Bizarre Patents: THE BABY-LAUNCHING CENTRIFUGE

what is so beautiful about biology as illuminated by evolution is that you me everyone currently alive is the product of an unbroken chain of births going all the way back to the first single-celled organisms over billions of years this chain has been linked together by the very natural process of reproduction but what if there was a better way to give birth what if oh i don't know we flung babies out of bodies with giant centrifuges wait what that's right today we're physicsing babies baby now entering the facility in 1965 the u.s patent office granted an application for quote an apparatus for facilitating the birth of a child by centrifugal force conceived by husband and wife attorney team george and charlotte blonsky the device which was more or less an adjustable spinning table with a bunch of straps was supposed to work exactly how you think it's supposed to work the blonsky's baby centrifuge called for a pregnant woman to be strapped to this table with their heads centered at the axis of rotation in between the woman's legs would be a flexible net of course positioned perfectly to catch flying babies wow when the pregnant woman was strapped down and secure an attending physician would then use some math to determine the necessary rpms to subject them to the idea being at some rotational velocity the forces induced would overcome the frictional and compressive forces of the birth canal and then in addition to the woman's own pushing efforts oops that's a baby in a net now leblonski's thought a device like this was necessary and might sell and revolutionize things because in their words their words i can't stress that enough more civilized women didn't have the time to develop the necessary pushing musculature that more primitive women did yikes but 60 year old morality aside for a second this isn't the craziest idea i've ever heard no that's the idea on the internet that finland doesn't exist people on the internet are the baby centrifuge isn't the craziest idea i've ever heard just crazy problematic because of the centrifugal force now i know when i say that word you might have flashbacks to physics 101 where some guy with a ponytail trying to teach you physics said everything you intuit about forces is wrong and some of them are fake but just stick with me for a second because it's very useful for our discussion today so let's try it now imagine that you were in a car and you're going around a circle to the left maybe you're in nascar turning left for a few hours and sweating out 11 pounds of water as you do so like dale earnhardt jr now if i asked you what forces you were feeling in the car you would report as you turned left that you felt some pushing force to the right but if you asked me watching you from the stands who goddale raise hail i would say that there's nothing pushing on you at all i'm just observing your mass and the inertia that your mass has kind of fighting against the motion of the car as your mass wants to continue straight now both of these options are true but which observation is real well they're both real that's relativity for you baby but only you in the car going left who have to invoke some kind of force that explains your motion that's perspective dependent now this is the centrifugal force and it's why this is considered fictitious because we disagree and i'm an inertial frame of reference but it's still a very useful idea for one it makes the math a heck of a lot easier wait so humans just pop out of other humans well yeah more or less gross i know right centrifugal math isn't all that bad for example if we were to get on one of my facility hyper rails and travel in a circular track the fictitious centrifugal force that i would start to feel would increase according to the product of my mass our angular velocity squared and the distance i am from the center of rotation now as the velocity starts to increase so too with the fictitious force and eventually the force would get so large ah that you would feel almost thrown to the oh my back almost thrown to the outside edge but what if i wasn't some physics guy with a ponytail trying to teach you what if i was a babe and what if this hyper rail wasn't a transport it was another kind of stop tunnel yeah sorry as we know from smart boy isaac newton anything experiencing a net force is going to be accelerating force equals mass times acceleration and in a centrifuge that's no different the further you are away from the center of rotation the faster your angular velocity the more you are going to accelerate and then at some point the acceleration is going to get so high that you're going to pass 9.8 meters per second every second and then you're going to start pulling g's as a multiple of this 9.81 and you're going to start getting literally heavier as measured on a scale like you were in ah goku's gravity chamber or something but if your body was somehow rigidly supported then maybe anything not attached to you would feel compelled to leave you i don't know something like a baby did you just give birth to a calculator no stop it what no it turned on no i have to call texas instruments and tell them that i'm i'm a calculator daddy the centrifugal force has a sister force it's called the centripetal force and it's more or less the same it's just pointed in an opposite direction it has the same magnitude but the centripetal force is the one that gets all the attention because it's one of the ways we can create artificial gravity in space so observe this here bucket that i borrowed from one of my facilities staff members in this bucket i have some water now obviously if i just turned the bucket upside down the water would pour out but if i turn this bucket around in a circle with some acceleration then the centrifugal force will push the water towards the bottom of the bucket but the centripetal force will push upwards from the bottom of the bucket equal out and the water should stay in the same place this is exactly how we would create artificial gravity in space so observe now keep in mind i do in fact have water in this bucket okay look at me i'm a space station of course then it follows that if i was to stop this bucket spinning at any time any artificial gravity you'd have in a space station would go away and gravity on earth here like with this bucket would more or less take over look arya my water broke stop it yeah sorry and so finally we returned to birth by centrifuge now that we understand all the operative forces involved we can go back to the patent document and page through it as we do so we come upon the only table of numbers in the whole document and we see that this device was supposed to make birthing easier by subjecting pregnant women mind you on one of the most stressful and painful days of their entire lives to up to seven g's of acceleration so this was supposed to make the birthing process easier by having effectively a 54 pound baby weighing on the womb this device yes was hyper gravity just for the stuff it just sounds so easy just get naked strap in spin up and that's a centrifuge baby and a net between your legs easy it's sure blond skis surely you will revolutionize the multiplication of humans i mean it won an egg nobel prize surely but of course the blonsky's invention never revolutionized how humans enter meat space although there was a single model built for a science museum in ireland and you can go see it today the device was never manufactured in mass nor was it used for even a single birth it turns out the idea of strapping yourself naked to a spinning table at seven g's was not the most uh ideal thing in the world in front of strangers it would be just as armchair physically of me to suggest oh i don't know birth by bungee jump which uses acceleration in the same way let this be a lesson to all you would-be sciencers out there just because something is theoretically plausible does not mean that it's not wildly impractical until next time i mean i might as well suggest like birth by rocket sled kevin get a post-it note now exiting the facility thank you so much to the very nerdy staff at the facility for their direct and substantial support in the creation of this video today especially i want to recognize research assistant bretton campbell and visiting scholar jacob greer if you want to get on the facility staff if you want to join me and over 1200 nerds who are talking with me every day on discord giving me episode ideas showing me their pets they're getting episodes a day early and live streams that no one else can see you can join the facility today at patreon.com kyle hill and if you support us in our nerdy educational mission just enough you get your name on arya here each and every week and she's an ai and there's hundreds and hundreds of you so i have no idea how i'm gonna pass the see i made the blonsky's device sound very ridiculous and it is a little misguided in how it thinks it would make things easier on a very stressful and painful day as i said but that's not to say that didn't have some interesting ideas in the world of patents there's other patents they're always looking to each other for interesting components to more or less slot into their own design case in point leblonski's baby centrifuge was cited by a nasa patent application to create artificial gravity for humans in space so it's not the most ridiculous idea i've ever heard neither was it for nassau when thanks for watching

Channel: Kyle Hill

Views: 174,895

Keywords: because science, engineering, kyle hill, learning, math, physics, science, stem, the facility, centrifuge, baby, giving birth, patent, centrifugal force, centripetal force

Id: N_OiNOYRlDo

Length: 10min 58sec (658 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 18 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Droid85]

I wish every video title sounded violent and ridiculous