Buddy Runyan
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2017–2020
13:04 · 150K views · Feb 6, 2011
Part 1 of an episode of the British educational TV series The Secret Life of Machines, about how vacuum cleaners work and their history. It mixes humor with explanation of household technology.
HN recommends the series as an entertaining way to learn how everyday machines work, enough to start debugging them.
3 comments from Hacker News
Thanks to both of you for the praise. You might also be interested in "The Secret Life of Machines". [LINK] and this video . Philip Morrison (from Ring of Truth) is perhaps best known for his powers-of-10 movie. [LINK] . He was also a columnist for Scientific American. The only column I remember is when he decided to make bread from scratch. Really from scratch. They grew wheat in a small plot of land near his home in Cambridge, Mass. He's part of the generation that developed the first atomic bomb. He carried the first core to the Trinity test site in the back seat of his car, and helped load the weapons on the planes that went to Japan.
These overviews give you just enough knowledge to start debugging a broken household machine. I love it. If anyone's looking for more videos from this series here's a playlist of the complete series: this video
There is a great TV series called "The Secret Life of Machines" that covered some inventions that changed the world: this video There is an episode on central heating: [LINK]