Remember friends, for best results, use aluminum foil, but coat both sides of your foil with gold leaf, before folding into a hat. PDF folding Plans $10. Custom hats $399 and up. Faraday was a genius, but he did not receive a top-notch education, so his math was a bit fuzzy. But from Faraday's musings, James Clerk Maxwell determined his famous equations.
Hey now the most I’m willing to pay you for a custom hat is $389 plus S&H. What do I look like, Mr Moneybags? We’re all struggling with the inflation not just you 😂
@@Cowloverdude Hey, Gold Leaf is $80 per gram. I do offer a cheaper version -- I just paint it Gold-Chrome spray-paint after it's folded. Some say it LOOKS better -- but it doesn't work as well. What do you want?
Tesla didn't "arguably invent the telephone", it was radio, which Tesla first got working as a kind of remote control demo, and a few years later Marconi started sending and receiving long-distance radio signals and recognized it as a communication technology, and then got all the credit.
Sacramento has streets named Howe, Watt, Edison, Marconi, Bell, Fulton. I think those are more “inventor-y” than “science-y”. I don’t know why, though. But now I have to google it.
Essentially all of the aluminum used by the USSR during WW2 was produced in the US because of the electricity issue you mentioned - the Soviet power grid was heavily dependent on enormous hydroelectric dams along the Dnipro river in Ukraine, which the Germans captured in 1941, and remaining Soviet grid capacity was extremely strained. though the Soviets had plenty of bauxite, electricity was in such short supply that it was more effective for America to produce aluminum in the US and ship it across the Pacific to the USSR, who then hauled it all the way across Siberia to factories producing aircraft
Another huge production area for aluminum and Alcoa facility is near Massena NY, drawing from the huge hydroelectric plant on the St. Lawrence river. I grew up near there and though the town along with the rest of the Great Lakes rust belt area has greatly declined the Alcoa plant is still pumping.
in like 10 years some kid is going to be wondering why there’s so many electrical references in his towns street names and find this exact video and be super happy
Company towns are often surprisingly modern and efficient compared to your average urban mess. The one I am near this summer has a single road in the center of it, designed to handle the massive numbers of logging trucks and trucks shipping paper out of it. All the main destinations like groceries, hardware stores, machine rentals, and field gear sellers are based on this main road. Another section holds all the industrial facilities, other than the mill itself, like mechanics, rock testing labs, railroad, and repair infrastructure. Then instead of building the housing right next to the road, they made a road that leads off into another section of town that is isolated from the noise and traffic of the city, and has smaller stores, parks, and amenities. And it is near the main mill. It's actually quite walkable, a rarity in this part of the country. The downside is that the entire region smells vile from the smell of the wood being decomposed in the mill. It's safe, but nauseating.
Aluminium Oxide is super important. Aluminium is soft, the Oxide is super though, gives you strength and scratch resistance. It also is very chemically stable, so it doesn't bond with food, doesn't stain and doesn't interact much with our bodies if we eat some. And also teh shade thrown at Hall, famous for discovering Hall effect, and inventing controller triggers for video game consoles.
Fun fact, Alcoa was the subject of one of the earliest and most impactful antitrust cases. U.S. v. Aloca, a 1945 Second Circuit opinion written by the famous Judge Learned Hand.
As a person who grew up in Maryville but moved away, seeing these videos is genuinely a bit surreal, especially since I started following you prior to your move to Knox.
ngl, got almost halfway through before i realized exactly what science channel i was watching and the cooking specialist is not the one i was expecting for a metallurgical lesson. i dig it!
I thought you might have more about Fontana Dam, which I believe was built to power the aluminum production for WW2. The history of the Road to Nowhere would also be fun to mention.
2:15 - So Tennessee and North Carolina stole our mills from PA.... Thank Adam, now I know who to be mad at for not having mills in Central PA anymore. 😂
Rear Admiral Grace Hopper would be a fantastic figure to have a street named after her, as is Ada Lovelace (both are patron saints of computer science today)
I love that Adam is just making videos about whatever he wants now. His enthusiasm is back and the quality of his videos has significantly increased as a result
Wondering if the Perkins/Perkin thing is an error, since it was Sir William Henry Perkin. Perhaps they meant to honor Jacob Perkins, an inventor who patented an early refrigerator?
i dont know why but my brain expected you to pronounce it "ah-loo-mee-nee-um" instead of "ah-loo-mee-num" even though im 100% sure i've heard you say aluminum before in another video
The Perkin/Mauve thing...though funny on the face of it, his discovery of the mauve dye was the first synthetic dye ever made. So he's recognized for revolutionizing/inventing dye (with implications for industrial chemistry, fashion, etc etc), not just naming washed-out-purple.
I also find it really interesting that the color we associate with the word mauve is nowhere NEAR the color of mauveine (Perkins' dye.) The original dye is an extremely bright royal purple. It' doesn't have any of the pinkish or greyish tones we'd normally associate with mauve. It's a gorgeous color, and I can see how he could make a fortune from it.
@@christineg8151 I remember learning this somewhere. The muted purple is the color the dye fades to over time. So people seeing old mauve dresses thought that faded color was the color mauve
@@christineg8151 Some years ago I went to an exhibition of imperial robes from the Qing Dynasty, which were obviously dyed many colours as was fit for the emperor. The robes have diagonal stripes at the bottom which were dyed different colours, and you could tell the later Qing robes apart just because in those robes, the purple stripes at the bottom were still bright and vibrant when every other colour was faded. Mauveine was quite the invention.
The biggest takeaway I got from that lengthy explanation of the making of aluminum was, “Huh, guess that’s why it’s basically the second or third most crazy precious metal in the Cosmere.”
@@SageSSBM1 He got it from the Ashmounts apparently, cant remember where it says that but it does in one of the books, must have been hell trying to get it from the lava/magma though
The thing is, this is the process that makes aluminum so available nowadays! (Mistborn Spoiler alert) I believe it's the Lost Metal where they say that Scadrial is close to inventing this process,which would stop aluminum from being more expensive than gold. And so technology heralds (heh) the end of the current era of feruchemist invincibility. Now I'm excited for era 3 again! (As in, it's been a while since I read Mistborn, and excitement dies down.)
Aluminum also comes from Arkansas, specifically the town of Bauxite near where I grew up (named after the ore). The main road is named Reynolds (like the foil company), we have Alcoa Blvd, and other noticeable remnants of the age of aluminum mining here in the state.
I grew up in Central Arkansas and never knew the Alcoa name was related to aluminum. I feel like I saw it everywhere on various little roads and communities, and obviously the big Alcoa Road.
@@tayloralamb Neither did I until I saw some doc on former largest companies and what happened to them. They pointed out Alcoa short for Aluminum Company Of America.
@@tayloralamb I graduated from one of the major Saline County high schools in the mid-80's. Maybe you're younger and memories have faded some since, but certainly when I lived in the area everyone knew about Alcoa and Reynolds, though I don't think either was operating by the time I graduated. My family was never involved with the local aluminum industry, so my knowledge definitely has some gaps.
The road that goes through bauxite isn’t Reynolds. It’s just bauxite highway. The two ends are Edison and Reynolds road, but they both stop in Bauxite. We have the almatis plant, but it was the Alcoa plant for 80 years, before it was bought by almatis. There are thousands of acres of land that are marked with no trespassing signs with Alcoa’s trademark on them. I e seen crazy things in the woods. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of lakes and ponds nothing can grow or live in, holes you can drop glow sticks down, and never see the bottom of, etc. I’ve been chased off Alcoa land on dirt bikes and four wheelers more times than I can count. I grew up in bauxite, and have loved in saline country my entire life. Bauxite was the largest producer of aluminum on the planet during ww2. Idk anything about Alcoa, TN, but Adam got this one wrong.
As someone who lives in Hardin valley and drives through Alcoa regularly….it makes me so damn happy to see this. My grandpa worked in the Alcoa factory for a long time way before it became arconic. He passed last year from lung cancer that he got from asbestos in the factory. Still so cool to see someone with as much of a following as you in a town I recognize.
As the sign has been in a few shots: Vose Road is probably named after the railway engineer George L. Vose who wrote the book on railway engineering (two of them even).
"Vose Road is named in honor of the family name of the mother of Alcoa’s first mayor, C.L. Babcock, one of the founders of Babcock Lumber Co., the forerunner on (in 1969) present Veach-May-Wilson." www.cityofalcoa-tn.gov/384/Street-Names
@@dlmhdlmh because its spelt different in different places "Aluminum" and "Aluminium", much like "Color" and "Colour". it was originally Aluminum though, them silly brits changed it for some reason... just like soccer.
@@Poke5555TheBossit was originally Alumium, then changed to Aluminum then further to Aluminium. As for Soccer. It was originally called Football. Then a governing body was formed and called association Football to differentiate it from other forms such as Rugby Football. And some posh toffs shortened it to Soccer and Rugger. While the rest of the country carried on calling it football. The Americans picked it up along with Rugby from the rich transatlantic hobnobbers. They ended up turning Rugby into what they call football today. While it evolved rather differently in the UK into Union and League. I guess calling those Unner and Leager wouldn't really roll off the tongue.
I love the little editing quirk you have of putting "hi" when we can see something of the camera or "bye" when you lose a piece of something. It's very cute, I like it a lot.
Both are correct but in another more important way Americans are correct. We stuck with the name given by the guy who discovered it and isolated the new element: Sir Humphry Davy. The Brits changed the spelling because they just thought their version sounded better. Seems disrespectful to the discoverer, himself a Brit. Both spellings are accepted by the IUPAC, which is actually the final word on the matter.
@@SZvenM I can see on Google Maps that Curie St. has no initial. For some of them there's no initial and for some you may have seen, like Newton, the first letter is "W" which means "West", not "I" for "Isaac".
That sign 🤬 gets my goat too, as a native Blount Countian 😂 Thank you for this great informative video, generation's of my relatives supported our family working at Alcoa.
Fun fact, that N. Hall Rd was probably named after Edwin Hall who furthered the discovery of the Hall Effect. This is the name for the voltage difference produced in a conductor when current is passing through it and it is in a magnetic field.
It might be Charles Hall, the American scientist who, contemporaneous to Paul Heroult of France, discovered the electrolysis process for aluminum production, which is why it's also know as the Hall-Heroult process.
8:11 most of India's passenger railways also have their own railway gauge, commonly known as 'Broad gauge', which is wider than the standard railway gauge.... funnily, this Indian broad gauge is used on the San Fran BART, idk why
Fun fact: Span also doesn't have the same railway gauge as the rest of the world, while Portugal (which only borders Spain) does. That's why you always have to change train when getting into Spain. Also, they're fixing it with the new high-speed railways which are standard gauge.
I grew up in the "Aluminum City", New Kensington PA, a suburb of Pittsburgh and the site of the first production aluminum plant in the USA, by the Pittsburgh Reduction Company, later Alcoa. In 1970, the plant closed and we heard the production would be taken up by a plant in Tennessee, which I assume was the Alcoa TN plant. The entire city of New Kensington hated Tennessee in the 70s, cause "they took our jobs". The poor rust-belt town still is on its knees, down to about 10,000 people now from a population in the 1960s of about 25,000.
That's the big issue with a town only having one manufacturing plant. Manufacturing creates HUGE job markets. Manufacturing can create towns, but when that manufacturing leaves and there is nothing to take it's place the town slowly but surely starts to die. Look at all the textile mill towns of America, I'd say they had it earliest and worse so far.
You can rub off pure aluminum metal with abrasive paper, not just oxide. The oxide is very hard and white (like in an uncontaminated car polishing paste). Pans may get black because the alloys that break but don't bend also contain copper.
8:11 it's not just Russia, a lot of the world doesn't use standard gauge. India, Japan, most South-east asian countries, many countries in Africa, and nearly all of South America use a different railway gauge than standard gauge. Even in Europe Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Finland, and former USSR countries use a different gauge.
My Grandparents were displaced twice by TVA. First from the Red Hill area in the Norris watershed. Second from the riverside property where the Bull Run Steam plant is now located. Both times they were satisfied with the compensation. Not everyone has that kind of story to tell.
There's also a fascinating story about how Alcoa fell on hard times in the 1980s, but turned their fortunes around in large part due to a renewed focus on safety.
Adam wishes streets were named after not white male scientists only to ponder another second and realize all the other ones were hangers-on and so incredibly minor in their contributions it'd be silly to put Edison, Newton and Darwin next to George Washington Carver 😂
Just wondering why we "must not forget" that the town was segregated. The entire flipping south was segregated. The longer nitwits continue to pound that nail, the harder it will be to just get past it. It happened. It sucks. All we can do is move forward and do better. But barking that we "must not forget" that the town was segregated a literal HUNDRED YEARS AGO in the middle of a video about a town built around aluminum............ You virtue signaling is showing
If they did name a street after someone who is not a white man, who would they use? The only one I can think of is Curie, but a quick Google search shows that there is a Curie St. there.
Nah, man Al2O3 is white, that's what causes aluminimu tarnish. The grey stuff on your napkin is actually just Aluminium. It's a soft metal so it's fairly easy to just shear some off it's surface even with a napkin. Also, notice I wrote aluminium, because that is the correct way to spell it 😅
I moved to Maryville, TN about a year ago, right on the border of Alcoa, to do my PhD at the University of Tennessee, absolutely crazy to see the streets I drive every day in an Adam Ragusea video! If you drove on 129 to get here from Knoxville, you’ll know why they call Alcoa Highway “I’ll kill ya” highway 😅
My hometown of Leverkusen in Germany originated as somewhat of a company town as well, though there already were some villages that were incorporated into the new town. If someone outside of Germany knows about Leverkusen, it's generally either because they are football (or soccer) fans or because they are familiar with the chemical industry. The big one is obviously Bayer, but there's also a Dynamit Nobel plant here and lots of others.
A quick google search suggests there werent many scientists of other races that did such monumental work back when the town was created. Now of course had they received the level of education and equal treatment in the field im sure there could have been as many if not more, but there simply werent.
@@pariscloud2907 bullshit. It's a video about history, you're just triggered that he mentioned something that puts some white people in a negative light. So fragile
