The Secret Life of Machines is playing on The Science Channel! How cool is that! I thought I’d lost this show for good ten years ago. Of course, it’s awfully dated now…
Go Tim and Rex!! Nothing phony just two guys doing what they love, I have a dozen episodes on VHS. They sort of remind me of Adam and Jamie from mythbusters.
I don’t get the Science Channel, but I envy those who do, because TSLoM is one of the best shows ever produced. I’m sure it must seem dated today, but I bet it’s still worth watching. If you’ve never seen it, I suggest you catch an episode – you’ll probably get hooked.
I had never heard of it until it showed up on The Science Channel a while ago. Every few months, they do an entire weekend of classic science TV shows – Mr. Wizard, Connections, etc.
I found “Secret Life of Machines” fascinating, charming and really educational. I didn’t realize how old the idea for fax machines was, for instance.
This one was a big favorite when I was a kid—and I was lucky enough to tape all the episodes when the Science Channel ran a marathon a few months back. Sweet. 
They’re all sitting on my TiVo waiting to be burned. 
I first saw these about 6 or 7 years ago on the Discovery Channel. Even though some of the electronics they show are dated, the shows themselves still hold up perfectly well.
Previous comment aside, why oh why has this show not been released on DVD yet?!
Resurrecting this because I just remembered this show and found you can watch all 18 episodes on YouTube.
Anyways I love this show! I remember watching it when it came on late at night on the Discovery Channel when they were still new. The crude animations are awesome and often wonderfully bizarre. It’s amazing how interesting something as mundane as a sewing machine or vacuum cleaner can be.
Always bloody unnerving to wake up to a thread I started before . . . well, before anything that defines my current life had happened.
You got me before coffee, even.
The sewing machine episode is the episode that I remember best. I never really understood how it worked until I saw their giant mock-up with one guy operating the needle and one guy operating the bobbin.
zombie or no
there is nothing dated about explaining reality. a well done show.
as i recall it did good on the sewing machine. a complex machine. i also fondly recall a ‘how it works’ book i bought as a teen which had maybe 6 pages of text and diagrams on the machine.
The episode on the fax machine was great too. I saw it when I was a teenager and it’s when I learned why digital communications are more reliable than analog.
Between The Secret Life of Machines, Mr. Wizard’s World, and The Mechanical Universe, I learned an incredible amount of science and engineering from watching TV.
The Mechanical Universe was fantastic for their math explanations.
Yes it was. I’m a math professor, and when I teach calculus I always tell my students that I learned to take derivatives from watching tv.
**EEEEK! Almost ten years ago!! :eek:
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I don’t think this is a violation as I’m pretty sure the owners of the show make this link available, so go to: The Secret Life Of Machines to download avi files of the shows directly. It was made available by the show’s creators because they tried to do a DVD release deal but they couldn’t find a backer who thought it would be profitable enough…
One of my favorite shows ever.
Aside from the production values (which were crude even for the time), I hardly consider it dated at all. The internals of vacuum cleaners, washing machines, refrigerators, and auto engines haven’t changed a bit in the past few decades (or really the past century for that matter). Today, they have some junk electronics slapped on the outside but that doesn’t change their underlying machinery at all.
Yeah, VCRs, fax machines, and word processors aren’t so common anymore. And they don’t cover cell phones. They’re still interesting machines, and the fundamental components are still common with other machines.
I love their theme song, animations, and crazy constructions. Their clunky but genuine presentation is more compelling than just about any slick modern presenter.
I think what sets “Secret Life of Machines” apart from other “how it works” or “how it’s made” shows is the depth of their explanation; they don’t just show you that a vacuum cleaner is a hose connected to a fan connected to an electric motor, they show you what an electric motor is and how, and more importantly why, it works, and how the device evolved from its invention into the familiar modern version.
Absolutely. Going into the history also illustrates the critical technologies needed to enable a new machine. The electric motor was crucial for practical vacuum cleaners, and they demonstrate this well when they show off all the absurd and useless human-powered models that came before.
Connections is another favorite series (at least the first season… later ones degraded IMHO) for this same reason. You don’t really understand a technology unless you know the things that led up to it.
That’s why the fax machine episode was one of the best. Because it wasn’t just about the facsimile device, it essentially covered the whole history of long distance information transmittal, including semaphore towers, early analog electronics, to digital. With awesome full-scale mock-ups and demonstrations*!* This episode and the one about the photocopier were, IMO, the most technically interesting.
Yep! You get the idea that most machines have a very simple idea at their core. Also, most machines are really just special cases of more general and simpler machines. Their demonstrations really strip away the unnecessary detail and show the core idea.
A typical explanation for a fax machine is liable to start with “an electronic sensor scans the image…” but that’s gotten it wrong already–TSLoM points out that the fax was patented 150 years ago and there were no electronic sensors then. The principles of the machine–digital transmission, converting an image into scanlines/pixels, time-synchronized systems, etc.–came much earlier and have nothing to do with computers or electronics.