Oh well. Also, it was really easy to melt those tweezers on the plate.
I'm a mid-60s kid. In the late Apollo era, I remember my mom heating up the Tang bottle to make the command module. Wish I still had it! ....PS: Can you imagine a company trying that now? Putting a plastic container in an oven?? I grew up with some arguably unsafe toys!!! Loved them!! Even the wind-up robot with the spark wheel in its chest. Mix that with a gas stove leak.....
I was killed by a Lawn Dart.
Almost all my toy cars, trucks, ray gun, etc. had a spark machine built in and some could sure spay them sparks all over and they were made of metal. But those Super balls though, could really fly!
@@tracyrreedSorry😢!
I drove Tang until the late 1970’s…..so goood!!!!!
@@tracyrreedGlad you recovered!
Thank you, Scott, for the memory. My brother and I had one of these (b. 1961). All the best. Fly safe.
I remember ages ago getting some D&D miniatures sent by mail because of Wizards Dungeon Master Rewards Program, and they were all squeezed because bad packaging and I just discovered by luck that if you dump them on a cup with some boiling water they would stand up and recover the original intended molded form, not the same materials but the same principle it seems.
I was expecting something involving radioactivity, but this is pretty mind-blowing as well.
Don't throw these away, someone will pay big bucks for these.
There is a 100% chance this is going into his personal collection.
Na. Bet he won'sell that. But expect his video output to drip, because he is doing 'science' for some time.
We used to make bag tags out of chip packets before they changed them. You got the chip bag and put it in the oven and it shrinks down and you put a keyring through a hole in the corner and put it on your bag. I had dozens of them.
remember doing this with bags of skittles as a child... believe I attempted(and failed)about 10 years later to a very underwhelmed audience.. Havnt tried it since and always wondered if I had messed up or if the packaging had changed
I can’t imagine the flimsy bags of my childhood doing anything but melting or burning to a crisp. What year was this? Sounds fun though.
I can’t imagine the flimsy bags of my childhood doing anything but melting or burning to a crisp. What year was this? Sounds fun though.
@@KraftyKreator We would go to the extent of opening the bags as carefully as possible so that we would be the most perfect shrinky. There was a huge uproar from all the kids here in Australia when they announced they were making the change because we wouldn't be able to make the shrinkies any more.
As a retired electrical engineer who spent most of his career at a nuclear power plant, we used RayChem sleeves consistently for electrical connections, especially on safety related equipment. I never knew that it was associated with a toy. Thanks again for another excellent video!
The strange change machine was my favorite toy as a little kid. Now I crave Tang. Brave heart with the house processing.
put all those vacuum cleaners in series and create your own vacuum closet 😂
There's a video on RUclips by Andrew Seltzman where he sends a heavily shielded GoPro through an industrial electron beam irradiator that is used for making plastics like this. The title is " GoPro Ride Through an Electron Beam Irradiator at Full Beam Power (GOPR0016trim)" and it's rather frightening.
That's ok. Just make sure Drake Anthony never gets one. 🤣🤣
Watching the cart slowly approaching a veil of blue ionized air formed from the electron beam is this perfect mix of awesome and ABSOLUTELY TERRIFYING.
Seeing the pixels in the camera being affected by stray electrons as it approaches the beam and then the dosimeter going off scale and dieing made me smile.
Someone made the comment "worst Disney ride ever". :-)
I find it kinda strange that RUclips recommended me these electron beam videos just a few days ago.
@benjaminhanke79 it's spooky I watched that video last night!
Cool toy! But… my dad was an Electrolux salesman my whole childhood. I’ve used all of those, and worked on them too. The one on top of the first pile (red badge on the side) is 70ish-90ish years old! Love the vids, sir. You’re must-see viewing for me.
I too had one of these as a child, and it worked exactly as intended. I played with it a lot, and the heating coil eventually burned out. The tech involved completely perplexed me at the time. Thanks for explaining it so clearly.
cool video, i did my phd work with shape memory polymers. they basically function by exploiting phase transitions in the material, such as the glass transition temperature. that should ping some regular scott manley viewers to make the other space connection - the o-ring failure on the Challenger. Feynman actually demonstrates a step analogous to the smashing of the toy in his famous televised appearance when he put the o-ring material in cold water, clamps it, and shows that it stays (for a bit) in the clamped shape.
6:56 I _KNEW_ there had to be some sort of irradiation involved!
Man, the 60's were the best!
Sorry to hear about you mother-in-law. My condolences.
Good on ya taking care of family stuff, and making the best of it.
Now I see why you've achieved a great deal.
I hate moving too, but you've taken the art of avoidance to new levels!
Great job. I'll have to remember your techniques.
I had a strange change machine when I was a kid. I felt guilty when the guy didn't completely unfold.
This is the same process used to produce PEX-c piping (PEX-a is produced using peroxide to induce crosslinking and is softer and more flexible than PEX-c) as well as XLPE wire insulation. The memory effect is important in the systems that use cold expansion fittings (eg, Uponor/Wirsbo), and is why plumbers can sometimes stop leaks solely by heating the connection for a few seconds with a torch or heat gun - the compression force of the pipe and the ring of PEX trying to return to its unexpanded size is increased by the heating.
Given the popularity of PEX piping, a lot of us depend upon this very technology every day without realizing it.
I had one of the Strange Change Machines. It was one of the few toys I still remember from 50 years ago. It was very cool.
My cat and I enjoyed your video. I enjoyed you talking and my cat enjoyed you talking with your hand!🐱
Great video! I watched it whilst using a propane torch to shrink about 10m of heat shrink tubing over industrial elecrical connections. I was initially yelling at my phone to tell you that heat shrink is a shape memory polymer from years ago! But you finally mentioned raychem and their products! I can breathe again 😂😂
Ten meters ?
Having that box adds a lot of value to somebody who collects toys... and that collection of vintage vacuum cleaners! Chef's kiss!
Good Lord! I had completely forgotten about that toy. I had one as a kid too. I remember that thing smelling pretty bad as it heated up probably from burning off the POLs used in stamping out the metal parts. It's a miracle I don't have cancer.
Like most kids, I lost interest in it after a while and it languished in my toy bin. Fortunately, I never burned myself with it, nor did I get impaled by any Jarts, get "fragged" by plastic shrapnel from a set of "Clackers", or become a projectile while laying on the platform in the rear window well of the family sedan on long road trips. In certain respects, the 1960s and 1970s were far more innocent and at the same time far more dangerous than today.
I find it absolutely staggering that these original polymer figures still work after 50+ years😮
I have seen many much newer plastic parts just fail from aging, or from their softeners condensation out. Thanks a lot for sharing, great story 👍
Okay... Now I have to get all the coffee spray out of my keyboard....
Thanks Scott, I love you!
Mr. Manley-
As others have already commented, thank you for your "Strange Change" toy report. It triggered long dormant, 55 year old memories from my 1960s childhood.
Raychem probably used high energy X-Rays to crosslink. When I was a service engineer for high vacuum and lab equipment I serviced a vacuum system used for a high energy X-Ray machine to crosslink a continuous sheet of synthetic rubber passing through an aperture. This was in a special room with seriously thick concrete walls which was eerie to be inside working on the equipment. The tech told be if the X-Ray was turned on I would get a fatal dose of radiation...cool!
I HAD ONE!!
It was fun… for about a week
I am sorry to hear of your loss. Thank you for taking time to share this really cool find with us. *starts hunting yard sales for old Tang bottles*
I love the mental picture of you starting to clean out this house but then just getting obsessed with this 60's fire hazard. 🤣
Thanks Scott, this one had all the right elements to speak to me like no previous Scott Manley video has before. Came for the radiation teaser, expected a proto-luminescent technology or something. I was AMAZED and THRILLED that it was actually the surprise Christmas gift that my sister and I had a lot of fun "playing" with when we were little. I say play, but mostly I remember just trying to get what the point of it was as a toy for us kids to play with more than once or twice for the novelty. Aside from the obvious transformation trick. Like, there just HAD to be more to it than that, over and over. But nope!
So in our waning interest, my attention turned to wondering how it worked - we were just old enough to even think about that kind of thing. I NEVER forgot that toy, but totally forgot its name. So thank you for telling me what it was called!
After a few sessions, I managed to burn myself on it. As I recall it was the metal vice jaw, which must have absorbed enough heat of the plastic as it cooled into a block. That plastic slide cover wasn't foolproof, and I was probably impatient to take it out of the vise. But by standards of the time, it was clearly safe enough for unsupervised 7 year olds. Mom told me it was a first degree burn, and then I knew what a burn felt like. I don't think we ever played with that toy again.
We bugged our mom for Tang too. But quickly lost interest in it once she brought some home, it just didn't taste that good. I was gaga for all the Apollo Moon landing freebies and toys, but never knew about the shape change Tang bottle - dang!
I loved your ending too, well played. Oh, and welcome to Boston. At least we're not getting floods here. Sorry about your mother in law, and the house clearing task. But I really appreciate your sharing this toy. It's wonderful that it still works.
Clicked for the Strange Change Toy, stayed for the jump-scare 👍
Even without irradiation, many plastics will show shape memory if deformed hot and cooled in the new shape. Take a normal soda bottle and hit it with a heat gun and it will shrink because they are blow molded from cast pieces that have the threaded part already formed.
Had one of these too. That toy has crossed my mind a number of times and couldn't recall what it was called. Thanks for the memory 8)
Thank you Scott Manley for posting :)
LOVED the "Signal Lost" ending!
Thanks, Scott, for the blast from the past. I had one of those and played with it for hours. My friends loved it too. That, the Thing Maker, and the Easy Bake Oven were from a time when kids could actually play with dangerously hot toys- and learn the hard way...
My mind is completely blown!
And those electrolux vacuums should be worth some money. Those things were awesome vacuums.
Condolences Scott
Yes! I had one of these! I begged my parents to get me one for Christmas. I think my mom had reservations about it but I got one and just wore it out.
OMG I had one of those back in the 1960s which I got for Christmas. It was one of my favorite toys. The heating surface got hot enough to cook on! I used to crush stuff in the compression chamber.
I never got my favorite creature, the big eyed alien with membrane wings
Really cool. Thank you Scott for finding this. Amazing.
Brings back so many memories!!! Spent a lot of time playing with this and Creepy Crawlers!!
There’s another Raychem product that uses memory: the “Tinel Lock” system for securing cable shielding onto connectors. It uses a hooked ring of nitinol metal which is loosely snapped over the shielding mesh. Then a resistance soldering unit is used to pass a large current through it, causing it to get very hot. The ring’s memory then causes it to shrink, firmly clamping the shield to the connector.
I’d love to try them for fun, but they’re insanely expensive. They’re rarely used outside of the military.
(Tinel is Raychem’s trademark for nitinol alloys.)
We need to bring back the heard thinning toys from the 60's . Back then surviving your childhood was something you could be proud of.
I really love when algorithms deliver proper results and content… A few hours ago I was reading about Shape-memory alloy, NASA, clips and here I am, after watching the Tenacity video you made. Thank you for your work!
I love your de-constructed no frills camera in hand type of videos. Don't ever be afraid to talk about your other interests and hobbies!
OMG I want one!
Thanks for taking us on this journey, Scott. That was truly fascinating!
This was such a cool video! Thanks so much for sharing, Scott. You honestly remind me of my Dad. This is the exact type of thing he'd find interesting. Definitely going to send him this and ask if he remembers any cool toys from his childhood. Hope you have a wonderful day, Dude!
I had this toy growing up in the 90s. One of my foster parent's grandmother had it and gave it to me. I loved it!!
I had one of those toys! I also had Mattel's Creepy Crawlers which made bugs out of plastigoop in a Mattel Thing maker.
The Thingmaker was a heating element that got hot enough for water droplets to to dance around on. You had flat metal molds with several bugs per mold. Plastigoop came in lots of colors. You would fill the mold with Plastigoop and place it on the heated Thing maker tray. The Plastigoop would change to a deeper color as it cooked. When it was done, you placed the mold into a dish of water to cool it down. Then you would remove the wiggly jiggly bugs from the mold. Mattel had to discontinue their various Thing maker lines because of burns as well. But they continued to sell the Plastigoop to support the Thing makers already sold.
We had one in box at our Nan & Grandad's house, belonged to our uncle- used to play with them in the late 80's. So great to see this after so many years!
Fascinating - thanks, Scott!
Thanks. I had totally forgotten about this toy. None of us had one, but i now remember the commercials.
I recall hearing about creating crosslinked rubber sheets for the tire industry using electron beams. It limits rubber fluidity and movement during vulcanization.
I still have mine.I got it for Christmas as a kid.Hours of fun and it still works.Thanks for sharing.
One of your all-time best videos, love it
This is so very interesting, that back in the 1960s, such technology existed. Great video Scott, fascinating subject.
Thanks Scott! I remember playing with that when I was a kid.
Fascinating episode, Scott!
This was easily as interesting as one of your normal space tech videos. Thanks for sharing.
I found my dads at my grandmothers house in the 80s. I had so much fun with it.
Played with one of these at a friends for hours as a kid.
What a welcome reminder.
Cool trip down memory lane! I had the Strange Change Machine, and worked very well “back in the day”. I always wondered how it was able to do that.