They need to do a show on how those machines are made. Are they made with more machines? What makes those machines?
I like the music, too. When they hit it just right, it’s dead-on ‘video game music’.
“Now the unfinished bushings must jump from platform to platform collecting ring stars and avoiding death at the hands of the ninja cyber-bunnies. Approximately 25% of the bushings are eliminated and melted down into pre-sized zinc sheets.”
Exactly. That could go all the way back to the monks making typesets or something… 
Seriously, that is something I’ve thought of. Nearly every one of those factories uses some extremely specialized, if not one-of-a-kind machines. I’m sure there’s a whole industry out there that makes custom manufacturing equipment, and it’s probably fabulously expensive. It would be interesting to see how that stuff’s made.
An episode of Made In America had a company that designed production line machinery. That was an interesting example of meta-industry.
My dad designed them! Well, not all of them, but he worked for a company which makes quite a lot of different products, and his job (Research Fellow - yes, even his female counterparts were Fellows) was to take some invention someone had come up with (that was my grandfather’s job once upon a time - to invent the thing) and to figure out how to mass produce it. He’d come up with line assembly plans, and sometimes had to figure out how to make the machines to make the parts he needed to make. He spent years working with a LASER company in Germany, trying to develop a LASER which would cut some sort of plastic chunk into little tiny regular pyramids - but then he had to invent something which would test those pyramids to make sure they were all even, and that took more years. The final product in this case? Non-woven fabric. The kind you find lining diapers and maxipads. His idea was to use water pressure over those little pyramids to tangle fibers. (Which, I might add, he says he thought of when I was a toddler and he was giving me a bath - he watched how my long fine hair tangled in the bathwater and got his idea.) He spent a good two decades or more on this project, while also designing and testing line assemblies for other goods.
He had a lot of cool stuff in his office that was dreamy for a kid - he had one of the first CAD drawers and color printers and little machines that would go “puff!” and spray a spray of perfume on a product every 0.64 seconds as it whizzed by on a conveyor…I agree, I’d love to see a show about that. But there are unbelievable amounts of things they won’t be able to show - especially because this is developmental stage work. Secrets abound. There were areas of his building he couldn’t take me in as a kid, because of confidentiality stuff. Like I was going to understand anything, much less retain it long enough to run to the competitor. But they’re really strict.
He’s retired now, though, so we’ll have to stalk another Research Fellow.
I’ve actually seen a few segments like that where they’re going over the production of feed stock (aircraft aluminum billets, plastic pellets) or parts of the equipment (machine tools, switches and relays, robotic arms). Not as interesting as you might think. Individually they’re fairly simple objects and mechanisms… its the choreography of the entire automated assembly line that’s awe inspiring.
The French site, Comment c’est fait, is better than the Discovery Science page, but the Discovery page has videos from the first episode!
Ouch.