Engineering

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.
  • Aircraft carrier (Article) — the design problem of operating fixed-wing aircraft off a moving ship, and the fixes that came out of it. The angled flight deck, worked out by the Royal Navy after WWII and now universal, lets a landing aircraft that misses the wires open the throttle and go around instead of piling into the aircraft parked forward, and lets launch and recovery happen at once. Also: the New York Times used “supercarrier” as early as 1938, for HMS Ark Royal at 22,000 tons and 72 aircraft; the US operates 11 nuclear CATOBAR carriers and by 2015 had more than twice the combined deck space of every other nation; and in 2006 the Swedish submarine HSwMS Gotland got through the screen around the USS Ronald Reagan’s strike group during JTFEX 06-2.

Videos

  • Calm Traffic Needs More Than Calm Driving (Video) — braintruffle’s 36-minute explainer on phantom traffic jams: how stop-and-go waves travel backwards through a queue, drivers modelled as oscillators, and the string-stability problem that lets a small brake tap grow. It closes on why a few well-controlled cars can stop all the waves, drawing on a 2018 ring-road field experiment with autonomous vehicles and Tennessee’s I-24 MOTION project.
  • 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.