As a child growing up in northern Ontario Canada, there were not many channels to watch. I distinctly remember watching this and thoroughly enjoyed it enough that it ended up, pushing me towards becoming an electrician. Still enjoy re-watching these episodes.
No way, that is just a bias due to it being what you are used to. Had you had been raised with bright white sparkling looking Christmas tree lights and then 40 years later dull yellow lights were introduced you'd be thinking they looked dull and boring. Not at all representing the spirit of Christmas. I don't like those unreliable things at all, where 1 bump destroys the whole string (even though they were designed to basically short a failed lamp keeping the circuit going but only brighter). No such issue with LEDS.
@@jtveg Modern LED strings tend to be overrun, which causes them to (shock, horror) fail in a short amount of time. Next time you have a failed LED "bulb" open it up and you'll find one or more of the individual LEDs with a black spot in it. That's the failed one. Put a blob of solder over it to short across it and the bulb will starting working again, but even brighter and with an even shorter remaining life. The electric light bulb industry just does not want you to stop buying light bulbs. It's possible to put in more LEDs and run them at lower current individually for the same light output. Google Dubai lamps, and then go and watch Big Clive's investigation of them (and subsequent experiments on how to make the light bulbs sold almost everywhere else last much longer). Perhaps it's hard to see how they could have made the CFL units actually last the 8000 hours they promised, so maybe they did their best there (only maybe, as I've become rather cynical about the whole thing) but the current short life span of the LED light bulbs is nothing short of money grubbing manipulation of the market. As you surmise, LED light bulbs should last almost forever, but in actual fact most tend to last less than their incandescent counterparts even if they do use less energy while doing so. The best house lighting I've found is the flat panel rings used in oyster lights. The LEDs tend to not be overrun, so they simply don't fail. The difference is that they are made by electronics manufacturers who specialise in putting components onto circuit boards, rather than "light bulb" manufacturers like Osram, Phillips etc.
Agree, and was about to say the same. This series benefits immensely from having been shot on 16mm, and nowhere more obvious than this episode. Not even modern digital film cameras are able to capture the colour detail in those bright lights.
In my opinion Tim should make copies from these originals again in 16mm as a back up. Film last much longer than any digital stuff. PROVEN! Best would be a copy on polyester basis film which is today normally used in copy works. Unfortunately these copy works are getting fewer. (I can recommend ANDEC in Berlin) Kodak made just ~5 (?) years ago a Dia-Film the Ektachrome 100ASA in E6 process. I hate that they still used a tri-acetate basis for this (lasts only 150 years due to the vinegear syndrome). THE MAIN REASON SOMEONE IS FILMING TODAY is that it is LASTING. I film 16mm and 8 & Super 8mm at minimum every 2 years 2 reels (100ft each)
There's something magical about Secret Life of Machines too Tim. It's why the show is still so fun to watch as well as the new content you've created. This quasi intimate relationship between two strangers, the watcher and watched fascinates me. It's a connection that can last a lifetime.
Loved these as a kid, still re-watching them today, but I have a new respect and admiration for the phrase "Put that bloody penguin out." Thank you Tim.
Hello Tim. One very funny story about sodium lighting 💡💡 Back in the late 50,s/early 60,s my grandmother and her two friends brought me to the seaside. On returning home late and coming out of the railway station which had sodium lighting, one of my grandmothers friends said "oh Mrs Kelly you look very pale/greenish" instantly my grandmother felt faint and some of the station staff were bringing her glasses of water. My grandmother mentioned to her two friends that they also look very pale, hence all three were sitting down feeling faint. Another station chap arrived to see the commotion of these three old ladies in a distressed state. Enquiring what happened and consequently being told that they were very pale, he chuckled and said, *"its the lights making you look pale"* All three had a miraculous recovery with lots of laughter. Very memorable times.
When I was 16 or so, I removed carbons from old-fashioned, basic carbon-zinc D cells (hard to find the original, non-"alkaline" cells these days!) and, placing my mother's electric iron in series, I made my first carbon arc lamp. At first I made very sketchy smoked glass lenses, but after a year or two I bought welder's goggles. I never got around to making a carbon feeding mechanism, tho I fooled around with those and with a gas jet / lime-light many times as a young adult.
My mother's two brothers tried this same stunt back in the thirties but they forgot the electric iron. My grandfather had a few things to say about all the electricity in the house going out!
The 'Lighting Industry Presentation' at around 17.50 using an overhead projector is quietly one of the most amazing moments in the film. Such a suddenly obsolete and forgotten proto-powerpoint technology! At the same time, the crane shot at The End is one of the greatest shots ever broadcast.
I have a nice memory about this episode, I was on my 4th year of high school (1995), the class vas electronics, and for a reason that I dont recall, the professor asked if anyone knew how halogen lamps works, and I answered telling what I saw in this episode a few years before, he was surprised and asked my how I knew this! I answered that I saw in in TV on a show called "the secret life of machines". Amazing episode!
This was my absolute favorite episode as a kid. The section showing how Geissler tubes work and how the different phosphors combine to convert the UV of the mercury discharge to visible light was so amazing to me. Incidentally, Alec who has a channel on here called Technology Connections and who I think of as carrying on the torch of exactly the kind of technology explanation videos people like Tim pioneered in this series decades ago, has just put out a fantastic in-depth video on gas lantern mantles and how they work that's definitely worth a watch. I do wish someone would do a video on candoluminescence specifically though, it's quite a strange and nonintuitive mechanism of light production that's poorly explained in the literature.
I enjoy Technology Connections as well. Alec does an excellent job creating thoughtful and well researched video presentations about so many of the different technological components that are so ubiquitous in our daily lives. The average person may remain uncurious about them, but for those lucky enough to find his channel, they are rewarded with thoroughly entertaining and wryly humorous explanations.
I enjoy Technology Connections as well. Alec does an excellent job creating thoughtful and well researched video presentations about so many of the different technological components that are so ubiquitous in our daily lives. The average person may remain uncurious about them, but for those lucky enough to find his channel, they are rewarded with thoroughly entertaining and wryly humorous explanations.
I like them all, as it gives a sort of summation of the whole of the history of inventions and inventing, that no one man just suddenly "invents" a complete device. the entire world plays a part in most evreything.
You might be interested to know that there was an agreement called the Phoebus cartel stretching way back among tungsten light makers to limit the life of their bulbs. A tungsten light could last forever but they were engineered to fail. This, of course, ensured an ongoing business for bulb makers. Today that seems to be a thing of the past with LEDs, or it did until LED light makers began reducing the number of LED chips in bulbs and driving the LEDs harder. This produces excess heat in the chips and their nearby electronic controls, shortening their life. It is possible to alter LED bulbs if you are handy with a soldering iron and can change out a capacitor. The "Big Clive" RUclips channel goes into some detail about this. I love how each episode has a fun ending.
I recall my parents telling me how absurd this got - you'd screw in a fresh bulb and it would ping out after maybe half an hour. Meanwhile: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centennial_Light#:~:text=The%20Centennial%20Light%20is%20the,the%20Livermore%2DPleasanton%20Fire%20Department. My father during the 1960's was a senior electrical contractor working for Siemens. He related to me a tour of the Ford Dagenham site. The two "rooms" of greatest interest contained in one; the motors of competitor cars and in the other, the bodies. The motors were ran indefinitely until destruction, and the bodies were subjected to a serious pounding by hydraulic rams until they fell apart. Although they obviously learned a lot about the relative dynamics and material wear, what purpose did they intend? To make theirs about the same. A properly maintained "Farina" Morris Oxford or Austin Cambridge would easily do 250,000 miles if properly maintained - nah; that's no good if you're trying to sell stuff. 100,000 miles then break - that was the new target. The process of galvanization has been known since the 17th Century, yet it took until the 1990's to transfer to automobile construction. Detroit planned a 5 year lifespan, and anyone who lived through the 70's and 80's knew the rot-boxes produced. Hell, 30 years ago as a kid I had a thriving business filing out and filling holes in peoples cars. This inescapable ubiquity of planned obsolescence perhaps hits the new householder more than anyone. You buy a washing machine, a dryer machine, a dishwasher, a fridge, a freezer and they all suddenly screw-up shortly following their warranty period, which is usually within a 6 month period of each other. Nice... Once upon a time, you could almost completely dismantle a Morris Minor with a half-inch spanner and a few expletives. It now costs a VW service centre upwards of $1/2million dollars to properly equip. These cars are not designed to be reliable; that wouldn't make money. This is the true resistance against electric cars - there is very little to go wrong. Unless you _make_ them go wrong.
It's really a shame about that continuing with LEDs, it's not even like the LED chips themselves contribute much to the expense of the bulb. Especially considering all the other electronics that are in each bulb, which just get thrown in the bin as well, just because one of the LED chips burns out.
The part with the prism and the spectrums reminds me of high school, when we duplicated the Michelson-Morley experiments, and we shot a laser beam all over the school hallways! We figured it was about 1.2 km long, back to the laser!
The one you did with refrigeration was really good and as things are old do come back now everybody is using ammonia, refrigeration, and CO2 and natural refrigerant so how things changed him thank you very much for putting all this back on it’s great
i could sit and watch this channel for hours and hours. i love the style and the music. thank you for posting all these. the world is a better place for having it! :D
I vividly remember watching this episode as a kid. Making the wire glow with an old arc welder was brilliant, my Dad was a welder at the time and I remember him frantically flapping his arm to stop the welding rod from sticking as he was trying to strike an arc, the opposite of what you two were doing here : )
I have the whole series on DVD. Unfortunately, the kids think it's boring, and go back to playing on the 'smart' phones, and don't realize where theat phone has its roots.
Nice one Tim! One of my favourites. It'll go just right with me crunchy nuts! Edit: You're right about the light from a gas mantle. The process of installing one as it burns away leaving a gossamer lattice of ash that transforms the gas flame into a light that must've seemed almost magical to the early adopters! It's invariably stormy weather that causes a power cut and I also use a camping Gaz light so i associate that lemon/lime hued light & the gentle roar of the gas jets with being safe & cosy whilst the storm rages outside the kitchen window or outside the tent.
I wonder what health risks were associated with the ash from gas mantles, they contained radioactive Thorium to produce the bright light. I have a lot of the radioactive mantles, interesting items to place near a Geiger counter to demonstrate the radioactivity.
@@rustymotor The factory girls were at risk, certainly. I did borrow a Geiger Muller tube and heard the counts from a couple of mantles that the owner used as a control/reference. I then tested some Uranium glass i picked up at the charity shop, and merely got background plus 50%. Deemed that 'safe'!
I spent a part of my childhood with oil lamps with the same mantle that was on the gas lamps in this program, they gave a surprisingly decent amount of light.
Speaking of the Eye And The Brain, I highly recommend the book, Proust Was A Neuroscientist. It showcases examples of various artists in print and painting who were actually exhibiting what science discovered decades later about the process of vision and comprehension. For instance, there are more neurons going back to the eye from the brain than from the eye to the brain. Examples from painters and writers like Cezanne, George Eliot, Proust and Gertrude Stein display their intrinsic understanding of the chemical processes of comprehension. A very fascinating book. We do fill in the blanks.
“Daylight is much brighter than most artificial light” Me watching this video in the dark and getting blinded when he opens the door: you’re telling me man.
Such a great find...this gives me a chance to thank Tim for the original episodes of The Secret Life of Machines. I watched and appreciated all of them in the early 90s. Now with the remasters it gives me a second chance to enjoy them all over again and also the new Secret Life of Components. Thanks again Tim for your great work!
I'm very glad that your house did not catch on fire, that kitchen looks very cosy. I've experience gas lighting when I was young at a relative's chalet that did not have electricity, they also had a gas powered refrigerator. I was amazed by both technology. CFL do last much longer than incandescent lights unless they're in emplacement like recessed ceiling lights where the heat is trapped and damaged the electronics. I bought CFL years ago before LED were popular and affordable and I've yet to change one. The manufacturers are at fault for not divulging that some emplacements are inadvisable.
"It's nice when there are no men about isn't it!" Speaking as a man, I agree 100% Thank you Tim. Another informative, thought-provoking thoroughly charming float downstream. BRAVO and best wishes from a fellow maker of 'things' 🏆🇬🇧
Heat from tungsten lamps used in traffic lights used to keep the snow melted off the lighting assembly, when new LEDs bulbs where used at first the signs used to clog up with snow until they fitted heaters with temperature sensors in.
on a similar note i have heard the more modern diesel warships couldn;t operate in the far north as the decks will ice up and topple, steam ships could use steam hoses to blow offf the ice and operate further North. And coal/ town gass was so oily it sealed its own leaks, when north sea oil gass came along it dried out all the joints and leaked.
That is not true. One - due to protective visors on top of the lights, for traffic lights to be occluded by snow, wind would have to blow that snow directly into the light for an extended period of time. We call such an event a blizzard. AKA that time when you shouldn't be on the road. Unless you want to die. Snow that does gather that way will melt as long as the traffic light remains operational. Because... Two - LED lights DO produce heat. They just tend not to produce it in the IR part of the spectrum like incandescent bulbs do. In fact, per watt, LEDs produce far more heat than incandescents - up to 85-90% of energy used by an LED gets converted to heat, whereas an incandescent bulb will convert only about 10-15% of the energy used into heat. But it will shunt as much as 80-85% of energy into invisible IR. I.e. A 100 W incandescent bulb will produce about 1600 lumens of light and some 10-15 W will be wasted as heat. For the same amount of light one would need an LED of about 20 W, which would be wasting about 17-18 W as heat - more than the equivalent incandescent bulb. The reason incandescent bulbs are much hotter is all that IR light that gets wasted BUT which still heats up the surrounding air as it radiates from the bulb. But back to snow not melting... 1 Watt = 859.85 Calories per hour. 1 Calorie is the amount of heat needed to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water to 1° Celsius - AKA above the melting point. A traffic light using 8-15 Watts will waste 7-13 Watts as heat, AKA it will melt some 6-11 kilograms of ice per hour of operation. That would be a block of ice 10 centimeters long, 10 centimeters wide - and 60 to 110 centimeters high. Three - but people are stupid. So, there ARE such things as LED traffic lights with heaters built in (because stupid people demanded them and we all know that stupid customers are the best buyers of unnecessary stuff) - but practically no one uses them. Cause it took years for them to be created, as no one actually needed a more expensive, energy wasting LED traffic light. Engineers designing LED traffic lights being good at math and stuff, unlike people worrying about snow not melting when heated - they never thought to design a version for morons. Silly engineers. In the mean time, all those municipalities that did switch to LED traffic lights figured out that they don't need heating their LED lights to melt the snow - and they never needed to replace the LEDs they got the first time. Cause unlike incandescent bulbs - LEDs last a LOT longer. And use far less energy.
@@d3nza482 I agree with you that LED lights do produce some heat. Measurement of the lumens of *visible* light produced per watt of power consumed will show that LED lights are much more efficient than incandescent lights. I do not think it reasonable to include the infrared radiation produced by incandescent light bulbs as "light" in your calculations because it is invisible to the human eye and thus of no use to humans as light. This fact tilts the efficiency contest much in favour of the LEDs. There is also a significant error in your calculations of how much ice can be melted per hour by the 7 to 13 watts of waste heat you assume are created by an LED traffic light. You state that "1 Calorie is the amount of heat needed to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water to 1 degree Celsius - AKA above the melting point." This is not a correct statement. A correct statement would be: "One calorie is the amount of heat that needs to be added to or removed from 1 gram of liquid water to increase or decrease the temperature of the water by 1 degree Celsius provided that no phase change of any of the water is taking place." This quantity is called the "specific heat" of water. Snow is frozen water, basically particles of ice. To melt 1 gram of water ice at a temperature of 0 degrees Celsius to 1 gram of liquid water at 0 degrees Celsius requires the adding of 80 calories of heat to the water. This quantity is known as the "latent heat of fusion". During the melting transformation the temperature of the water will remain at 0 degrees Celsius. The process is reversible. Freezing liquid water into ice requires the removal of 80 calories of heat per gram from the water. This quantity is known as the "latent heat of solidification." Again, the temperature of the water remains at 0 degrees Celsius during the transformation from liquid water to ice. The heat added to or removed from the water is called "latent heat" because it does not result in a temperature change of the water. Instead, the heat causes a "phase change", which is a physicist's way of saying the water is either melting, freezing, vaporising, or condensing. The error in your calculation is that you have not allowed for the latent heat of fusion of water, thus your calculations are in error by a factor of 80. Seven to 13 watts of heat over 1 hour represent 6,018.95 to 11,178.05 calories of heat which will be capable of melting 75.24 to 139.72 grams of water ice per hour if 100% of the waste heat is added to the ice. Most traffic lights have 3 illuminated areas (red, green, yellow) which are illuminated only one at a time. The waste heat is shared among these 3 areas with typically the yellow getting the smallest share because it is only illuminated for a brief period in each light cycle. This means that the yellow light will have only a small fraction of the ice melting power available to it and will be at greatest risk of being obscured by snow. The bottom line is that the problem of traffic lights being obscured by snow is a very real problem and must be taken care of appropriately. I am a Canadian living in the land of ice and snow so I have seen early LED traffic lights obscured by snow before the problem was properly addressed. Incidentally, the latent heat condition also occurs when liquid water is boiled. To boil 1 gram of liquid water into steam 540 calories of heat must be added to the water. This quantity is known as the "latent heat of vaporisation". To condense 1 gram of steam to liquid water 540 calories of heat must be removed from the steam. This quantity is known as the "latent heat of condensation". In both cases the temperature of the water/steam will remain at 100 degrees Celsius as the phase change takes place ASSUMING the pressure is maintained at 1 atmosphere which is 14.7 pounds per square inch or 101.325 kilopascals or 760 mm of Mercury in a barometer. The boiling and condensing temperatures of water are strongly influenced by the pressure applied to it. If the pressure is higher or lower than 1 atmosphere the water will still boil or condense and require 540 calories per gram to do so. Assuming the pressure is steady, the temperature will not change as the process takes place, but the temperature will be different from 100 degrees Celsius. Also incidentally, once water undergoes a phase change to ice or steam its specific heat changes. The specific heat of ice is about 0.5 calories per gram per degree Celsius. This means that adding or removing 1 calorie of heat from 1 gram of water ice will change its temperature by 2 degrees Celsius. The specific heat of steam is about 0.48 calories per gram per degree Celsius. This means that adding or removing 1 calorie of heat from 1 gram of water steam will change its temperature by 2.083 degrees Celsius.
(Continued Comment) There are also a few other small errors in your work. You properly use capitalisation for the SI (International System of units) unit "degrees Celsius" as this unit is named after a person (Anders Celsius) so it is a "proper name" and thus capitalised. Oddly enough, the SI unit "watt" for power, even though it is named after the person James Watt, is NOT capitalised and should be written as "watt". Only when abbreviated (or used as the first word in a sentence) are the units named after people capitalised so it would be correct to use "W" as the abbreviation for watts. I agree this makes no sense, but this is the way the SI system is defined. Unfortunately you also capitalised the unit "Calorie". This is incorrect. It is true that the unit "Calorie" does exist and it does refer to a quantity of heat but there is a difference between a "calorie" and a "Calorie". The "calorie" is a unit used in physics and thermodynamics and is the amount of heat that will change the temperature of 1 gram of liquid water by 1 degree Celsius. The "Calorie" is a unit used in food science and is the amount heat energy liberated by a food item when tested in a calorimeter. The ratio between the two is a factor of 1000. One Calorie is equal to 1000 calories. For this reason, a Calorie is sometimes called a "kilocalorie" or a "large calorie" to distinguish it from the calories used in physics and thermodynamics. When you look at the label on a food item and it lists the number of Calories in the food it is talking about kilocalories or large calories. Confusing the two units will obviously result in an error in calculations by a factor of 1000! Isn't science wonderful! Just so many subtleties to confuse a person! Unfortunately, it is important to get these details correct or another person reading your work may not understand it properly or it may lead to errors in calculation. d3nza, I would like to congratulate you for attempting to do a mathematical analysis of the ice melting capabilities of the waste heat of LED traffic lights. Not many You-Tubers would have the courage, incentive, and inquisitiveness to do so! It is so nice to see an intelligent comment like yours where you tried to work out the factors of the situation logically to justify your conclusions. This is how science and engineering are done! Unfortunately you got caught by an oddity of the physics of water. It pains me a bit to point out your errors when you have tried very hard to do a proper scientific analysis of the situation, but if we are going to do science here, we need to get it correct. In fact, posing a hypothesis/ conclusion and having others check and/or test your work is how science eventually resolves a clear picture of the truth of a subject. In writing all the stuff above I am NOT trying to ridicule you. I am trying to further your knowledge so that the next time you need to deal with some of the physics of water you will have more understanding and be better prepared to develop the correct calculations. I hope you will keep at it, keep learning, and continue to elevate the level of the RUclips comment discussions. It was my privilege to respond to your comment! Disclaimer: I am not a physicist or a thermodynamicist. My training is as an electronics / electrical engineer. If there is a real physicist or thermodynamicist in the crowd I would appreciate a critique of my work. After all, I have a lifetime of experience in sometimes getting things wrong!
Entertaining and educational. Loved the `cartoon` characters. The painting at 3:17 is titled Greenock Dock by Moonlight by the Victorian artist John Atkinson Grimshaw.
I also was the poor fool who spent a fortune to switch my life over to compact florescent lights only to realize they did NOT deliver their promised life and were not well suited to post life recycling. Was an expensive lesson.
The part about Edison getting models to wear the lights as advertisement reminds me of how my friend Naomi Wu would make wearable LED projects as a form of art.
I loved the series back in the day and enjoy revisiting them now! I reckon you missed a trick by not including your gas lights in the split spectrum test! Thanks for sharing these!
THANKS AGAIN TIM!!! absolutely loving these, as good as any modern diy electronics channel on youtube that tears items down and reverse engineers them!
I hope you are doing well sir, I very much enjoy your videos and I haven’t seen you upload in several months. If you get the time or inkling… We would all enjoy more “secret life of components“… Or pretty much anything you’d like to show us we would enjoy! Your work has guided so many of us and influenced us into our careers and long lifetime of work. Thank you for your time and energy
i really liked all your videos. very informative with all those experiments. with the help of your channel, i managed to watch your backdated videos. :). hope you are well mr tim hunkin. sending regards from malaysia.
The Lenny Henry joke, the flat has centeral heating, a light bulb in the middle of the ceiling. Ladybird simple electronics 1979 had a light falshing robot that I built , mesmerised by the glowing filaments controlled by blue tubes , small lumps in wires and three legged sealed tubes. probably set me on a path. Electromagnetic spectrum. to understand these fundamental principles is a pleasure. The eye and the brain, fascinating, the layers of filtering and re-combination, to give a binary answer to can you spot all the traffic lights in these pictures. Love yuor work.
As you mention, incandescent light bulbs make fantastic and economical low power heaters. I have a number of unheated sheds with a water supply, the pipes freeze in the winter so I drain them, but where the supply comes through the floor before the stopcock cannot be drained, so is prone to freezing, it blows the compression fitting off the plastic pipe if it does. A small insulated box around the stopcock with a 20 W bulb in it stops it freezing, however cold it gets. Cheap to run and extremely effective!
i remember buying some compact flourescent bulbs at grainger in us way back . they were tubular straight not the swirl and when you flipped the switch they took like 1 or 2 seconds to come on. i used them in my apartment in a regular edison base lamp. they did actually last me 20 years using them for about 6 hrs/ day . they were in an open lamp with the base down. the swirly bulbs lasted very poorly but were cheap. the once that lasted 20 yrs cost about 25 dollars each so like 50 bucks in todays money.
@@SkunkMantraTechnoSkunk Or the Osram CFLs (and early Osram Sylvania after the 1994 buyup of GTE's lamp division) when they were USA made. I have some in regular use that are almost 30 years old. Same with the preheat choke ballast CFLs where the lamp is a separate replaceable element. They last ages.
14:00 I’m pretty sure high voltages in a vacuum actually give off xrays and other particles, would be interesting to find out if this experiment and other with normal house supply produce it as well
Love these episodes! I'm an avid fan of neon, proper gas filled neon, It's always nice going to parts of Spain seeing it still used quite a bit over there, LED neon rope never quite has the same look about it :(
I made a spectroscope using a webcam and a refraction grating film. Spectral Workbench is a great free open source software to run. You can see what a light is made of. Great to identify fake Sun lamps and UVC Leds.
Google "i-Phos light Spectrometer" for the kit I built. 3D printed my own stuff and used a mailer tube for the body. Sold as a kit for 85 pounds in the UK, by Chris Wesley. He has a channel on RUclips (Chris Wesley), where he shows how it all works.
The lack of contrived sensationalism and presentation style make this much more informative and easy to absorb than the vast majority of modern TV shows... There are enjoyable contemporary channels as well though, I do like a bit of AvE, Lindybeige, and Edd China too!
Been waiting on this episode :) Speaking about CFL im still useing old trusty Philips SLs And Thosiba Neoballs From the 80s In bedroom and shed, Some of these bulbs have lasted up to 9-10 years before they finally Flicker and go EOL. Tho disadvantages of these old ones they use magnetic ballest so flicker when come on and bit dim for 20 30 seconds. But are trusty outdoor bulbs that last ages if you can get hold of some. Plenty on EBAY still. LEDs have slowly crept up in my house for kitchen and Spotlights due to HALOGEN bulbs are hot and not very good.
At the end you mention about how compact fluorescents didn't live up to their claimed lifespan. I've still got a couple of the original Philips SL Prismatic cfls (the ones that look like they're in a jam jar) and they still work as well as they ever did. The colour is much warmer than more modern ones, but the warm up time of nearly 20 minutes can be annoying!
As a child growing up in northern Ontario Canada, there were not many channels to watch. I distinctly remember watching this and thoroughly enjoyed it enough that it ended up, pushing me towards becoming an electrician. Still enjoy re-watching these episodes.
Still like the warm glow of the incandescent bulb.
Particularly with Christmas lights. Far nicer than the modern led sets
@@nathanlucas6465 Exactly! I'm that one energy wasting guy on my block with gas lanterns on my house!
No way, that is just a bias due to it being what you are used to.
Had you had been raised with bright white sparkling looking Christmas tree lights and then 40 years later dull yellow lights were introduced you'd be thinking they looked dull and boring. Not at all representing the spirit of Christmas.
I don't like those unreliable things at all, where 1 bump destroys the whole string (even though they were designed to basically short a failed lamp keeping the circuit going but only brighter). No such issue with LEDS.
@@jtveg Modern LED strings tend to be overrun, which causes them to (shock, horror) fail in a short amount of time. Next time you have a failed LED "bulb" open it up and you'll find one or more of the individual LEDs with a black spot in it. That's the failed one. Put a blob of solder over it to short across it and the bulb will starting working again, but even brighter and with an even shorter remaining life. The electric light bulb industry just does not want you to stop buying light bulbs.
It's possible to put in more LEDs and run them at lower current individually for the same light output. Google Dubai lamps, and then go and watch Big Clive's investigation of them (and subsequent experiments on how to make the light bulbs sold almost everywhere else last much longer).
Perhaps it's hard to see how they could have made the CFL units actually last the 8000 hours they promised, so maybe they did their best there (only maybe, as I've become rather cynical about the whole thing) but the current short life span of the LED light bulbs is nothing short of money grubbing manipulation of the market. As you surmise, LED light bulbs should last almost forever, but in actual fact most tend to last less than their incandescent counterparts even if they do use less energy while doing so.
The best house lighting I've found is the flat panel rings used in oyster lights. The LEDs tend to not be overrun, so they simply don't fail. The difference is that they are made by electronics manufacturers who specialise in putting components onto circuit boards, rather than "light bulb" manufacturers like Osram, Phillips etc.
@@Chris_the_Muso
Yes, I totally agree and I have also seen the video on the Dubai Lamps on BigClive's channel.
There's something magical about the lighting and the 16mm print which makes these visually interesting. Not to mention the animations.
Agree, and was about to say the same. This series benefits immensely from having been shot on 16mm, and nowhere more obvious than this episode. Not even modern digital film cameras are able to capture the colour detail in those bright lights.
In my opinion Tim should make copies from these originals again in 16mm as a back up.
Film last much longer than any digital stuff. PROVEN!
Best would be a copy on polyester basis film which is today normally used in copy works. Unfortunately these copy works are getting fewer. (I can recommend ANDEC in Berlin)
Kodak made just ~5 (?) years ago a Dia-Film the Ektachrome 100ASA in E6 process.
I hate that they still used a tri-acetate basis for this (lasts only 150 years due to the vinegear syndrome).
THE MAIN REASON SOMEONE IS FILMING TODAY is that it is LASTING.
I film 16mm and 8 & Super 8mm at minimum every 2 years 2 reels (100ft each)
*Put that bloody penguin out!* :))))))))))))) Probably the funniest animated part from the whole series.
2:20 “I’m Trying to go to sleep, *put that bloody penguin out.* ”
😅😅😅😅
RIP Rex, and thank you Tim
Love these remastered episodes, thank you
Tim is a wonderful guy - I remember watching these episodes several decades ago when CRT meant cathode ray tube :-p
I’ve probably said it before but this series made me an engineer!
This man is fearless. Playing with high 5+ kilowatt welding equipment+ molten steel with bare hands.
Dude didn’t turn the welder off when changing to the pencil. Wtf
@punman5392 He's probably a rookie.
Could'nt stop laughing when Rex let go of the 'floating' light bulb. :)
There's something magical about Secret Life of Machines too Tim. It's why the show is still so fun to watch as well as the new content you've created. This quasi intimate relationship between two strangers, the watcher and watched fascinates me. It's a connection that can last a lifetime.
Loved these as a kid, still re-watching them today, but I have a new respect and admiration for the phrase "Put that bloody penguin out." Thank you Tim.
Hello Tim.
One very funny story about sodium lighting 💡💡
Back in the late 50,s/early 60,s my grandmother and her two friends brought me to the seaside. On returning home late and coming out of the railway station which had sodium lighting, one of my grandmothers friends said "oh Mrs Kelly you look very pale/greenish" instantly my grandmother felt faint and some of the station staff were bringing her glasses of water. My grandmother mentioned to her two friends that they also look very pale, hence all three were sitting down feeling faint. Another station chap arrived to see the commotion of these three old ladies in a distressed state. Enquiring what happened and consequently being told that they were very pale, he chuckled and said, *"its the lights making you look pale"* All three had a miraculous recovery with lots of laughter. Very memorable times.
When I was 16 or so, I removed carbons from old-fashioned, basic carbon-zinc D cells (hard to find the original, non-"alkaline" cells these days!) and, placing my mother's electric iron in series, I made my first carbon arc lamp. At first I made very sketchy smoked glass lenses, but after a year or two I bought welder's goggles. I never got around to making a carbon feeding mechanism, tho I fooled around with those and with a gas jet / lime-light many times as a young adult.
My mother's two brothers tried this same stunt back in the thirties but they forgot the electric iron. My grandfather had a few things to say about all the electricity in the house going out!
I believe Panasonic still makes carbon-zinc batteries.
@@tOSdude Yep. Red and white graphics.
Very much amazing. I'm very glad Alec from Technology Connections recommended these to me
Love the Welsh accent on the penguin light holder 😂 reminds my of my grandmother 😂🤣
The 'Lighting Industry Presentation' at around 17.50 using an overhead projector is quietly one of the most amazing moments in the film. Such a suddenly obsolete and forgotten proto-powerpoint technology!
At the same time, the crane shot at The End is one of the greatest shots ever broadcast.
Thank you Tim for spending the time and effort to remaster the episodes and visiting with us at the end of each.
“THE END” was fantastic!! 😊😊
I have a nice memory about this episode, I was on my 4th year of high school (1995), the class vas electronics, and for a reason that I dont recall, the professor asked if anyone knew how halogen lamps works, and I answered telling what I saw in this episode a few years before, he was surprised and asked my how I knew this! I answered that I saw in in TV on a show called "the secret life of machines".
Amazing episode!
This was my absolute favorite episode as a kid. The section showing how Geissler tubes work and how the different phosphors combine to convert the UV of the mercury discharge to visible light was so amazing to me.
Incidentally, Alec who has a channel on here called Technology Connections and who I think of as carrying on the torch of exactly the kind of technology explanation videos people like Tim pioneered in this series decades ago, has just put out a fantastic in-depth video on gas lantern mantles and how they work that's definitely worth a watch. I do wish someone would do a video on candoluminescence specifically though, it's quite a strange and nonintuitive mechanism of light production that's poorly explained in the literature.
I enjoy Technology Connections as well. Alec does an excellent job creating thoughtful and well researched video presentations about so many of the different technological components that are so ubiquitous in our daily lives. The average person may remain uncurious about them, but for those lucky enough to find his channel, they are rewarded with thoroughly entertaining and wryly humorous explanations.
I enjoy Technology Connections as well. Alec does an excellent job creating thoughtful and well researched video presentations about so many of the different technological components that are so ubiquitous in our daily lives. The average person may remain uncurious about them, but for those lucky enough to find his channel, they are rewarded with thoroughly entertaining and wryly humorous explanations.
There were a few more in the 1980's and 1990's. They used to air on ABC Education. Now long gone thanks to funding cuts.
I like them all, as it gives a sort of summation of the whole of the history of inventions and inventing, that no one man just suddenly "invents" a complete device. the entire world plays a part in most evreything.
They are ALL my favourites.
So glad you mentioned Joseph Swan :D
Oh my... The sound of that poor old vacuum pump!
my old (1960's vintage) vaccuum pump sounds identical, and pulls more vaccuum than a modern pump. it's just that modern pumps are a lot quieter. :)
You might be interested to know that there was an agreement called the Phoebus cartel stretching way back among tungsten light makers to limit the life of their bulbs. A tungsten light could last forever but they were engineered to fail. This, of course, ensured an ongoing business for bulb makers.
Today that seems to be a thing of the past with LEDs, or it did until LED light makers began reducing the number of LED chips in bulbs and driving the LEDs harder. This produces excess heat in the chips and their nearby electronic controls, shortening their life. It is possible to alter LED bulbs if you are handy with a soldering iron and can change out a capacitor. The "Big Clive" RUclips channel goes into some detail about this.
I love how each episode has a fun ending.
I recall my parents telling me how absurd this got - you'd screw in a fresh bulb and it would ping out after maybe half an hour.
Meanwhile: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centennial_Light#:~:text=The%20Centennial%20Light%20is%20the,the%20Livermore%2DPleasanton%20Fire%20Department.
My father during the 1960's was a senior electrical contractor working for Siemens. He related to me a tour of the Ford Dagenham site. The two "rooms" of greatest interest contained in one; the motors of competitor cars and in the other, the bodies.
The motors were ran indefinitely until destruction, and the bodies were subjected to a serious pounding by hydraulic rams until they fell apart.
Although they obviously learned a lot about the relative dynamics and material wear, what purpose did they intend? To make theirs about the same.
A properly maintained "Farina" Morris Oxford or Austin Cambridge would easily do 250,000 miles if properly maintained - nah; that's no good if you're trying to sell stuff. 100,000 miles then break - that was the new target.
The process of galvanization has been known since the 17th Century, yet it took until the 1990's to transfer to automobile construction. Detroit planned a 5 year lifespan, and anyone who lived through the 70's and 80's knew the rot-boxes produced. Hell, 30 years ago as a kid I had a thriving business filing out and filling holes in peoples cars.
This inescapable ubiquity of planned obsolescence perhaps hits the new householder more than anyone. You buy a washing machine, a dryer machine, a dishwasher, a fridge, a freezer and they all suddenly screw-up shortly following their warranty period, which is usually within a 6 month period of each other. Nice...
Once upon a time, you could almost completely dismantle a Morris Minor with a half-inch spanner and a few expletives.
It now costs a VW service centre upwards of $1/2million dollars to properly equip.
These cars are not designed to be reliable; that wouldn't make money.
This is the true resistance against electric cars - there is very little to go wrong. Unless you _make_ them go wrong.
You can buy LED that last as long as they are supposed to, if you are king of Dubai.
It's really a shame about that continuing with LEDs, it's not even like the LED chips themselves contribute much to the expense of the bulb.
Especially considering all the other electronics that are in each bulb, which just get thrown in the bin as well, just because one of the LED chips burns out.
@@kenhukushi1637 or you can modify the cheap 1s by changing out a resistor or 2, bigclivedotcom has info on dooby lamps(diy dubai lamp)
@@jamesportrais3946 a half inch spanner, and a few expletives. hehe! Interesting info
The part with the prism and the spectrums reminds me of high school, when we duplicated the Michelson-Morley experiments, and we shot a laser beam all over the school hallways! We figured it was about 1.2 km long, back to the laser!
I love that "trick" bulb that Rex had floating mid air! These are the best. Thank you Tim for reviving them in HD.
I wonder if Tim has seen the Technology Connections channel, particularly the videos on oil lanterns.
Not sure but the reciprocal is certainly true
If Alec ever did half the stuff shown here, his videos would be twice as long due to the disclaimers and warnings.
1980s calling my friend
I have all 3 Connections series and the "Day the universe Changed" series as well.
The one you did with refrigeration was really good and as things are old do come back now everybody is using ammonia, refrigeration, and CO2 and natural refrigerant so how things changed him thank you very much for putting all this back on it’s great
And the giant wooden nut and bolt 🎉 the dang theme song and the whole bit is just amazing - Well done from Tx
i could sit and watch this channel for hours and hours. i love the style and the music. thank you for posting all these. the world is a better place for having it! :D
Its just so delightful to see these films & the extras at the end. Bravo.
I vividly remember watching this episode as a kid. Making the wire glow with an old arc welder was brilliant, my Dad was a welder at the time and I remember him frantically flapping his arm to stop the welding rod from sticking as he was trying to strike an arc, the opposite of what you two were doing here : )
I have the whole series on DVD. Unfortunately, the kids think it's boring, and go back to playing on the 'smart' phones, and don't realize where theat phone has its roots.
the quality of these remastered versions is outstanding. thansk tim :D
I love watching your shows, they were before i was around, but i love mechanics and mechanical gizmoes
Nice one Tim! One of my favourites. It'll go just right with me crunchy nuts!
Edit: You're right about the light from a gas mantle. The process of installing one as it burns away leaving a gossamer lattice of ash that transforms the gas flame into a light that must've seemed almost magical to the early adopters!
It's invariably stormy weather that causes a power cut and I also use a camping Gaz light so i associate that lemon/lime hued light & the gentle roar of the gas jets with being safe & cosy whilst the storm rages outside the kitchen window or outside the tent.
I wonder what health risks were associated with the ash from gas mantles, they contained radioactive Thorium to produce the bright light. I have a lot of the radioactive mantles, interesting items to place near a Geiger counter to demonstrate the radioactivity.
If i remember correctly, the silk netting is impregnated with Strontium.
@@rustymotor The factory girls were at risk, certainly. I did borrow a Geiger Muller tube and heard the counts from a couple of mantles that the owner used as a control/reference. I then tested some Uranium glass i picked up at the charity shop, and merely got background plus 50%. Deemed that 'safe'!
Loving the add ons at the end Tim. You are fantastic!
Lol, the penguin candle joke was brilliant!
I had forgotten this episode, but it soon all came rushing back. It was the most impressive one on me by far. Wonderful to see it again!
I worked in a lighting shop for a long time.
I guess I should say it was an illuminating experience.
I spent a part of my childhood with oil lamps with the same mantle that was on the gas lamps in this program, they gave a surprisingly decent amount of light.
Speaking of the Eye And The Brain, I highly recommend the book, Proust Was A Neuroscientist. It showcases examples of various artists in print and painting who were actually exhibiting what science discovered decades later about the process of vision and comprehension. For instance, there are more neurons going back to the eye from the brain than from the eye to the brain. Examples from painters and writers like Cezanne, George Eliot, Proust and Gertrude Stein display their intrinsic understanding of the chemical processes of comprehension. A very fascinating book. We do fill in the blanks.
thanks for this recommendation, i'm going to buy it right away!
Tim ... Thanks for all you do
“Daylight is much brighter than most artificial light”
Me watching this video in the dark and getting blinded when he opens the door: you’re telling me man.
Just found out this series. Really informative and entertaining to watch!
Deserves more views 👍👍
Between Tim, Rex and the Christmas lectures I had a great childhood! Thank you!
thank you this channel is so useful than anyother channels
Miss ya Tim. Will keep looking for updates when winter rolls around again
Great television. So real.
Such a great find...this gives me a chance to thank Tim for the original episodes of The Secret Life of Machines. I watched and appreciated all of them in the early 90s. Now with the remasters it gives me a second chance to enjoy them all over again and also the new Secret Life of Components. Thanks again Tim for your great work!
They don't make such good TV series now days unfortunately.
Great one!
Great work, another masterpiece of yours!
I'm very glad that your house did not catch on fire, that kitchen looks very cosy. I've experience gas lighting when I was young at a relative's chalet that did not have electricity, they also had a gas powered refrigerator. I was amazed by both technology.
CFL do last much longer than incandescent lights unless they're in emplacement like recessed ceiling lights where the heat is trapped and damaged the electronics. I bought CFL years ago before LED were popular and affordable and I've yet to change one. The manufacturers are at fault for not divulging that some emplacements are inadvisable.
Another fascinating insight.
"It's nice when there are no men about isn't it!"
Speaking as a man, I agree 100%
Thank you Tim. Another informative, thought-provoking thoroughly charming float downstream.
BRAVO and best wishes from a fellow maker of 'things' 🏆🇬🇧
With these guys, safety is not number 1 priority :D
Thanks Tim and Rex! Masters of bodge!
I love these remasters and the commentary afterwards. Keep it up!
Always a pleasure to learn something new, even if it is something old. Thank you Mr. Hunkin.
Heat from tungsten lamps used in traffic lights used to keep the snow melted off the lighting assembly, when new LEDs bulbs where used at first the signs used to clog up with snow until they fitted heaters with temperature sensors in.
on a similar note i have heard the more modern diesel warships couldn;t operate in the far north as the decks will ice up and topple, steam ships could use steam hoses to blow offf the ice and operate further North. And coal/ town gass was so oily it sealed its own leaks, when north sea oil gass came along it dried out all the joints and leaked.
That is not true.
One - due to protective visors on top of the lights, for traffic lights to be occluded by snow, wind would have to blow that snow directly into the light for an extended period of time.
We call such an event a blizzard.
AKA that time when you shouldn't be on the road. Unless you want to die.
Snow that does gather that way will melt as long as the traffic light remains operational. Because...
Two - LED lights DO produce heat. They just tend not to produce it in the IR part of the spectrum like incandescent bulbs do.
In fact, per watt, LEDs produce far more heat than incandescents - up to 85-90% of energy used by an LED gets converted to heat, whereas an incandescent bulb will convert only about 10-15% of the energy used into heat. But it will shunt as much as 80-85% of energy into invisible IR.
I.e. A 100 W incandescent bulb will produce about 1600 lumens of light and some 10-15 W will be wasted as heat.
For the same amount of light one would need an LED of about 20 W, which would be wasting about 17-18 W as heat - more than the equivalent incandescent bulb.
The reason incandescent bulbs are much hotter is all that IR light that gets wasted BUT which still heats up the surrounding air as it radiates from the bulb.
But back to snow not melting...
1 Watt = 859.85 Calories per hour.
1 Calorie is the amount of heat needed to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water to 1° Celsius - AKA above the melting point.
A traffic light using 8-15 Watts will waste 7-13 Watts as heat, AKA it will melt some 6-11 kilograms of ice per hour of operation.
That would be a block of ice 10 centimeters long, 10 centimeters wide - and 60 to 110 centimeters high.
Three - but people are stupid.
So, there ARE such things as LED traffic lights with heaters built in (because stupid people demanded them and we all know that stupid customers are the best buyers of unnecessary stuff) - but practically no one uses them.
Cause it took years for them to be created, as no one actually needed a more expensive, energy wasting LED traffic light.
Engineers designing LED traffic lights being good at math and stuff, unlike people worrying about snow not melting when heated - they never thought to design a version for morons. Silly engineers.
In the mean time, all those municipalities that did switch to LED traffic lights figured out that they don't need heating their LED lights to melt the snow - and they never needed to replace the LEDs they got the first time.
Cause unlike incandescent bulbs - LEDs last a LOT longer. And use far less energy.
@@d3nza482 I agree with you that LED lights do produce some heat. Measurement of the lumens of *visible* light produced per watt of power consumed will show that LED lights are much more efficient than incandescent lights. I do not think it reasonable to include the infrared radiation produced by incandescent light bulbs as "light" in your calculations because it is invisible to the human eye and thus of no use to humans as light. This fact tilts the efficiency contest much in favour of the LEDs.
There is also a significant error in your calculations of how much ice can be melted per hour by the 7 to 13 watts of waste heat you assume are created by an LED traffic light. You state that "1 Calorie is the amount of heat needed to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water to 1 degree Celsius - AKA above the melting point." This is not a correct statement. A correct statement would be:
"One calorie is the amount of heat that needs to be added to or removed from 1 gram of liquid water to increase or decrease the temperature of the water by 1 degree Celsius provided that no phase change of any of the water is taking place." This quantity is called the "specific heat" of water.
Snow is frozen water, basically particles of ice. To melt 1 gram of water ice at a temperature of 0 degrees Celsius to 1 gram of liquid water at 0 degrees Celsius requires the adding of 80 calories of heat to the water. This quantity is known as the "latent heat of fusion". During the melting transformation the temperature of the water will remain at 0 degrees Celsius. The process is reversible. Freezing liquid water into ice requires the removal of 80 calories of heat per gram from the water. This quantity is known as the "latent heat of solidification." Again, the temperature of the water remains at 0 degrees Celsius during the transformation from liquid water to ice. The heat added to or removed from the water is called "latent heat" because it does not result in a temperature change of the water. Instead, the heat causes a "phase change", which is a physicist's way of saying the water is either melting, freezing, vaporising, or condensing.
The error in your calculation is that you have not allowed for the latent heat of fusion of water, thus your calculations are in error by a factor of 80. Seven to 13 watts of heat over 1 hour represent 6,018.95 to 11,178.05 calories of heat which will be capable of melting 75.24 to 139.72 grams of water ice per hour if 100% of the waste heat is added to the ice. Most traffic lights have 3 illuminated areas (red, green, yellow) which are illuminated only one at a time. The waste heat is shared among these 3 areas with typically the yellow getting the smallest share because it is only illuminated for a brief period in each light cycle. This means that the yellow light will have only a small fraction of the ice melting power available to it and will be at greatest risk of being obscured by snow. The bottom line is that the problem of traffic lights being obscured by snow is a very real problem and must be taken care of appropriately. I am a Canadian living in the land of ice and snow so I have seen early LED traffic lights obscured by snow before the problem was properly addressed.
Incidentally, the latent heat condition also occurs when liquid water is boiled. To boil 1 gram of liquid water into steam 540 calories of heat must be added to the water. This quantity is known as the "latent heat of vaporisation". To condense 1 gram of steam to liquid water 540 calories of heat must be removed from the steam. This quantity is known as the "latent heat of condensation". In both cases the temperature of the water/steam will remain at 100 degrees Celsius as the phase change takes place ASSUMING the pressure is maintained at 1 atmosphere which is 14.7 pounds per square inch or 101.325 kilopascals or 760 mm of Mercury in a barometer. The boiling and condensing temperatures of water are strongly influenced by the pressure applied to it. If the pressure is higher or lower than 1 atmosphere the water will still boil or condense and require 540 calories per gram to do so. Assuming the pressure is steady, the temperature will not change as the process takes place, but the temperature will be different from 100 degrees Celsius.
Also incidentally, once water undergoes a phase change to ice or steam its specific heat changes. The specific heat of ice is about 0.5 calories per gram per degree Celsius. This means that adding or removing 1 calorie of heat from 1 gram of water ice will change its temperature by 2 degrees Celsius. The specific heat of steam is about 0.48 calories per gram per degree Celsius. This means that adding or removing 1 calorie of heat from 1 gram of water steam will change its temperature by 2.083 degrees Celsius.
(Continued Comment)
There are also a few other small errors in your work. You properly use capitalisation for the SI (International System of units) unit "degrees Celsius" as this unit is named after a person (Anders Celsius) so it is a "proper name" and thus capitalised. Oddly enough, the SI unit "watt" for power, even though it is named after the person James Watt, is NOT capitalised and should be written as "watt". Only when abbreviated (or used as the first word in a sentence) are the units named after people capitalised so it would be correct to use "W" as the abbreviation for watts. I agree this makes no sense, but this is the way the SI system is defined.
Unfortunately you also capitalised the unit "Calorie". This is incorrect. It is true that the unit "Calorie" does exist and it does refer to a quantity of heat but there is a difference between a "calorie" and a "Calorie". The "calorie" is a unit used in physics and thermodynamics and is the amount of heat that will change the temperature of 1 gram of liquid water by 1 degree Celsius. The "Calorie" is a unit used in food science and is the amount heat energy liberated by a food item when tested in a calorimeter. The ratio between the two is a factor of 1000. One Calorie is equal to 1000 calories. For this reason, a Calorie is sometimes called a "kilocalorie" or a "large calorie" to distinguish it from the calories used in physics and thermodynamics. When you look at the label on a food item and it lists the number of Calories in the food it is talking about kilocalories or large calories. Confusing the two units will obviously result in an error in calculations by a factor of 1000! Isn't science wonderful! Just so many subtleties to confuse a person! Unfortunately, it is important to get these details correct or another person reading your work may not understand it properly or it may lead to errors in calculation.
d3nza, I would like to congratulate you for attempting to do a mathematical analysis of the ice melting capabilities of the waste heat of LED traffic lights. Not many You-Tubers would have the courage, incentive, and inquisitiveness to do so! It is so nice to see an intelligent comment like yours where you tried to work out the factors of the situation logically to justify your conclusions. This is how science and engineering are done! Unfortunately you got caught by an oddity of the physics of water. It pains me a bit to point out your errors when you have tried very hard to do a proper scientific analysis of the situation, but if we are going to do science here, we need to get it correct. In fact, posing a hypothesis/ conclusion and having others check and/or test your work is how science eventually resolves a clear picture of the truth of a subject. In writing all the stuff above I am NOT trying to ridicule you. I am trying to further your knowledge so that the next time you need to deal with some of the physics of water you will have more understanding and be better prepared to develop the correct calculations. I hope you will keep at it, keep learning, and continue to elevate the level of the RUclips comment discussions. It was my privilege to respond to your comment!
Disclaimer: I am not a physicist or a thermodynamicist. My training is as an electronics / electrical engineer. If there is a real physicist or thermodynamicist in the crowd I would appreciate a critique of my work. After all, I have a lifetime of experience in sometimes getting things wrong!
It's amazing how much good stuff you fit into 25-ish minutes.
Entertaining and educational. Loved the `cartoon` characters. The painting at 3:17 is titled Greenock Dock by Moonlight by the Victorian artist John Atkinson Grimshaw.
Thank you!
I also was the poor fool who spent a fortune to switch my life over to compact florescent lights only to realize they did NOT deliver their promised life and were not well suited to post life recycling.
Was an expensive lesson.
Trust you didn't repeat the mistake....and avoided getting a Tesla- the modern equivalent of a CFL...
Very interesting as usual ;-))
The part about Edison getting models to wear the lights as advertisement reminds me of how my friend Naomi Wu would make wearable LED projects as a form of art.
He also electrocuted an elephant to "prove" that AC was more dangerous than DC. He was an evil man.
love love love this
Put that bloody penguin out!
Yes sir, Mr. Hodges sir.
Yes, another one! 😍
Another superb episode. Great practical demonstrations and beautiful cinematography. Thank you for uploading!!
Wonderful
The real hero of these series is the lady that does all the voices for the animations.
My new favourite channel, Tim you are a legend.
This is so charming!
Your the best, always have been!
I loved the series back in the day and enjoy revisiting them now! I reckon you missed a trick by not including your gas lights in the split spectrum test! Thanks for sharing these!
I loved the original series, and it's a treat to see it back in remastered form,
except for the animated features, which I never cared for.
28:20. I have two compact fluorescent tubes I started using in 1999. They still work.
I remember watching Richard Gregory on 'the sky at night' with Patrick Moore, at Selsey beach. He was explaining the 'big moon' optical illusion.
THANKS AGAIN TIM!!! absolutely loving these, as good as any modern diy electronics channel on youtube that tears items down and reverse engineers them!
I hope you are doing well sir, I very much enjoy your videos and I haven’t seen you upload in several months. If you get the time or inkling… We would all enjoy more “secret life of components“… Or pretty much anything you’d like to show us we would enjoy! Your work has guided so many of us and influenced us into our careers and long lifetime of work. Thank you for your time and energy
Thanks for these Tim, just discovered your many creations just a few months ago, keep at it :D
i really liked all your videos. very informative with all those experiments. with the help of your channel, i managed to watch your backdated videos. :). hope you are well mr tim hunkin. sending regards from malaysia.
It’s actually amazing
The Lenny Henry joke, the flat has centeral heating, a light bulb in the middle of the ceiling. Ladybird simple electronics 1979 had a light falshing robot that I built , mesmerised by the glowing filaments controlled by blue tubes , small lumps in wires and three legged sealed tubes. probably set me on a path. Electromagnetic spectrum. to understand these fundamental principles is a pleasure. The eye and the brain, fascinating, the layers of filtering and re-combination, to give a binary answer to can you spot all the traffic lights in these pictures. Love yuor work.
Very enjoyable, thank you'
As you mention, incandescent light bulbs make fantastic and economical low power heaters. I have a number of unheated sheds with a water supply, the pipes freeze in the winter so I drain them, but where the supply comes through the floor before the stopcock cannot be drained, so is prone to freezing, it blows the compression fitting off the plastic pipe if it does. A small insulated box around the stopcock with a 20 W bulb in it stops it freezing, however cold it gets. Cheap to run and extremely effective!
Totally share your experience with CF bulbs. I have had similar problems with LED bulbs, but not to such a serious extent.
Hi Tim, thanks for shining a light on a fascinating topic. Why are you not ‘Sir’ Tim, for services to education? Love your work. Gregg, Australia
i remember buying some compact flourescent bulbs at grainger in us way back . they were tubular straight not the swirl and when you flipped the switch they took like 1 or 2 seconds to come on. i used them in my apartment in a regular edison base lamp. they did actually last me 20 years using them for about 6 hrs/ day . they were in an open lamp with the base down. the swirly bulbs lasted very poorly but were cheap. the once that lasted 20 yrs cost about 25 dollars each so like 50 bucks in todays money.
Just like the Philips SLs Bulbs very robust CFL from 80s early 90s,
@@SkunkMantraTechnoSkunk Or the Osram CFLs (and early Osram Sylvania after the 1994 buyup of GTE's lamp division) when they were USA made. I have some in regular use that are almost 30 years old.
Same with the preheat choke ballast CFLs where the lamp is a separate replaceable element. They last ages.
14:00 I’m pretty sure high voltages in a vacuum actually give off xrays and other particles, would be interesting to find out if this experiment and other with normal house supply produce it as well
Love these episodes! I'm an avid fan of neon, proper gas filled neon, It's always nice going to parts of Spain seeing it still used quite a bit over there, LED neon rope never quite has the same look about it :(
And let's not forget about the introduction of HID (high-intensity discharge) lights that are now used in some, not all, car headlights.
I love how Britain used to be.
I'd love to go back to these days sometimes.
Wow!
Rex's thumbnails could surely have told some stories!!! 🙀
I made a spectroscope using a webcam and a refraction grating film.
Spectral Workbench is a great free open source software to run.
You can see what a light is made of. Great to identify fake Sun lamps and UVC Leds.
Google "i-Phos light Spectrometer" for the kit I built. 3D printed my own stuff and used a mailer tube for the body.
Sold as a kit for 85 pounds in the UK, by Chris Wesley.
He has a channel on RUclips (Chris Wesley), where he shows how it all works.
Now, can we get a Secret life of Electric Light Orchestra video?
These should be in every man's YT home page and recommendations, not that drivel they are pushing onto us.
Yes but we are in the minority, the 'less clever ones' are in majority and want that drivel. If not, it wouldn't 've existed.
The lack of contrived sensationalism and presentation style make this much more informative and easy to absorb than the vast majority of modern TV shows... There are enjoyable contemporary channels as well though, I do like a bit of AvE, Lindybeige, and Edd China too!
Netflix should take it up
@@TheAlps36 Netflix is shite... Run by the same dregs that run hollywood, youtube, and the rest of this degenerate matrix.
exactly not the gaming and lifestyle drivel
Been waiting on this episode :) Speaking about CFL im still useing old trusty Philips SLs And Thosiba Neoballs From the 80s In bedroom and shed, Some of these bulbs have lasted up to 9-10 years before they finally Flicker and go EOL. Tho disadvantages of these old ones they use magnetic ballest so flicker when come on and bit dim for 20 30 seconds. But are trusty outdoor bulbs that last ages if you can get hold of some. Plenty on EBAY still. LEDs have slowly crept up in my house for kitchen and Spotlights due to HALOGEN bulbs are hot and not very good.
At the end you mention about how compact fluorescents didn't live up to their claimed lifespan. I've still got a couple of the original Philips SL Prismatic cfls (the ones that look like they're in a jam jar) and they still work as well as they ever did. The colour is much warmer than more modern ones, but the warm up time of nearly 20 minutes can be annoying!
I have a few SL's too and they still work a treet
It's mainly the cheap electronics that give up. Although I had a tube where the phosphor coating flaked off too.
Big Clive approves your light bulb xray device
This man is fearless. Playing with high 5+ kilowatt welding equipment+ molten steel with bare hands.
It was the days before health and safety ruined all kinds of dangerous fun.