The Magic of…Tubes

...Tubes?

Ok ok, I know what you’re thinking.

“I thought this newsletter was about showing us interesting videos from the internet! Why should I care about tubes?!?”

Well, here’s why.

Think of all the pipes and tubes around you right now. The ones that carry gas for your stove and water for your shower. They carry refrigerant fluid to keep your food cold and electrical cables that connect you to the internet.

We have the simple tube to thank for indoor plumbing – just for that, they deserve, at the very least a hearty salute!

But what else can those tubes be used for?

Well, it turns out, some pretty exciting things.

Picture this: you’re in Paris in the late 1800s and you want to meet your friend for un café. You say you want to meet up at 8:15. So you arrive at Café Paris at the agreed-upon time and look at your pocket watch, only to realize – your friend is late! C’est une catastrophe!

When they eventually do arrive they show you their pocket watch and it says they’re exactly on time. It’s 8:15. Your watch says 8:18. What gives? It turns out that without a shared central time-keeper, individual watch mechanisms can fall out of sync. This kind of mechanical misalignment is almost inevitable.

So, to better coordinate Parisians, a few clever engineers in Paris figured out that they could use tubes to carry compressed air which could be used to mechanically sync clocks posted throughout the city. In other words, it transformed people’s ability to be “on time.” (8 minutes)

This is a crazy – and extremely creative! – use of a tube. And the video does a great job of not only explaining the mechanism, but the consequence of this newfound “ontimeness” (that’s my word, not the video’s.)

But if Time is not up your alley or Paris is too far afield, you’ll be delighted to know that in New York City, one of America’s “modern marvels”, tubes are everywhere. And not for the reasons you might think.

Steam.

Yeah. Boiling water steam. If you’ve visited The Big Apple, you probably have noticed the billowing clouds emanating from the street or the sidewalk.

I lived there and I never knew that in New York, that very gas does everything from provide heating for buildings to preserving important artworks. Until someone told me. And I watched this. (7 minutes)

I wouldn’t exactly call it a modern marvel, but it blew my mind imagining that there are still miles worth of pipes pumping hot water all over the city.

And for our final tube of today, it’s not quite a tube at all.

And you have almost certainly seen one even if you don’t live in New York and Paris.

Hummingbirds!

I’m almost certain that you’ve never seen a hummingbird before and thought, “tubes!”

But when you think about those highly adapted specialized beaks, it doesn’t get more tubular than that.

I ended up watching this marvelous documentary (narrated by David Attenborough) while doing something mundane at work. I was so excited that afterwards I caught myself halfway through a rant at my girlfriend (yes the same one who endured my AI mania) about the incredible qualities of these tiny birds. Did you know they can pluck insects out of the sky? That some of them migrate across the gulf of Mexico? (52 minutes)

I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. I already loved “hummers” as they are referred to in the video, but now I’m even more fascinated by them.

And so, that concludes our newsletter on pipes and tubes.

What did you think? Any cool tube videos I missed?

— Francisco