Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Ball Bearings

Episode Date: December 19, 2022

Alex Schmidt is joined by comedy writers/performers Sam Reich and Mike Trapp (Dropout.tv) for a look at why ball bearings are secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources, handy links, and this week's bonus episode.

Ball bearings. Known for being metal. Famous for balls. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why ball bearings are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks! Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone. I'm joined by Sam Reich and Mike Trapp. And I hope you know Sam and Mike's work from all sorts of things, such as CollegeHumor.com and Dropout, the streaming service. Dropout has original comedy sketches. It has tabletop role-playing gaming done in an amazing way.

Also, it has its own game shows. And actually, Sam hosts a show called Game Changer. Mike hosts a show called Um, Actually. They're both each their own thing and fantastic. And Sam and Mike each have their own things going on, too. But it's I really want to highlight Dropout because it's independent video comedy online that is worth streaming, worth supporting. Like if you're looking for funny videos on the Internet, as many people are, Dropout's the place to be. Also, if you're looking for funny videos on the internet, as many people are, Dropout's the place to be. Also, I've gathered all of our zip codes and used internet

resources like native-land.ca to acknowledge that I recorded this on the traditional land of the Canarsie and Lenape peoples, acknowledge Sam and Mike each recorded this on the traditional land of the Gabrielino-Wartongva and Keech and Chumash peoples, and acknowledge that in all of our locations, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode, and today's episode is about ball bearings. Ball bearings are a patron-chosen topic, many thanks to Stephen Daniels for that suggestion. Also to Brett T. Giffen, to Heather E., and some other folks on the Patreon for either supporting that suggestion or independently suggesting it. I loved researching this topic because ball bearings are truly

something that is the title of the podcast. So please sit back or spill a bunch of ball bearings and then do the physical comedy of almost slipping on them a bunch. Like your arms are spinning and you're like, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop. But you never fall. I don't want you to fall. I just want the physical comedy. Either way, here's this episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating with Sam Reich and Mike Trapp. I'll be back after we wrap up. Talk to you then. Mike, Sam, it is so good to have you both on the show.

And I always start by asking guests their relationship to the topic or opinion of it. So either of you can start, but how do you feel about ball bearings? Extremely strongly. I have strong feelings about ball bearings. No, I don't have the strongest feelings about ball bearings, but I do have, I guess when I saw that my two immediate thoughts were my wife does roller derby and her uh skate wheels have ball bearings in them and it's it was a fairly regular occurrence that she would have to remove the bearings and clean them as like

part of her like keeping her skates up up to to snuff and i don't totally understand what was going on there it's like oh yeah of course you got to clean your ball bearings it's like i can yeah i guess that's important but uh i don't ask me like exactly what they're doing uh i don't know if i could tell you and similarly i i remember when i was uh and i'm curious to hear to you just because when i was living in korea this was in like 98 99 somewhere around there there was a there was like um a very short-lived like yo-yo craze and i was never totally sure if this was something that extended to the rest of the world or the u.s um or if it was just this particular area but um yo-yos for like three months got like super popular and then and then faded away into and the next big thing came along but in in that brief period, I remember there were like trick yo-yos and like that were designed to like spin for longer and stuff.

And those had the number of the number of bearings and springs. And there was like, whoa, this one's going to go forever. It's got eight ball bearings in there. And similarly, it was like, I don't know why you're saying that does that. But I believe you. It's a little magic totem that will do what it says. Wow. Theoretically, yo-yos

must have been popular at some point like originally what you're saying is like this was like a yo-yo renaissance yeah well you tell me was there a yo-yo renaissance in 98 99 where you lived in in the u.s absolutely not alex i i weirdly have a memory of it i did not get into it but i remember like everybody in middle school was suddenly like i learned 10 yo-yo tricks over the summer and i was like i did not i missed the boat but cool that's great i do feel like it came and went super fat like like yeah really a blip yeah and it was for me it was like oh i i love this craze because it's like oh the thing that's that's fatty is like is a very cheap like affordable toy and then it's just like can you learn how to do a couple of like kind of simple tricks that like you just have to practice

like a tiny bit and be like oh i know how to rock the cradle now yeah so it's 99 98 99 somewhere in that general area and then uh yeah just as quickly as it came it it seemed to to die out so this was post swing dance or was it post swing dance this was around the same period as swing dance um for a brief period of time actually you know what i'm gonna say pre-swing dance because I think this was before. Slightly before. Yeah. But definitely like post-pog. Definitely post-pog.

We're living in a post-pog world here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There were so many dexterity hobbies back then. Man, oh man. I can't do that stuff at all. Are you kidding me? So that is the extent of my relationship to ball bearings. Sam, how about you?

Yeah, Alex, in your email to us, you were like, if you don't know what this is, don't Google it. And I took that to heart. I think, to Trapp's point, that this, and I could very well be embarrassing myself, but that this falls under the general topic of mechanical engineering, I believe. Yeah. I'm relieved that Mike said yo-yos because my one reference for ball bearings, which could be accurate or not, is I believe that they power fidget spinners. Because during the fidget spinner craze I remember reading this would have been post yo-yo

post swing dance that I was reading some like think piece on fidget spinners and I believe that ball bearings had a role to play a role a role if you will I i'm gonna be doing that whole episode a lot of ball material here we go here we go uh yeah round roll a sphere circle i'm

just getting ready just training my brain it's like one of these things were like the i feel like the first time i encountered them it would have been like oh what are these for my dad would just been like they're ball bearings it wouldn't like okay that's enough of an answer and then even once like even like if you ask me now like and then like around i guess yo-yo time you're like what's the deal with these ball bearings what are they doing yeah and i feel like someone would have been like oh well you know they um they spin while the other thing is spinning and that helps it spin and i would go okay and again like clearly follow-up questions are required here

like there's like i just sort of accept that it's sort of this like oh it's like a like clearly like i'm sure there's going to be centrifugal force involved and wheels within wheels i have this sense that like that's sort of like what's going on here but but if you ask me like to explain it right now i would just sort of be like magic it's just uh things spin and then it helps some more that's true of so much of mechanical engineering where it's just like a total russian nesting doll of wikipedia articles you know i mean it's like oh it's balls that you know know, physically behave like this. Well, how? Well, why?

Well, there's no more humbling experience to me than like going to look something up on Wikipedia and learning that even the Wikipedia article is too complicated for you to understand. Like it usually happens to be like sometimes I'll like someone will mention some like mathematical concept or like a weird math paradox or something like, oh, what's what's this? How does this work? Or like some of those like unsolvable math problems and be like yeah tell me about this what makes it unsolvable and even to understand the base level it's like i just i don't know i'm lost from sentence one yeah i i am glad because ball bearings it turns out are in like many things but the the physics it turns out, are in many things. But the physics, it turns out, are pretty simple,

and I was really glad that I could digest it. They're in your food. Yeah, that's what I was thinking, too. There's ball bearings in your beef. Yeah, the way you said that, it sounded like an old 1950s, like, ball bearings and you. Ball bearings are in everything. The food you eat, the air we breathe.

Why, ball bearings are everywhere. See this plane? You'd fly out of the we breathe, my ball bearings are everywhere. See this plane? You'd fly out of the sky if not for ball bearings. Just footage of people choking on tiny metal balls. Yes, ball bearings. Your cereal. Your dogs can't run without them. Little pellets are ricocheting everywhere.

People are ducking. Well, Jimmy, if not for ball bearings, you'd fall apart in an instant. Your limbs would be on the floor. You're saying ball bearings keep me together? Yeah, because normally the show starts with a set of stats and numbers about the thing. But this week I want to start with one big takeaway of what it is. So here we go into takeaway number one. Ball bearings are a mechanical middleman for machine parts, especially parts that turn.

Ah, yeah. God, that's so simple. Alex, I feel like you just distilled a lot of like, what would have easily been 10 sentences on Wikipedia into something that I can really wrap my head around, so thanks. Yeah, sure. It's basically like instead of having a lubricant, you have a sphere is kind of the idea. Is that sort of right? You have two things that are spinning within each other, and rather than having things rubbing against each other to make them like slide against each other you just put a sphere there and like well now you're just gonna roll and you'll roll nice and smooth and like two things yeah two nested things spinning within each other will roll nice and smooth if they have a bunch of they're surrounded by a bunch of little balls exactly right yeah that's that's

a great way to put it like the super important uh like physics thing here is friction because a ball is only touching a little bit of a surface so for example a wheel and an axle if the the flat surfaces of the wheel and axle are touching each other all over a bunch of friction but if there's a ball bearing inside of that it's just the tips of the balls all the time yeah if that makes sense the tip of a ball is that a yeah sorry i i i was immediately my brain was going he's like alex said tip of the balls hold on a second there's something here yeah yeah yeah that's gonna happen a lot too um yeah i mean what immediately comes up for me is this thing of like yeah but there's still friction there i mean there's so small so small just just the gent's got to be some. But they're so small. So small. Just the gentlest touch.

The single point on your ball to touch. Not that much friction. The gentlest. The gentlest amount of friction. Tiny little stroke. Yeah, but like, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, ball bearings must, you're probably getting here, Alex, and I just jumped like 10 chapters into your programming plan.

But like ball bearings must wear out. They do. They must get worn down. Yeah. And they can break in there, too. And so that's like it's a key maintenance thing that people do. And and then in a lot of cases, it's easier to replace just bearings instead of letting the main things rub against each other and break each other so so it's also handy that way oh once again wear down the middle man

let them take the fall for everything um uh and and i and i guess they would need need cleaning as i said with my my wife cleaning her roller skates which i i uh yeah but even now i'm like it's okay. Yeah. I guess I, I see what's happening here. Like they're, they're keeping the wheels spinning nicely.

I don't know what is getting dirt. I just, this dirt does dirt collect in their dirt. And if people go online, they'll see like hundreds of different diagrams of ball bearings. But the, the general structure is usually hard metal balls, usually steel.

And then they're in some kind of groove or trough that they can roll through, and then there's outer and inner ring around that. And so sometimes there's some open space where stuff could get in. Other times there's not. But yeah, especially if you're in a competitive sport where your roller skates need to be faster than the other person, that's an advantage. You want to keep that clean and ready to go.

It's harnessing the power of a marble slide for mechanical advantage. Yeah. It also turns out I've never played marbles as a sport where you're hitting marbles against each other, but the ones called steelies, those are just ball bearings that people are using. It's just a metal marble. Did you say as a sport, Alex, is that what you said?

Is that very generous? Game is probably fairer. To the marbling community. How dare you say that? There's someone very offended. No, it is a sport. You can watch it on ESPN 26.

I mean, I'm more likely to watch that than I am some sports. I'd be super into competitive marbling. Yeah. But, uh, but yeah, and I'll, I'll have links to super visual versions of this, but the, the general thing is, is this almost surprisingly basic physics thing of just, there's less friction on a ball than there is on solid surfaces, touching each other, like whole flat surfaces. ball than there is on solid surfaces touching each other like whole flat surfaces and that's that's it that's just the principle and then from there they're sort of endlessly in machines like as i was prepping this i was like why don't i make a list of the things that have ball bearings in

them and then it's basically every machine that has a turning or spinning element like i there were like blogs for people who fish where it was like here's how the ball bearings and your fishing rod work for the reel and like it's it's in everything from giant planes to the littlest stuff are there are there aficionados of ball bearings like in the same way there are like experts like um like people get super into like trains and people get like are there are there people who like for whom the ball bearings like is not it's not just a part of a machine it's like no no i'm into these these little spheres wow i i didn't find them i feel like i kept finding aficionados of stuff and then as part of it they're like and i learned how to nail the bearings i'm so good at it they're

a ball bearing subreddit where people are posting pictures of their favorite turning functions, being like, look at how smooth this is. Let's take a look at the inside. This is so rude to the ball bearings, though, because it's like, oh, these ball bearings are essential to all these incredible machines we use every day. We don't care about the bearings themselves. It's true. I love fishing. I love these other things. But the actual bearings, no, they bearings themselves. It's true. I love fishing.

I love these other things. But the actual bearings, no, they wear out. Throw them away. Get a new one. Who cares? Yeah, they're propping us up. They're propping us up. They deserve more credit, which is what this podcast is all about.

Yeah. Yeah, I never think about it. And they're especially inside of a lot of mechanisms, I feel like. So if they're not visible on the surface, you're like, I don't know, that just turns. And then you walk away. Like you just don't put any thought into it. It makes you wonder, like before we were turning things, what were we doing? Like before the ball bearing, did things just go, you know, up, down, left, right? Did nothing, were there, were there there no smooth smooth turns before ball bearings the the sense i get is there were endless kind of bearings or they just let flat surfaces touch

each other yeah like there were yeah right very like bones knocking into each other without cartilage we just let things like wear terribly down yeah yeah and there's like wooden versions of bearings there's also well we won't get into, and there's wooden versions of bearings. There's also, well, we won't get into it, there's just other kinds of bearings in general. A similar one is roller bearings, where instead of balls, it's cylinders, like small cylinders.

And they especially use that for applications where the bearing needs to hold a lot of weight. Like a cylinder can be a little stronger for that. But that's a truly endless engineering rabbit hole that is is everything in the world and with all mechanical engineering the the rest of the show is all about these ball bearings all over the place and the next fascinating thing about them is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics oh good and this week that's in a segment called

I'm Counting Numbers Tonight. Knock on your door. One, two, three, four. I need glasses for my eyes because I'm reading stats at this time. And it was submitted by Willow Tanager. We have a new name for this every week. Please make it as silly and wacky and bad as possible. Submit to

SipPod on Twitter or to SipPod at gmail.com. I love that. Trap and I were laughing the whole time at that, but silently in order so that your listeners will get the sense that we were staring at you in dead silence. Yeah, that was some pro- it i really that was really uh not even needed but thoughtful thank you yeah no we're just claiming that we were laughing the

whole time we were actually just steely stared confused yeah sam and i were sidebarring with each other over text like what's going on right now? I cut out the part where I shouted, no, come back. You know, there was a lot of that, a lot of begging. I think I lost your connection for a second. This is the next day right now. Alex had to, like, take to email. He showed up to my house and begged me to come back.

Well, the first number here is about an astoundingly small ball bearing. It is 1.49 millimeters. Oh, that's very small. Yeah, it's less than 0.06 inches. So it's the diameter of the world's smallest ball bearing, 1.49 millimeters. Well, that's less than two millimeters. It's less than two it's more than one not quite 1.5 millimeters though more than one what is the smallest ball bearing used for and it turns out it's a japanese manufacturer rolled these out it's called minibaya mitsumi incorporated and these are for a specific part

of wristwatches uh there's a piece called the tourbillon which is like an additional mechanical stabilizer that needs the tiniest ball bearings commercially available wristwatches are themselves just total black magic it's it's amazing that we managed to pour as much mechanical engineering as we did into these teeny tiny devices like as long ago as we did i mean we've been doing this for what like again i'm gonna embarrass myself but hundreds of years how long has time been around because before time was invented we were like i don't know i couldn't tell you what was what we're doing i'm really into tiktok in general but this like sub genre of tiktok video these folks who clean mechanical watches and they like take old

watches that are super grimy and they pull them apart i'm sure i've stared directly into a ball bearing and just not known what i was looking at and they have all these specialized little tools and chemicals they use to to clean everything just so and then you watch as they carefully put everything back into place it's so satisfying i feel like um i i would like to see a video like that but then at the end of it the camera pans over and you just see one little tiny cog that they forgot to put in. And it's like, oh, no, no, no. Where was this supposed to go? Heavy side.

And the rest of the watch just bursts into flames. Like, ah, well, that's my fault. These tiny ball bearings, they're also like the thing that ball bearing companies are excited to try to achieve. The most exciting like engineering challenge is to make great small ones. And so there's information about the biggest ball bearings in the world. But on some level, that's kind of easier because as you get bigger and bigger, it's just huge. And like the precision is easier to get right i mean why is it really that we can't go smaller or is it that we don't have a good reason to because we

make like microchips that are the size of an atom or something like why why can't we make ball bearings that are one millimeter as opposed to one point that's insane that's insane sam you can't just no no 1.49 that's the smallest you can go you can't go one millimeter that's insane, Sam. You can't do it. No, 1.49. That's the smallest you can go. You can't go one millimeter. That's insane. You're talking out of your ass right now, Sam. I can't handle this right now. One millimeter ball bearing. I will admit that mere moments ago, I did not know what a ball bearing was.

But I'm ready to say, I think it's ridiculous we can't go smaller. I think you're ridiculous. They demand one millimeter ball berries i mean this is as i researched this i definitely developed great british bake-off brain where you suddenly are like that's not a crumb pat that's a stupid crumb pat everybody knows how to make crumb pat that you just heard of it two seconds ago yeah yeah and that's a great question like i i get the sense it's the need for an application because because this watch part is so tiny and, you know, it probably would get prohibitively expensive without a reason to mass produce it to the world's largest standard ball bearing. It's a Swedish manufacturer named SKF, and they make one that is for mining equipment, like huge mining equipment. I don't know exactly what part of the equipment, but

it's a bearing that's more than a meter long. Oh, my God. They each weigh almost eight metric tons. That is definitely both larger and heavier than I was expecting for the largest ball bearing. Yeah. And now I'm on the opposite side of that particular ball bearing where I'm like, that's too big. We can do,

we can do that with less. I'm convinced. Whatever that is. No, it's for, it's for a really big yo-yo sam and it's that yo that big yo-yo is not going to spin the way you want it to without those big old ball bearings the world's largest fidget spinner

when the next number here is a year this is the history of them. It's 1883. And 1883 is when like the modern industrial ball bearing was invented. Like the first person, the challenge was to build a machine that cranks these out at a very precise level and way so you can use them as bearings. And the first really good industrial version of that was from Friedrich Fischer, a German inventor in the town of Schweinfurt in Bavaria. Wow. Before that, we were hand-making ball bearings. Your local ball smith would craft them at a rate of only, you know, 30 a day.

I'd argue those old ones tasted better. You know, you could really taste the love that went into each handcrafted ball bearing um you know like are this industrial yeah for sure the market i mean you you raise an interesting point that i hadn't really thought about it that like i guess in order for ball bearings to be effective they have to be like truly identical um which does seem like kind of a pain in the ass yeah that's interesting right i guess what it raises for me is this thing of like we we must have known that they would be helpful before we made this machine so we had some like there was some preliminary ball bearing probably that existed before the machine made one, but then how effective could

that have possibly been, you know? Yeah, that's right. And it's also like, I think a lot of industrial goods where, you know, like before we had factories making forks, the town blacksmith would make a couple of forks for the richest person in town. And that was it, you know, like, like there were versions of this that were handcrafted uh but for but for such an expensive price there's some victorian lord at the top of a hill in a big manor with like a yo-yo that the townsfolk would all be really excited to come and see i demand more ball bearings i could do sick ollies on my skateboard yes lord i'll show that tony hawk tony hawk is like robin hood in the woods like he's a big outlaw they all can't stand

it's too good he's out there in the woods doing doing kickflips other skating tricks that I definitely know. But, uh, and yeah, this inventor, he, it really was a precision challenge. I'll also, I'm going to link a book called The Perfectionist by Simon Winchester. It's all about like the history of mechanical precision and trying to get things down to exact and more and more exact levels. But Fisher, he developed a machine for this in 1883 and then kept improving it. Eventually, he could make them to an accuracy of 0.0005 inches, which is a tiny fraction. I just think of this person on this pursuit.

Like, you know, you take anyone who has some kind of, you know, like particular passion and they're going to be a little bit hard to understand in some regard, right? They're sort of like mountain climbers, right? It's like, why are you climbing this impossible mountain? Like, it seems hard and bad. And it's just like, I just got to do it do what it's in me but even like mountain climbers stuff like there's a certain amount of like romance that you can see like you just have to imagine talking to this guy

at a party or something and it's like what are you up to now it's like i'm making the perfect ball bearing it's like didn't you do that last year it's like no but that was only 0.001 accurate i'm now getting it 0.00001 it's like you already you did it man you made a perfect sphere it's like no it's not quite there this guy was the absolute death of a cocktail party yeah oh it's like yeah everyone desperate to get away from this guy's like well i've made another ball and this ball is even more ball-like than the previous ball. I have to get out of here. You would not believe. I got caught in a corner talking to this guy again.

Just like, if you see him approach me, please steal me away. Oh, have you met my friend here, the ball bearing guy? It's like, oh, no, no, no, no. Oh, again, Sam. Perhaps you may recall last year when I told you about my perfectly spherical sphere. It might surprise you to learn that my sphere has gotten even more spherical in the ensuing months. Yes, please tell me about the journey from.0003 to.0004. Well, I don't have to tell you. I can show you.

Please look, Sam, at these two spheres. Now, which one would you say is the most sphere-like? The difference is so i there is no difference to the naked eye oh you're a cut up sam of course this one is the rounder sphere i mean they're my like yeah that's this guy yeah that's pretty much it this guy's totally revolutionized humanity but like he's in the process come to bed no i must have a rounder sphere today like imagine like a version of a steve jobs that's like you know standing in front of like 40 company employees inspiring the troops

and it's just like we can be rounder there is like there is one way this guy might have been cool and exciting to people in the time because uh the ball bearing industry one of its like first huge customers was bicycles so like the general availability of ball bearings it bicycles a lot more feasible, a lot more possible. Apparently, by the year 1896, Fisher had a company going making 10 million ball bearings per week. Oh, my God! Because bicycles, the way we have them in modern times, where it's not that one huge wheel,

it's evenly sized wheels in front and back, that got going in the late 1880s and bicycles really got popular then and they needed ball bearings for all of them this is like this is the way to be a very successful entrepreneur i've i've heard is like you find the technology that's behind the technology like Like you invent and patent that. And then anyone who needs an anything has to come to you for it. I have this like acquaintance of mine who I met through a friend of mine was, he invented something to do with the way

that video game characters are rendered or something. Like he patented this technology. And it's like oh yeah you would imagine that would be very useful and then it turns out he's worth like 250 million dollars or something like that oh my lord it's like you rather than going like deep on the vertical axis of something like bicycles you're going deep on the horizontal axis which is like what is something that a hundred different industries need i mean that that is kind of a metaphor for the ball bearing itself or it's like it's like i don't need to make something new i

just need to make the thing that helps the other things uh and if i if i get that then that's going to yeah yeah this is we're talking about like how precise they are and so how are they actually made because they're just like solid metal balls right yeah it's like hard steel is it just like poured into a cast or something or pretty much i'm gonna link about it because it's just pretty technical but uh but yeah it's casting steel and then a lot of polishing and sanding like there's some actual sand involved in smoothing them out. But it's a whole thing. Because it's just an ice cube tray.

Yeah. It just goes crack, crack, crack. It's dumping. Well, you were talking about like the ball bearing factory for these bikes. And like I truly just like couldn't turn off like in my brain the sort of stupid looney tunes like uh just like conveyor belts with balls just like you know like rolling everywhere and it's like it's like i at first i was like that's ludicrous that's that's a dumb image and i was like no that could actually be it i don't really

know what it looks like when they're like at the ball bearing factory yeah the the video i saw it's a lot of like individual balls going down shoots in a line like that kind of like it's sort of a big marble slide. The cartoon you think? Yeah. That's ludicrous. I love that. Just the whole factory of ball.

Like the ball bearing factory would look like what like if you had to tell if you asked a child to describe what a factory is it would just be like that it'd be like machines move stuff and stuff rolls around why is that ball rolling down there it's like that's where it rolls oh okay why it's it's spinning distance from that classic comedy trope of like, well, dad works at the business factory. You know, what do we do? We make the metal balls. Yeah.

There's such like a atomic unit of all machines that. Yeah. It's like it's like a machine for machines. It's just it's just recursive at some point. Yeah. Yeah. Next thing here is a big trumpet sound for a big takeaway. Before that, we're going to take a little break. We'll be right back.

I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places, yes. I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson,

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And remember, no running in the halls. And they're also in a lot of vehicles in particular. And there's a couple other big takeaways for this main show that talk about that. Because here we go into takeaway number two. show that talk about that because here we go into takeaway number two during world war ii the british and the nazis tried to shut down each other's militaries by destroying each other's supply of ball bearings this was like each of those groups the british and the nazis had an idea at some point of like if we mess with their access to ball bearings, they can't build most vehicles and artillery. So let's do that.

I'm yeah, I'm going to say this is that cocktail party guy at work again. He's like, you know, the most important part of the war effort might surprise you. No, it's not your friend, the bullet. It's ball bearings. I mean, here he's doing a little better. He's being a little bit more interesting. It's like he's learned he can't talk about his factory for too long. He's bringing up the war.

I mean, that's like ball bearings are getting serious now. You know? Yeah. And this was especially World War II because World War I had vehicles, but we have that somewhat accurate mental picture of infantry in trenches. And there's not that many ball bearings involved. But World War II, especially the Air Forces, they needed ball bearings for everything they were doing with building a plane, running a plane. Apparently, like for one example, the German aviation industry in World War IIi they used 2.4 million ball bearings per

month just for building and repairing planes and so like at some point somebody in the british military and intelligence said like if they just didn't have ball bearings like they can't fly anymore right we we win that's it yeah the world runs on balls yeah yeah it's kind of like you know taking away their access to food or something as basic right it's just like you know you can't function without the this atomic unit and then you sort of imagine those like world war ii like propaganda posters where it's like like keep keep a tight grip on your balls or like Don't let old Adolf get your balls. A stern Uncle Sam being like, loose ball bearings will be the end of us all.

You might slip up. Just buy war balls instead of the bombs. I don't know. Big letters. There's a few sources here, especially the UK National Army Museum museum and smithsonian national museum of american history but yeah they talk about how like world war ii they needed ball bearings for planes tanks machine guns heavy artillery and submarines so horses this is weird

i don't know what they're doing in horses but there it is you want your horses to turn don't you how do you think horses move sir and there's an odd thing where that previous number story friedrich fisher is an inventor of like modern ball bearing production he also built that company and then he made his hometown schweinf the center of German ball-bearing production. Apparently, from the 20s to the 40s, the population tripled as the Germans built a bunch of different plants for making ball-bearings. And so then, like, Allied airstrikes— I'm sorry, Alex.

You're saying that the population tripled because there were so many balls in the area? Now, hold on a second. Now hold on just one minute. Let's be clear about this. I follow. Sure, sure. Yeah. It's funny that there's like a ball-bearing district in Germany then.

Like, you know, it's like, you know, you think about like, you know, being in entertainment and it's like, well, you got to be in New York or LA. Like, that's just where the jobs are. And there's someone who's like, listen, a job in in in ball bearings but i i just don't want to move to to frankfurt or wherever it is like it's well that's the that's the reality it is like frankfurt that's just where the action is if you want to get in that ball bearing actions like no you're going into vaudeville like your father and your father's father. No, I want to go to Frankfurt and get into ball bearings. I want to be in a factory making perfect spheres.

I mean, it's really interesting to imagine that there was a whole ball bearing economy, like an entire town basically ho hoisted up and and making sense economically by the grace of the value of tiny little steel balls i mean there's there's something both uh beautiful and horrifying to me about that like if i imagine that i am like clocking in and out every day to, to just make, to make balls like solid metal balls, it's like, there's something that,

that does feel sort of like, like it's really in your face, the sort of like existential, like what am I doing with my life every day to be like, it's like, I come in, I make the balls. Like what are the balls do?

The balls do everything and nothing. They are, they are everywhere and therefore they're nowhere. I make the balls and uh and that's what i do clock in clock out the the balls get made they ship out of the factory and then it's time to make new balls uh it's so like it's it's such like a perfect vague thing to make that it's like it's like all you could focus on is like the act of work itself and the process of being like this is my job yeah it's true like it's like you come home and there's the standard dinner table question of like how was work i feel like your answer would be like i don't remember did i go to work i don't

know yeah i also like the beautiful part of that though like. Like, it's so simple. Like, what you're getting up and doing every day is so simple that it almost turns work into something, like, abstract. You know? It's like what we do. And everybody does the same thing. So it's not like you're, like, it's almost like it's sort of. Everyone in this town does the same thing. You go to a party and everyone's like, oh, you're in the ball industry, too? Okay, cool. town does the same thing you go to a party and everyone's like oh you're in the ball industry too okay cool it's like it's weirdly like utopian and dystopian at the same time you know no no

competition we just all make the balls yeah it's almost meditative like just the balls roll through yeah but and and also in in wartime with this town in particular, like the Allies started targeting it with airstrikes in particular because it was of military value, all the ball bearings in the town. Things aren't peaceful in the town of ball bearings after all. Yeah. And also there was a specific Allied strategy session where they decided that ball bearing factories were a key thing they needed to eliminate. where they decided that ball-bearing factories were a key thing they needed to eliminate. In June 1943, the British and Americans co-signed an agreement called the Point Blank Directive, which laid out basically a power ranking of what were the most and least important military targets to hit.

And second out of 19 different kinds of things was ball-bearing manufacturing. It was second only to airplane factories making the actual airplanes like they said if we can knock this out they don't have an air force anymore and we should focus on this see i think that just makes it cooler like now you're like i mean you know you're you're wanted you're you're on the list to be assassinated yeah as a ballman and you're and you're probably bringing that up all the time right it's like you know they're like it's like what do you do it's like oh yeah i make i make little the little metal balls and it's like oh okay cool it's actually actually i'm a very important the military said i'm the second most important uh yeah person here so and it's quite dangerous yeah i mean i am a target i am high on the list of targets yeah the new top gun movie was originally going to be about the

ball bearing men uh and then this is just how important uh they are to they only became airmen on the sixth draft. It was ball bearings for writers one through five. Why aren't these ball bearings ready yet? It will be ready, sir. You think you can make a ball bearing one millimeter? I know I can. You're writing checks your body can't cash, Maverick. Tom Cruise insisted on making the ball bearings himself I heard that yeah he's so committed it's great

and then there's a viral clip of him like hurting his hand a little bit like oh ow like wow he tried so hard well and uh and yeah and so the the British and Americans they were not able to knock out Nazi production of ball bearings before they just won the war. So that strategy didn't do it. But also before 1943, early in the war, the Nazis tried to cut off British access to ball bearings. And they did it by doing a naval blockade of Sweden. So Sweden enters the picture here. And Sweden was officially neutral

throughout the war, but they were a major iron mining country and a big producer of simple metal machine parts, including ball bearings. And so the Nazis early in the war, like take over Norway and Denmark and then do a naval blockade of the water route between Sweden and Britain to try to cut off British access to the ball bearings they bought. So Sweden was manufacturing the ball bearings? Yeah. And apparently Britain was getting about 20% of its ball bearings from Sweden at the start

of the war. And so the Nazis were like, this is a way we can ground a bunch of their stuff if we knock that out. It's such a strange supply line to think about like of being like you think about cutting off like supply to food and like supply to to arms but like just like a a giant boat full of little metal balls yeah yeah middle supply so they weren't supplying they like hadn't picked sides but they were supplying one side not the other is that right yeah and then i'll i'll link about the details of it, but like throughout the war,

Sweden did a lot of sort of supplying both sides, but increasingly the Nazis later in the war is they were cut off geographically and physically because they were, it was, it was like, if we supply them some, they won't turn around and invade us and we can stay kind of neutral. So there, there was, there there's like it turns out a very in some cases bitter historical debate about sweden's role in world war ii like what side were they really on is it a whole thing yeah sure if you look at the ball bearings yeah yeah i could see them also like trying it's like it's like you're sending these ball bearings to to the allies and it's like no these are the ball bearings for digging equipment.

And I'm listing all the other uses of ball bearings. These ball bearings are not for planes. That's not what they're for. These are strictly for roller skates and for mining equipment and little watches. That's what we're doing here. This is soup for my family. A giant crate of yo-yos being sent from them to the British.

It's like, no, no, no, these are just for entertainment. Yeah, and then these were also, it was important enough to Britain that they actually organized a secret blockade run and snuck a bunch of ball bearings through like the nazi blockade early in the war there's a it's a british it's a clandestine guerrilla force called special operations executive in early 1941 they used small boats to sneak thousands of tons of ball bearings to the uk from sweden as like an early success someone with like ball bearings and the bottoms of their shoes they're trying to sneak through the dark and just making like little like loose change rattling

sounds everywhere they go it's like okay we're playing cool we're getting to the checkpoint they get knocked over they just roll forever demands his hat gets taken off he takes off his hat and like hundreds of ball bearings fall yeah yeah this was like a whole espionage focus like you know there's all the james bond type espionage stories and then there were these guys just slipping it through yeah yeah so funny there's like the moment where they get the ball bearings and like one of them's you know like sort of tempted to be like you know we could just take these ball bearings and run there's enough ball bearings here to start a new life you can just get out of this whole dang thing the guy shoots him for even suggesting it you traitor well and uh and then there's one more main takeaway for the main episode here

and it's it's oddly connected to it but takeaway number three ball bearings from the world war ii aviation industry helped perfect and popularize ballpoint pens. Oh. It turns out, like, I had never thought about it, but most ballpoint pens, it's a metal single ball is the ballpoint. So when we say ballpoint pen, we are referring to, we might as well be saying ball bearing point pen. Yeah, pretty much yeah whoa but we wouldn't because that's a tongue twister yeah that's that's sam there's terrible marketing you'll call it a ball bearing point pen no one will buy that it's out of control

first you want a one millimeter ball bearing now i can't talk to you right now sam i'm calling the ball bearing point pens from now on because i'm going to bring this anecdote up to make myself look smart. Now I'm going to have to beg Mike to stay on the podcast again. Oh, man. Was it the same bearings that were used in the planes that were then used in ballpoint pens? Or what is the direct connection between those two? Was it the same bearings that were used in the planes that were then used in ballpoint pens? Or what is the direct connection between those two? Yeah, so it turns out the chain is people invented ballpoint pens in like the late 1800s, but they didn't get the technology and the mechanical engineering to work well until all the way in the mid-1900s.

It took some decades. They weren't round enough, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. Like, and precision. And, and then the, the first company that really got it right, they did it partly by getting good ball bearings from the same people supplying the British Royal Air Force with ball bearings. Like the, they, they machined ball bearings well enough that they were like,

give us some really small ones for pens. And then that was it. Oh, wow. And the main sources here are a piece for Air and Space magazine by Rebecca Maxell and a piece for BBC Future by Stephen Dowling. It turns out that the idea for ballpoint pens started with an inventor named John J. Loud, who filed a U.S. patent in 1888. So very old. He was like, 1888 is my idea. But the whole pen just didn't work practically. And he also

invented it just to write on uneven surfaces or like wood. He didn't realize that you could use it for all writing. And so his version of a ballpoint pen tore through paper. It was like only for hard things and nobody liked that. It was just for scratching that S onto, that cool S onto his desk. That's what he invented it for. Yeah, the Stussy pen. That's interesting. That's definitely like not the primary use case when it comes to writing

implementations like i want to create a pen only for the stuff you shouldn't yeah yeah i can't wait to write on some paper with this oh no no sir sir please no uh you're horribly mistaken oh this isn't for paper this is for vandalism that's what this one's for. Yeah. And then like, he just kind of let that patent lapse. And then decades later, other people picked up this idea because, because at the time there had been like dipping something in ink pens and then fountain pens came along where you have the ink inside the pen, but they wanted something that writes more smoothly and more evenly. And a Hungarian journalist named Laszlo Biro filed a British patent in 1938. And that was the first like modern ballpoint pen maker was this guy.

And, but he also struggled with the technology, like mainly just getting the pen engineered properly in particular, getting the ink to work well and the ballpoint to work well. That was just difficult early on. I know this section only because I at one point was like, why do British people call ballpoint pens biros? And I had to look it up. But yeah, it's named after this dude. Exactly. It's a guy.

That's interesting. So the ballpoint pen, I mean, I feel like maybe... Ballbearing point pen. um but that's uh but yeah it's named after this dude exactly yeah it's a guy interesting so the ballpoint pen i mean i feel like maybe ball bearing point pen i feel like intuitively i know this but it the ball is like moving around as you it is like rolling around as you use it yeah like imagine imagine uh this is great great for podcasting imagine my finger here you have the ink inside and the tip is the ball so the back of the ball is always getting touched with ink and so as it rolls it picks up ink and it just keeps picking up ink from the back and spreading it onto the paper in the front because it's rolling yeah that is that's really interesting yeah so how come in other types of pens um you know, the ink doesn't just spill all out?

What keeps the ink in pens? Yeah. I mean, like, it could be that, like, most pens are bought. But I don't think, like, this is my favorite pen. Also great for a podcast. This is the G2. Oh, yeah, sure. That also used to be a bomber.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. the g2 um oh yeah sure that also used to be a bomber yeah yeah yeah yeah this is actually uh this is made of uh old landmines um don't click it the wrong way whatever you do it's really not behave 007 but with all pens like all writing implements ever apparently also when ballpoint pens came out some people thought they were like killing creativity because with a fountain pen the ink's coming out unevenly in a way where you can do interesting calligraphy kind of stuff and a ballpoint pen it's just the same line all of the time and they were like oh writing will lose all personality but we don't mind it we

just got into it oh that's so funny it's the same as the ball bearing conversation we're having earlier it's not unique anymore they're all streamlined now that we make them by machine yeah personality will be lost yeah that is interesting is that is that something that i mean i guess i could see i'm i'm trying to imagine caring about that like i'm just like putting myself in that mindset where it's like oh i guess you could see if someone's like stroke was a little bolder in one in one area or that feels like the nth degree of like reading into a text you know or like you get a text that just says like sure and you're like

what does this mean he says sure like does that mean like sure does that mean like sure like what is going on here but like if you could also be like, the S is a little darker. Like, there's more ink on that S. Do you think because he was like pushing down hard? He was angry. He was frustrated. And there's a frustrated S there, right? Yeah.

But I think it's also just individualism loss, right? Like, I'm sure this was the same was true when we moved to, you know, the printing press that it's like so much personality is lost in that transition. And it'll be the case again, when all of our jobs are taken over by artificial intelligence. Well, it'll be like, oh, now the individual, you know, can't as much come through because it's the amalgamation of all of our thoughts and work for forever and ever. But we'll get used to it. I love I love imagining the hipster who's shitting on the Gutenberg Bible, you know,

where it's like, finally, like, the word for the masses. We can turn around books like this. And there's some, like, monk who's just like, ugh, every letter looks the same. There's no personality in here at all. It's like, but yes, books for everyone, books for the masses, education can spread. It's like, yeah, but what do you lose? Is it worth it? Is it really worth it in the process? Yeah time i write god it's a little different you know

depending on context it's like i feel like that really comes through and is lost here where are the little bunnies in the margins where are the snails where's the gold leaf in the first letter? There's nothing here. But then this guy, Biro, decides to start a whole company for making these. He also gets support from the government of Argentina. So he and his brother moved to Argentina to start making these. But the two breakthroughs they need to make the pens actually work consistently is his brother is a chemist and makes better pen ink that will flow the exact right way. Oh, nice.

And then Laszlo Biro gets connected to the British Air Ministry and convinces them that the air ministry needs ballpoint pens because they'll work better at high altitudes. Like they'll flow more evenly. And so the air pressure won't mess with the writing. Oh. Now, is that actually true of ballpoint pens, or is that just his talking point? I believe it is true as well, yeah. Okay. So he did, like, smartly use science.

He was like, I'm not making it up. And they're like, ah, it's true. It is fun to imagine an aviator, like, thousands of feet in the air, but writing with like a big feather quill something with a combination of like high tech and like really old he's like this something's wrong here like he gets distracted and just writes a bible like ah dang it this wasn't my job i was navigating okay i'm supposed to be taking notes on the coordinates of this uh it's that i wrote a beautiful poem and then so then byro convinces the british air ministry to

set aside a little bit of ball bearing production for ballpoint pen tips and then they make great pens with that and then continue to do that after the war and that helps make like ballpoint pens were apparently very faulty until the 1940s and then they finally started working well so so sorry to be to be clear then the uh because i got my timeline confused for a second there he was he was still getting the ball bearings for these ballpoint pens like wow what like during the war when they were like these ball bearings are the most what like during the war when they were like these ball bearings are the most precious thing to the war effort right now uh and they were still like yeah but use them for your pens exactly yeah because they he convinced them like part of your war effort is

the navigators on bombers need to take notes with pens and so please help me use a couple of tiny ball bearings for this and they made it happen happen. I guess you probably wouldn't have been making a very tiny plane with those tiny ball bearings, right? Like, you probably weren't using those for anything other than pens at that point, I would guess. Yeah, and apparently he sold them 30,000 pens. And 30,000 pens is an amount of pens. But like we said before, the Germans were using millions of ball bearings a month for their air force like the at the scale they were making these at it was a drip in the bucket it was fine yeah yeah yeah they're all in one drawer in one of these people's houses just like all these pens and not one of them works i swear there's 30 000 pens in here they're all

dead i should just throw them away but no i was throwing them back in the drawer folks that is the main episode for this week my My thanks to Sam Reich and Mike Trapp for really diving deep on this topic that is very mechanical engineering. And, you know, not every comedian would take this journey with me, you know, so I really appreciate both of them doing it. Anyway, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now. If you support this show on Patreon.com, patrons get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is a kind of ball bearings that make buildings more earthquake-proof. Visit SIFpod.fun for that bonus show,

for a library of more than 10 dozen other bonus shows, and to back this entire podcast operation. And thank you for exploring ball bearings with us. Here's one more run through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, ball bearings are a mechanical middleman for machine parts. Takeaway number two, during World War II, the British and the Nazis tried to shut down each other's militaries by destroying each other's supply of ball bearings. And takeaway number three, ball bearings from the World War II aviation industry helped perfect and popularize ballpoint pens. Those are the takeaways. Also, please follow my guests. They're great.

And in particular, please follow them to dropout.tv. Dropout has an entire library of classic college humor stuff and an entire growing every week library of new shows. And if you support it, you get not only all those shows, but also a Discord to hang out with other people who are enjoying it and talking about it. And both my guests this week do a lot of things there, including each hosting a game show. Not a lot of super funny game shows out there, but Dropout has multiple of them. Multiple of them? Weird phrase. Anyway. Sam Reich hosts Game Changer. Game Changer is a game show where there are different rules every episode.

The show is different every show, and it's awesome. And Um, Actually is hosted by Mike Trapp. That is a show of competitive correcting each other. You know, that phrase, like, um, actually, like that vibe. But both shows are comedians as contestants and very, very funny shows. Also, I got to guest on Um, Actually once. So you can look that up if you check it out on Dropout. But please check out Dropout in general. It's a really cool evolution of college humor and also totally new thing all at once and really rooting for them. And also they make awesome stuff.

So it's worth your time and your support. Check it out. Many research sources this week. Here are some key ones. I lean out a lot of World War stuff from the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, also the UK National Army Museum for how the Special Operations Executive worked in the UK, an amazing piece for Air Force Magazine by John T. Carell. Then also I want to highlight Air and Space Magazine and BBC Future about ballpoint pens.

Anyway, find those and many more sources in this episode's links at sifpod.fun. And beyond all that, our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by the Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Get that logo on a t-shirt at SifPod.store, a store in partnership with Topotico. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks. Go to our patrons. I hope you love this week's bonus show.

About earthquakes and more. And last thing, I have a quick programming note here. Last year, I put up a holiday message instead of a full episode on the Monday falling between Christmas and New Year's. I think that was a very healthy practice. And so I'm going to keep that practice going. December 26th, there's going to be a holiday message for you. That's next week. Then the week after that, a full new episode to ring in 2023. So I'm thrilled to say we will be back with a message next week. And then after that, a full new episode of secretly incredibly fascinating.

So how about that? Talk to you then. Thank you.