Nikola Tesla's Earthquake Machine! | MythBusters | Season 4 Episode 20 | Full Episode
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- čas přidán 19. 06. 2024
- In 1887, Tesla was supposedly testing his mechanical oscillator device at his laboratory in New York when pandemonium broke out. He almost brought the house down by placing his machine against an iron girder and tuning it to the resonant frequency of the building.
Using science as a tool, Hollywood special effects experts attempt to debunk rumours, urban legends and popular myths that have captivated the minds of many individuals.
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Seasons 01 to Season 4 truly are one of my favorite seasons among the whole history of Mythbusting. I mean, come on, it's these seasons where every single thing is unfiltered!
Total agree
After season 4, it seemed to feel much more about TV production quality and following a plan and formula and putting on a performance rather than just a team of people trying to figure interesting things out for themselves and showing us the process. Love all the mythbusters, but early on it was a raw and fresh product and was a pure type of entertainment that makes me happy
Kari'shitter?
@@stickmandaninacan total agree
I agree. Television magic at its best!
Gotta admit I really prefer the style of the old mythbuster compared to the newer seasons.
Peter Rees is that you?
I like the seasons 1 to 5
More natural, a lot less cinematic and forced
"this myth is really recent, from 2004...”
Oh, just 20 years.
Remember when AOL was a thing
Lmfao, random ass comment, but just made me remember how old I am 😂😂
i really like the earlier seasons
idk, the team feels more authentic
7:14 Yeah... a REALLY good torso!
lol
Given the state of US infrastructure, the test on the bridge was actually way more dangerous.
That bridge vibrating because of that little box is incredible!
Indeed. That only shows, if you perfectly hit the resonance of a building, or bridge, you CAN make it move/vibrate.
funny how the massager at 22:50 is now a thing for sale
That’s so true! I had the same thought 💭
It must have suck to clean that container van.
I remember this episode so good. The bridge would great for lattice climbing.
An episode I've never seen, or actually heard of before is awesome!
I'm curious if they would have had different results using harmonics of the correct frequency. It's actually kind of odd to me that they didn't try it.
15:44 A couple of things wrong with this approach.
Firstly, the way a beam is 'fixed' changes which modes it experiences, and thus what the natural frequency is. They might be under the assumption that having it 'floating' on wires makes it not supported, but thats not true. The wires are in tension, and hence the beam is constrained in the vertical direction (as long as the 'preload' force provided by gravity is not exceeded, which for the simple hammer excitement it wont).
I.e. in the vertical plane this is a two-way supported/fixed beam, where the natural frequency is the first mode (a standing wave with a period of 2x the length between strings). It is unconstrained in the horizontal plane though, and frequency components there are more unpredictable (depends on the internal mass distribution/stiffness/density of the beam/material) with its lowest frequency component being determined by the mass of the beam and the length of the string (its a swing after all).
Secondly measuring the resonance frequency of the full beam, but then adding the excitement changes the dynamics. The system goes from a beam with two sides fixed, to a mass with two beams, of which one side of each beam is fixed. One could approximate this more accurately by a mass/spring system (where the spring is formed by the parallel addition of the two 'beam pieces' with a linear stiffness (taking into account no rotation can occur at the beam end). You add a substantial amount of mass thus the eigen frequency is likely going to be much lower than previously.
So contrary to what they were doing, they would have likely needed a much lower frequency to excite the (modified) system.
21:46 Also something important they seem to neglect is the location of excitation. If the excitation is at a natural frequency (or multiple, as shown here), it should be at the appropriate point. If you perform the excitation at a nodule of said frequency, you will get no response.
Regardless, a structure will fail if you manage to get enough strain, for long enough, to hit fatigue limits. If you want this to happen with mechanical resonance with a very low input excitation you would need very low damping of the critical frequency (or a high Q-factor of the design). My profession is not in civil engineering, but I wouldn't be surprised if Q-factor is an important property in structure design, and that damping is sufficiently applied (if required) to reduce it.
Building a high Q oscillator in itself is quite challenging, so I wouldn't be shocked if the material properties themselves have sufficient damping to prevent this mode from ever being excited too easily.
a little late to the party, arent we?
@@AkiSan0 As if any input 20+ years ago would have made a difference after the show already airing.
That doesn't mean that it isn't a good opportunity to learn and share knowledge, such that others can get a bit of a deeper understanding. Or what do you suppose is wrong with that?
this is golden info. thanks for going to the effort of posting it. i had many a questions about this topic too. i am a sound guy but not an acoustics guy. so this was very interesting to me.
i guess those earthquake attempts have a fundamental flaw, they are without feedback - it needs a closed loop feedback ;)
Grant saved the day about Tesla device!
That Bone Room place is insane.
Grant's face at 10:35 is hilarious.
Also... did they have a permit to vibrate that bridge?
Considering that the bridge seemingly closed off, more then likely.
its terrorism lol🌋😵💫🤣
38:37 I did hear of someone who put a frozen can of coke in a pot of water on the stove to thaw it out quickly, then they got distracted and left it until it exploded, embedding shards of aluminium in the ceiling and walls, as well as spraying boiling water and sugar on everything.
i think they focused more on the "earthquake" explanation that tesla gave to the cops than a machine that would cause the machinery to shake and possibly dislodge bricks and stuff off an old building a good generator not secured can cause issues so i can see something attached to the building framework would knock a bit of structure down plus a building vibrating at 18/19 hz could cause issues with people causing dizziness and confusion which fits the description of the situation outside
You have to remember the weight of a "good generator"
a building is designed to stay up against its own weight... a bridge is designed to be rigid and span a distance... are they hitting the note of a single beam, or the entire asembly/span?
as shown by the linear actuator they eventually chose, a jackhammer doesnt quite give the same result as the tesla oscillator... something about a jackhammer being designed to hit a hammer... not oscillate and shake the user. the energy goes into the chisel, not the operator holding the machine.
pull apart a jackhammer, theres an oscillating piston, be it driven by air or a crank... but it acts inside another piston, an "air spring", and its THAT piston that hammers against the chisel. and the action of the hammering counteracts the action of the piston... all sort of equalises and the machine only shakes a small amount whilst the end of the chisel takes a pounding.
whereas here, its the inertia of the piston being moved one way that simply makes everything ELSE want to move the other way... eventually it will reach an equilibrium where the inertia of the vibrating assembly counteracts the inertia of the piston, and they will both oscillate with a particular amplitude determined by the respective inertias...
then theres fundamentals and overtones, nodes and antinodes... the mass isnt as important as the location...
whilst the tesla story seems a little... overinflated... theres every chance he did do something along those lines.
thinking of this drill bit i was once brazing. big hollow mining drill. shove the oxy torch up its rear end to preheat it, and with a certain tweaking of the mixture and torch position, it suddenly started "singing" at about 300hz... "cool" i thought... left it to go have my morning tea... walk out into lunchroom and the glass window is shaking... boss comes running down from office upstairs, WTF IS THAT?!?!? as this howling note builds and floods the industrial park we were located in... everyone came running! WTF IS THAT?!?
yet it was just a mere whisper in comparison, standing NEXT to it... some sort of awesome helmholtz resonant cavity :)
put all the CNC machines and every other noise we ever made to shame.
at the same time, it was very location specific. ive made similar "singing tubes" but never had THAT result again... the building was a massive suspended slab, huge cavern underneath... in a cubicle, welding bay, with a mezzanine floor above... iunno, just the layout of that building had a massive role to play it seems. i did it again outside the bay as well, no result... harmonics and pressure waves and interference patterns are WEIRD!
another one was shoving a long bent steel tube (trampoline base? dont ask...) into the coals of last nights fire... poured petrol in it... which of course ignites...
and playing around with the angle of it could get this awesome "idling V8" sound from it :)
@@paradiselost9946 awesome man i wonder if that sort of thing could be done at concerts or fairgrounds
😊😊😊😊
Super! MYTH BUSTERS? Thank you very much!
What about cast iron, it is brittle, I think it would shatter at those vibration levels, keep up the good work guys I love watching your shows.😊
Tests shows that the myth is almost impossible to be even plausible
Adam: lets make a real life scale model to test it
one of my favorite episodes, kinda creepy but one can think if they build a machine like the one Grant hands Jamie and Adam in the end but with a 1 ton weight or something it would take that bridge down.
There's a reason army guys aren't allowed to march in step across bridges.
MythBusters: Use Fake Blood
Also MythBusters: *Cassually buy an actual human ribscage*
For $210 too, saw the price tag on it
hanging a piece of steel on a string is not strapping it to a beam of a structure...?
7:22 for a second I thought their sound guy was the biggest human on earth.
You changed the resonate frequency of the bar by clamping it.
At the 1935 party, Tesla also claimed the mechanical oscillator could destroy the Empire State Building with "Five pounds of air pressure" (34 kPa) if attached to a girder and that he expected to earn $100 million from the oscillator within two years.
Er concerns the breaking glass you vibrated the rod to break the glass Adam
Should have tried modified Shake-Weights
34:01 that look on jamie's face:)
For 'breakstep bridge' google 'opening london millenium bridge'. Utter disaster
It’s the same effect, just much bigger scale
Yes,they got that totally wrong.
0:42 when did they shoot buster like that?
Once i made a hole bridge shake, only using my own bodyweight.
Tesla was certainly one of the greatest geniuses of all time... But he was also insane.
Those two things all too often go hand in hand. To be a visionary far beyond one's time is a heavy burden to bear.
i think thats another episode that did not air in germany, just because of the real human bones i assume.
Na, Erstausstrahlung im Juli 2007 auf RTL 2
Im deutschen Fernsehen wird mehr gezeigt als im US amerikanischen
Isnt that the bridge that cracked?
wait what ?
“…isnt…”
In the 2nd war they had to teach army cadets how to cook their tinned rations !!!
8:00 - Suicide Girls shirt... What a sign of the times.
arent there lava lamps that consist of a sealed glas phiole ?
There's a little difference between skeletonal and fleshy, if there isn't YOU have problems
The last sentence of Jamie what if we put a 100 pounds on that sucker, wouldn't you get the same result as in the shop with te steel beam?
I miss Grant :/
Carey said 'milk rocket ' ha ha ha
Kari?
Soo cool
Did you hear my Croatian Fellas, Tesla is Serbian. 😉
I feel like bridges are specifically designed to deal with vibrations for trillions of hours and I would have liked to see this myth tested further..
snot
oh, the internet 20 years ago... so innocent, so naive, so simple...
That bridge episode didnt age well...
The millenium bridge in london almost went down this way.
Then ,they are americans,so a level of ignorance is excused😂
ok, so, you can scale down a building to see what will happen with a life size building, as per Adam roughly at 36:40
So, lets try them twin towers, ey?
Lets check what will happen in a scaled down model....
Love and respect Jamie and Adam,
But they aren't Tesla.
You need the resonant frquency of the metal you are using, not some random 2Hz frequency you pick randomly..
They mention resonant frequency multiple times throughout and said they spent hours dailing in the correct frequency with a controller that has 100th of a Hz accuracy. I'm sure they are aware of what they need to do and the number they mentioned was a rounded one close to the number they need.
Tesla wasn’t a scientist; he was a mad inventor.
so a scientist lol
@@grindcorgz No.
@uriituw mate you need to google the definition of scientist 🤣 but because you seem incapable here it is, Scientist- a person who is studying or has expert knowledge of one or more of the natural or physical sciences, that's Tesla
@@grindcorgz And that describes Tesla?
Was he really studying science? Was he an expert in science?
@uriituw ok it's clear you are very basic and don't have the slightest idea about the crap you talk so I'm going to leave you to your delusion lol
Need more adverts your not making enough money, i did not even see the end
Anyone know who the girl in the Bone Room is?
It’s for uh… a friend 😂
This episode aired 18 years ago though, she might look a bit different now.
Not saying that it will be worse, but just saying.
Finally someone said it
@@Games_and_Music no you’re absolutely right fella. I can’t argue the logic 🤷♂️
@@jaysenmclaren9680 something about goth girls man 😂
I have one for you guys if Tesla got his way would electricity be cheaper I heard Edison and a group of others made it so light bulbs would only last so long where as there’s still an original one running
“Crackpot genius” ?? I wonder who is writing that?
Trouble with Tesla is he was willing to lie or make absurd claims in order to get attention. Marring his legacy and feeding conspiracy theories
Unlike Edison or any of the others that wrote the history, I suppose?
@@iamalive82well yes and no, both of them lied on some stuffs but Tesla had to do it to get recognition and fundings which was a big issue for him. Edison lied to evict competitors as he did with the electric chair or more simply to get recognized for other’s works, which is worse is in my book.
@@iamalive82 No, exactly like Edison. Or Elon, for that matter. Why do you think everybody and their uncle criticises Edison?
It may have caused the Earth to move for some ladies, but in common with nearly all Tesla’s devices, it didn’t work. The man was a huckster and fine self publicist, pure and simple.
You're out of your mind. He invented AC current and radio, among many other thing contributions.
@@allanshpeley4284 Don't feed the troll. I don't think he's bothered reading anything about Tesla that wasn't in some gossip magazine. Or he's an idiot.
13:38 Is the mythbusters yaoi fanfic I'm writting canon now??
Tesla is not born in Serbia!!!! Tesla is Croatian !!!! 😂 🇭🇷
He was born in Smiljan, in what is Croatia today, but when Tesla was born in 1856 Croatia didn't exist at is was known as the Austrian Empire. His parents were Serbian though and therefore he was Serbian too until he later became a US citizen in 1884.
Calm down.
Croatia is a new invented country. Read about "balkanization" process of creating a new counries to partition a big enemy.
@@bekerashes Croatia dates back to year 879 so it is in fact not new country at all.
Grant selflessly offers himself to do the math, narrator claims he’s taking the day off. I’d like to see said narrator do the math instead.
I must have missed the part where the myth required any maths
first?
i love this show, im 30 now, this science program made my whole childhood
I think you are, well done.
@@awesomemarck”…im…”
@@uriituw this is not my mother language but if you understand what im writing, dont bother me.
Tesla was full of s...
It's ok if you don't understand.
@@ctakitimu Mmmkay..
Hey @Mythbusters. I NEED TO KNOW, WHY HAVE YOU MADE YOUR VIDEOS UNAVAILABLE IN THE UNITED STATES? I am only able to watch via VPN. This is ludicrous, why are you denying your tv show to the people it was tailor made for?? Madness!!!
Republicans 🇨🇦
The church. All of them.
The license is for Commonwealth countries. Take it up with Beyond Distribution.
if you can get them for free, they cant charge for them. simple as that.
@@kitchenerleslie6177 youtube is left/dem..
THAT WAS THE SHITTEST ATTEMPT AT A TELSA MYTH I'VE EVER SEEN. FOR SHAME.
Myth confirmed
@@zjalapeno Oh, so edgy!
@@ctakitimu rad dude ✌️