Awesome Tom Scott

For a decade, Vlogger Tom Scott has entertained and educated us with his science and travel videos. 10 years to the day since his first YouTube clip, he’s decided to take a well-deserved hiatus. His final weekly video – at least for now – is a humble explanation of his reasons for slowing down and a celebration of the incredible experiences he’s shared with us.

The fastest car we’ve ever experienced was a dragster that launched from 0 to 60 mph in about two seconds. Tom Scott got behind the wheel of AMZ Racing’s Mythen, an electric vehicle that holds the world record for EV acceleration – 0 to 100 km/h in a mindblowing 0.956 seconds. Tom didn’t quite hit that number, but he still accelerated insanely fast.

If you’re the head of a big corporation, you can’t be bothered to share an elevator with other people. At the Baťa Skyscraper in Zlín, Czechia, the company’s owner had a special elevator built that carries his office to any floor. Tom Scott got a tour of this architecturally significant building and took a ride in the office that Jan Antonín Baťa never got to use.

There’s data out there that helps scientists simulate what happens after an explosion gets going, but they still don’t fully understand how to simulate the genesis of a blast. Tom Scott visited a team at the UK’s University of Sheffield working on solving this problem, which could improve the safety of handling explosives and bomb disposal.

After making a homebrew hovercraft with a leaf blower, Hideyasu Ito created his own unique take on the air-cushioned ride, a single-person hovercraft that floats on four plastic bubbles. Tom Scott had the rare privilege to meet the inventor and take his amazing creation for a ride.

Locking up your bicycle to a rack or pulling your car into a marked space seem like nice, low-tech approaches to parking. Tom Scott explains why some locations in Japan have adopted a much more complicated system, using underground garages and massive, robotically-controlled systems for parking bikes and cars.

Pneumatic tubes were a popular way for companies to send documents between offices. These days, the only place we still see them is at bank drive-thrus. Tom Scott visited C1 Espresso, a Christchurch, New Zealand café that uses the tubes to send orders to the kitchen, and delivers some food items to customers’ tables.

When automakers want to test cars for longevity, they put them on rollers and shakers to simulate long-term driving. But how do you test how long roads last? Tom Scott takes us to a pavement testing facility in France that uses a rapidly spinning machine called a fatigue carousel to rapidly imitate decades of road use.

Tom Scott got to experience very special tour of Australia’s Parkes Radio Telescope. Not only did he get to see the technology behind the long-standing telescope, he was allowed to walk on its massive dish and take a ride on it as it tilted and changed angles. Because the dish is so enormous, Tom had a hard time keeping his bearings.

Most roller coasters have braking systems that automatically slow down their cars as they go into corners and at the end of the ride. Tom Scott is here to show us Melbourne, Australia’s Great Scenic Railway, one of the last roller coasters to require a human operator to control the brakes aboard each and every trip.

These days, the military uses powerful computers and high-end graphics cards to simulate missions. But in the 1970s, one of the ways to simulate driving a tank was using a miniature city, a motion camera rig, and a remote screen that displayed the first-person perspective to the pilot. Tom Scott took this vintage sim for a ride.

Guédelon is an attraction in France that’s in the process of building a castle and its technologies based on authentic 13th-century drawings and artifacts. Among its features are these giant hamster wheels that use human power to lift stones. Tom Scott got a chance to give one of these treadwheel cranes a spin.

If you visit Normandy, France, 60 euros will give you the chance to float off the ground strapped to your own personal blimp. Each blimp is filled with about 70,000 liters of helium and has a harness and wings for controlling flight. Tom Scott visited Aéroplume Écausseville to take the low-altitude flight inside of an aircraft hangar.

Engineers need to simulate earthquakes to make buildings and other structures safer. Tom Scott headed to the University of Texas to check out the T-Rex, a mobile test rig that can produce massive vibrations in the ground. Combined with sensors, it can measure the stiffness of soil thousands of feet beneath the surface without digging.

With billions of letters sent each year in the U.S., it’s amazing that most mail gets to its destination. While automated processing equipment handles the majority of the mail, Tom Scott explains how the U.S. Post Office deals with hard-to-read addresses using a mix of technology and people typing on custom computer keyboards.

Soda Springs, Idaho, is home to a unique geyser that sprays carbonated water into the air. While the sparkling spring water is naturally-occurring, the water spout itself is the result of a man-made mistake. Tom Scott visited the geyser for an explanation of how it came to be and how they tweaked it to fire every hour on the hour.