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In it's simplicity it is genius. I had no clue this was a thing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirephoto

I really like these old "explaining" films. The pedagogical level is far higher than what seems common today. And the they take their time to convey the message.

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>I really like these old "explaining" films. The pedagogical level is far higher than what seems common today. And the they take their time to convey the message.

I wonder what happened? I have been blown away by some of the older explainer videos from the 40s and 50s, esp. some of the military training videos for vehicle repair, electrical engineering, etc. Very concise and very clear explanations, always with visual examples. Today, we have things like 3brown1blue that are kind of like that, but in general you don't see information transfer like this either online or in school (at least not in my experience).

The one about how a differential works is fantastic. It just goes step by step through showing the problem to incremental improvements until the final gearing system is “simple”.

My guess is that back then producing films was expensive cutting edge technology, and the few films that got made hired the brightest and best, and gave them time to get it right.

Today any unemployed bozo can make explainer YouTube videos. That great as a "democratization", but the average quality is obviously lower.

Some quick googling shows cinematic film cameras in 1930/40 used to cost $100k-$300k adjusted for inflation.

Today, the cheapest Netflix-approved camera is $2k [0]

Lower barrier to entry is a blessing and a curse. Signal v noise, etc.

[0] https://noamkroll.com/the-3-most-affordable-netflix-approved...

It's even lower. The FS7 on that list is more like $1,000 these days.

(Not that I would consider all those cameras on the Netflix list cinematic. Some are geared more towards documentary.)

And not that it's contrary to the $1K price point but, I think, Apple's last event was filmed with iPhones albeit with a lot of expensive lighting and other gear/people.

Film reels were also a significant cost that's pretty much gone to zero these days.

This is the right answer

They were produced to convey information, not to generate clicks and ad views.

Youtube is full of videos like that. A few sample excellent channels:

https://www.youtube.com/@animagraffs

https://www.youtube.com/@engineerguyvideo

https://www.youtube.com/@Lesics/videos

The problem is more that they are drowned under the volume of content available.

Also Jared Owen which does an impressive work of 3D modeling to explain how things and places work. I’m amazed by the level of documentation you have to ingest to model things in such details.

Wow, thanks for sharing!

If YouTube had a Dewey decimal style clickable directory it would be a lot easier to find content.

Yahoo, more or less. You’re not wrong.

rip yahoo directory and dmoz.

A librarian friend had the same complaint.

The problem is that libraries Dewey decimals are managed by librarians who want to sort things correctly. YouTube would be managed by uploaders who wants their stuff to be managed _incorrectly_.

YouTube recommendations and search is a super interesting problem not just because of the scale but also because uploaders are an adverse opponent, trying to keyword stuff their spam.

The obvious solution is to actually have librarians correctly classify the videos. DDS focuses on the nature of the work itself, not on the keywords or spam in the content. Librarians understand how to class all kinds of works, and it should be relatively simple to build a DDS/MDS index (Melville Decimal System since it's open, see https://librarything.com/mds) for YouTube videos. Just like with books, disagreement on classification is inevitable and perfectly natural; there's no perfect classification scheme, though DDS/MDS does a generally good job.

Dewey Decimal is probably not actually appropriate but it would be nice to have a good and appropriate classification scheme be used.

> The obvious solution is to actually have librarians correctly classify the videos

Which videos? The 500 hours of video uploaded every minute?

All videos of accounts with more than X subscribers.

There is already auto captioning done by YouTube. It would be trivial to plug an ai that generates tags and classify each videos based on the whole content. I am sure they already do that.

I like the game boy graphics explanations by Jesse „system of levers“: https://youtu.be/SK7XT0DWqtE

I'll recommend a couple of other channels:

- Old Royal Navy instruction manuals and documentaries: https://www.youtube.com/@davidbober7035

My favorite is Hands To Flying Stations (1975): https://youtu.be/cALccuPShQc

- Historic films and clips, mostly focused on workplace safety: https://www.youtube.com/@markdcatlin

My favorite is NASA's Toxic Propellant Hazards: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ND2TeNfcmKA

That toxic propellant one is fantastic.

I'd like to throw in a recommendation for Huygens Optics: https://www.youtube.com/@HuygensOptics

Everything you ever wanted to know (and more) about light and lenses, explained in a way that's totally comprehensible if you learned electricity and magnetism physics in college.

Yes - he's one of the very best! I loved his 3 part series on making a reflector telescope from a single chunk of glass.

Those videos were the equivalent of 3brown1blue for their day. With YouTube, there are far more videos of this sort today than there were then.

Yes, however, nobody has (imho) done it better than The Secret Life of Machines did it back in the late 80s/early 90s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuUyt9RG7pk

Have you seen Technology Connections on YouTube?

Yeah, a bit dry and it doesn't always hit the spot with the tone.

I wanted to like it but couldn't.

A criticism I have with not just Technology Connections but plenty of similar channels is that each video seems to just be whatever they thought of doing next.

I would love something of the same caliber of quality but with a blueprint for an entire series that would cover the compete gamut of a subject.

A popular YouTuber mentioned on HN, and deservedly so, is Ben Eater. His series on building a 6502 computer on a breadboard is exactly the kind of blueprint-driven content I would like to see more of. He had a goal of beginning from a clock circuit and ending up with an 8-bit breadboard computer displaying ASCII to an LCD display and he delivered it in a series of chapters.

That series Ben Eater did was really fantastic. Between following along in Logisim and trying a more ambitious design afterwards, it was the most fun I've had in a long time.

It's simple, yet hard to execute well. Each sentence contains one piece of information to be imparted. The speed of speaking is slower - with emphasis on diction and pronunciation. There is a slight pause between sentences to allow the recipient time to comprehend what was just said.

Try it yourself - read some of the comments here in that manner and observe the difference.

I pretty much use YouTube as a MTV replacement to watch music videos only, so won't speak to the quality of instructional material you find there, but I was still in the military as recently as 12 years ago and the training material in the military was still terrific. This includes unclassified material, though I don't know how you'd find it as a civilian if, for whatever reason, you were interested in learning how to perform maintenance on a modern humvee or what not.

The technical manuals are all available through Army epubs, but even though they're not classified, you still need a common access card to login and use the site. A lot of them get mirrored somewhere the public can find them, but I would definitely not call the sprawl of where you might find them very searchable.

can a civilian obtain a common access card?

Keyword: ECA

I'm not in the US, so that sprawl sounds like my only option if I wanted to see what was available.

Where should I start looking? If there's enough high quality content, it might be worth it to download entire websites and index everything to classify and surface things.

Survivor bias?

Maybe they made plenty of trash explainer videos, and those didn't survive.

Though for economic reasons, that's clearly less true than today.

What happened is that the average attention span fell bellow 2 seconds. There is a book. “Amusing ourselves to death”. YOU can watch those videos. The average person today will be bored and tune out.

Check out Jared Owen's explainer 3D videos on Youtube. some of the best I've ever seen, and relatively recent. Example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iod6uwUGM2E

> The pedagogical level is far higher than what seems common today.

This is a growing pet peeve of mine. I used to think that advancing media formats and productions tools would generally make conveying knowledge faster, better and deeper. Instead, we see most media intentionally engaging in overall 'dumbification'. It's not just more content being shorter or more summarized, as I'm trying to compare 'apples to apples' here in terms of content targeting, length etc.

What’s interesting is you also see the is was sponsored by Chevrolet (on the title screen), so it seems monetization-wise, it’s no different than today when YouTubers have a sponsor read at the start of a video. I just wonder if then it’s simply a matter of more creators competing for less ad-money-per-person, which leads to the kind of “optimized” content we see today.

It’s the algorithm. You’re playing a different game when your content has to compete with and grab attention on its own vs when a gatekeeper decides to broadcast you at 3pm to every TV.

Does survivor bias account for this? Only the best/most worthwhile videos from the "old times" are archived.

Right now, we see every piece of crap uploaded to YouTube. No doubt there's awesome video content being created today - Smarter Every Day by Destin Sandlin seems to fit - but it's surrounded by junk.

No, almost every piece of non-live media that was produced from the 1940s onwards went into huge broadcast archives. Some of the media it was stored on was destroyed, or otherwise reused for newer broadcasts, but much of what survived wasn't due to the inherent quality of the content and we have vast amounts of it remaining. Take this compilation of 1960s commercials from the Prelinger archives [0]. These obviously weren't produced to the same quality as the Chevrolet videos, but it's also not drastically different from contemporaneous syndicated content. The pacing is slower than modern ads, most include practical demonstrations of why the product is better/necessary, and there's just less optimization towards the visual frenzy we see today.

[0] https://youtu.be/EGUuyewrNNo

A couple other good ones:

How Differential Steering Works (1937) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYAw79386WI

Flak (1943) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8zPNMqVi2E

The diff one is so good.

Note how they made a model in the wirephoto video too to show the concept but with painted rope.

Models seems to me to be a very good pedagogical tool.

Possibly the high water mark of such things was the "Secret Life Of Machines" series. Here is their episode on fax machines:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuUyt9RG7pk

> The pedagogical level is far higher than what seems common today. And the they take their time to convey the message.

I think that is true for some content, but there's certainly a contingent of content creators out there now putting out a lot of good technical explainer videos. They're doing it far better than your typical mass media content producers.

I agree completely. I have found so many great videos for woodworking, coffee (both roasting and espresso brewing), robotics, home construction, car repairs, computer/portable device repairs, etc. Youtube has made almost any hands-on activity so much easier for me to learn.

I prefer reading for theoretical concepts most of the time, but something more complex that I don't have the time to properly study is sometimes better served by a good video or series as well.

Practically, most everything I dig into it's using both, although I just now started using phind.com (thanks for the tip HN) to fill in some of the things all my sources seemed to be skipping over or presupposing, and that has helped me get answers to latent questions I had for quite some time. I really need those links out because I can't rely on AI generated information otherwise, of course.

The hard part was synchronization. We're used to synchronization being easy today, but it was really hard to synchronize anything until the 1980s, when phase-locked loops became easy and cheap.

Does the belinograph need syncing though? I imagine you would just have a waste ribbon around the photo and start it after the call with say a delay you both agreed too. Or maybe you could send light in some known pattern with a starter strip and the receiver could look at the lamp.

Attenuation most have been a problem though? I guess you could send some sort of calibration photo to adjust gain? I don't think practical FM signal modulation was a thing yet in the 30s?

You need to synchronize the spin rate of the drums on either end. If there's a difference of half a rotation over however many hundreds (thousands?) of rotations to transmit the photo, you'd end up with a completely distorted picture.

I had a pair of these transceivers when I was in my teens, from a somewhat later period, thanks to my grandfather who refurbished them from his time as a telegrapher at Western Union. Synchronization at startup took ten seconds or so while each unit adjusted its timing and apparently sent a correction signal to the other, drums whirling all the time and gradually matching initial positions. It looked like the most primitive process possible, but worked every time.

Yes, I was looking for the bit where they addressed skew. You can even see it in the demo with the string, horizontal lines come out wavy after transfer to the other spool due to small differences in synchronization.

The pedagogical level and the production values both have the same source - this is an advertisement. The Jam Handy Organization made what we would now call sponsored content. It is unfair to compare the production values of this to modern educational content or modern amateur content - they're operating at different scales and with different resources.

In the past - as in now - media production is driven by the demands of capital.

We can wax nostalgic for commercials all we want but comparing it to a different modern product does a disservice to the past and media workers in the present.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt45kdjb.16

That's Jam Handy. They were really good at that.

Some Youtubers should try that style. Neckbeards with headphones are so over.

Not sure what you mean by that but Steve Mould (physics/chemistry/engineering), Matt Parker (math), Primer (economics), AlphaPhoenix (electricity, lately), 3Blue1Brown (math), Fraser Builds (history of chemistry, alchemy), Ben Eater (computers), Gneiss Name (geology) and The Thought Emporium (genetics/miscellaneous) are some youtube channels I really enjoy that teach concepts by either making elaborate models, making elaborate animations, or just actually making the thing they're talking about from scratch.

As someone else also pointed out, this video about the differential is fantastic!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYAw79386WI

AT&T's "Similarities of Wave Behavior" is incredible.

OT but one of my favorite songs is made from an old video like that https://youtu.be/Azsk21MpbUk?feature=shared

A style guide/analysis for these pedagogical films should be written, so it can be applied to new things

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