Engineering
How the built world actually gets made.
Channels
- Practical Engineering (Channel) — civil engineer Grady Hillhouse on “infrastructure and the human-made world around us,” usually by building a scale model of the thing and breaking it on camera. New videos the first and third Tuesday.
- Progress — Science Documentaries (Channel) — 567 full-length documentaries, most of them 45 to 50 minutes: aviation disasters and the investigations that followed them, WWII tank battles, the invention of the submarine, stratospheric jumps, and factory tours like how Mercedes-Benz builds 470 trucks a day. Weekly, and long enough to be an evening.
Reading
- Why roundabouts are safer than intersections (Article) — transportation engineer Deogratias Eustace on conflict points: a roundabout has far fewer places where paths can cross, and its geometry forces every driver to slow down. The FHWA credits them with cutting serious and fatal crashes by 90% where they replace stop-sign intersections and nearly 80% where they replace signals. The US went from 356 roundabouts in 2000 to over 10,000.
Videos
- So You Want to Build a Tunnel… (Video) — Practical Engineering on how tunnels actually get dug (cut-and-cover, boring machines, sequential excavation) and how the ground itself decides which method you’re allowed to use.
Sites
Bartosz Ciechanowski (Website) — legendary interactive explainers where every diagram is a live model you drag, spin, and take apart until the thing finally clicks.
- Mechanical Watch (Interactive) — the mainspring, escapement, and automatic winding of a watch, built up piece by piece.
- GPS (Interactive) — how trilateration, satellite orbits, and signal timing put a dot on your map.