This was excellent to watch, though the whole time it made me think of this classic engineering video:
1937 film explains how a car differential works
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Re: 1937 film explains how a car differential works
#22I remember playing with a differential engine in those Lego gear sets many many years ago. When you have a bunch of the pieces lying around and free time, you'll probably accidentally make a differential too. As for this video itself, I've seem it a few times, and it still really does amaze me how much care was put into this. I assume the video is government funded, and it kind of makes me sad to realize that they ha…
> government funded The video was made by the Jam Handy organization. They did videos for several car companies, and sometimes a consortium of them, is my understanding https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jam_Handy
That would explain the abundance of available mini-models that they could machine.
That does take the wind out of the sails of the argument that it could've had a broader focus than just the differential engine. In that case I'll shift my dismay to "90 years ago, videos of this caliber were possible, and yet educating people on a broader scale didn't enter the minds of any entity which could've afforded it."
Re: 1937 film explains how a car differential works
#23The style in those old films is so relaxing and pedagogically great. Has anyone else noticed that today's educational content intended for adults increasingly uses a format that was regionally only used for very young children? There is almost always personality emoting and doing accidentally on purpose funny things and laughing, exaggerating everything to keep people engaged.
Person-to-person interactions have changed dramatically since those days. Western culture had a sense of duty and progress that is now questioned by the postmodern intellectual elites. The emphasis today is on "enjoying yourself" in your own bubble, and debating "grand moral standards" is even ridiculed.
It's not clear that this phenomenon (if it exists) has anything to do with the relaxing of educational content norms. If anything, the technological advancements caused by that 'sense of duty and progress' have led to a reduction of the average 'Western' attention span to the point of requiring reductive and trivially engaging educational media. That's probably not really the case either, but it seems just as valid of a theory without considerably more rigorous investigation.
Re: 1937 film explains how a car differential works
#24The style in those old films is so relaxing and pedagogically great. Has anyone else noticed that today's educational content intended for adults increasingly uses a format that was regionally only used for very young children? There is almost always personality emoting and doing accidentally on purpose funny things and laughing, exaggerating everything to keep people engaged.
Like the stunt riding and log rolling?
Re: 1937 film explains how a car differential works
#25Suggest changing the title to reflect that this is a General Motors documentary. They are still around! Why not credit them?
The general motors today is not the same company that made this video.
In 2008 the original general motors was effectively dissolved, the current GM simply purchased some of their assets, which happened to include their names and trademarks.
Re: 1937 film explains how a car differential works
#26The style in those old films is so relaxing and pedagogically great. Has anyone else noticed that today's educational content intended for adults increasingly uses a format that was regionally only used for very young children? There is almost always personality emoting and doing accidentally on purpose funny things and laughing, exaggerating everything to keep people engaged.
This is the subject of an entire book by Neil Postman called "Amusing Ourselves To Death" (1985), including a chapter called "Teaching as an Amusing Activity".
Some excerpts from the book:
> “Dr. Ruth Westheimer is a psychologist who has a popular radio program and a nightclub act in which she informs her audiences about sex in all of its infinite variety and in language once reserved for the bedroom and street corners. She is almost as entertaining as the Reverend Billy Graham, and has been quoted as saying, “I don’t start out to be funny. But if it comes out that way, I use it. If they call me an entertainer, I say that’s great. When a professor teaches with a sense of humor, people walk away remembering.” She did not say what they remember or of what use their remembering is. But she has a point: It’s great to be an entertainer. Indeed, in America God favors all those who possess both a talent and a format to amuse, whether they be preachers, athletes, entrepreneurs, politicians, teachers or journalists. In America, the least amusing people are its professional entertainers.”
...
> “We may surmise that the ninety million Americans who watch television every night also think so. But what I am claiming here is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. ... The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining...”
...
> “Books, it would appear, have now become an audio-visual aid; the principal carrier of the content of education is the television show, and its principal claim for a preeminent place in the curriculum is that it is entertaining.”
Re: 1937 film explains how a car differential works
#27How would films like this be consumed in the 30’s? Would it be shown in theaters before a feature film?
Another comment pointed out that these were made by the Jam Handy Organization[0].
Just hypothesizing, but either GM might distribute these and have showings for staff as part of training. Almost certainly not for the engineers that already learned this but perhaps sales staff so they could better explain the mechanism and benefits to buyers.
Re: 1937 film explains how a car differential works
#28Great stuff. Making me think how simpler electrocars are: no differentials, no transmission, no complex injection machinery.
I feel it's a bit unfair to those mechanical components to ignore how complicated power electronics are, for example. They are perhaps less inspectable for a layperson (what happens when you break it open to see the insides?) so we tend to treat them as more of a primitive black box building block, but treat the mechanical components as complicated assemblies of primitives.
Re: 1937 film explains how a car differential works
#29Video says nothing about forces, however. With this explanation it seems that if one wheel gets slightly stuck, the other wheel gets all the force, causing a dangerous spinning.
Not so much dangerous as useless. That’s why Positraction was invented. And why locking differentials are a thing.
lol
Did you say youts?
Re: 1937 film explains how a car differential works
#30The style in those old films is so relaxing and pedagogically great. Has anyone else noticed that today's educational content intended for adults increasingly uses a format that was regionally only used for very young children? There is almost always personality emoting and doing accidentally on purpose funny things and laughing, exaggerating everything to keep people engaged.
I was expecting explanations to begin shortly, got bored after the second stunt. The format is, frankly, horrible. This must be the analog of the "You want a tutorial to do X? Lemme record myself writing painfully slowly in "New Document.txt to explain it." style of tutorials.