Pipe Cleaners Blue Stilton Cheese Smart Electric Meters Telescopes
The pipe cleaner was invented early in the 20th century. A wire core with tufts of yarn, it could be bent and twisted in any tight space, making it useful for cleaning a lot of things besides pipes. Its flexibility also offers a creative opportunity for those with a crafty bent. Today many pipe cleaners never get dirty. Instead of cleaning pipes, kids bend them and shape them to create crafts. The core component of every pipe cleaner is, of course, the wire made of malleable steel. There are two wires in every pipe cleaner. The wires will become intertwined with tufts of yarn, and it will all happen on a machine like this. But first here's a look at the two wires twisting together without the yarn. This wire core is the heart of the pipe cleaner. Without the tight twist, the yarn would just slide off. The spools of yarn unwind at the same time as the wire and head towards the machine. They'll use cotton yarn for pipe cleaners destined for actual pipe cleaning because it's absorbent. For the craft market, polyester fibers are more suitable. The colors are brighter. This orange yarn and the wire travel over tension disks to prevent slackening that would cause messy entanglements as the pipe-cleaner materials all head toward the forming machine. The yarn in the wire are totally in sync as they feed into the machine. The pile yarn rapidly winds around a metal former to coil it. At this point, the diameter of the pipe cleaner is set by using metal formers of different sizes. A sharp rotating blade cuts the coils to produce a series of short tufts. They stop the process briefly to give us a look inside. At the same time, the wires run in grooves around rotating rollers, and those yarn tufts now become trapped between the two wires. Together the wire and yarn tufts then travel over other rollers into a device called a flyer. The flyer was invented for twisting yarn. Each time the flyer rotates, it inserts one turn into the pipe cleaner. Bobbins then wind up the pipe cleaner. It all happens so fast, it's a bit of a blur. At the next station, numerous bobbins of pipe cleaners unwind simultaneously. They travel between a series of rollers. The rollers straighten the pipe cleaners, eliminating the curl created when they were wound onto the bobbins. A clamp then locks the pipe cleaners in position, and a carriage pulls them forward. The carriage moves in measured increments so a guillotine-style blade can cut the pipe cleaners to a precise length. In this case, it's 6 inches, a popular length for the craft market. The machine ejects the completed pipe cleaners, and a worker packs them up for retail. Each bag contains all the colors of the rainbow and then some. For thicker, fluffier pipe cleaners, they use a slightly different machine. Bobbins of polyester yarn rotate in the carousel to wind the yarn around the former and coil them. A sharp rotating blade cuts it into tufts. A carrier wire is used here to keep the pile under tension, after which the two core wires trap the tufts just as before. Another clamp twists the core wires and tufts as it pulls them forward. This transforms them into one thick and fuzzy pipe cleaner, which is then cut to any length the client orders. Production now focuses on pipe cleaners for medical and engineering cleaning jobs. Heat guns melt the fibers at the ends to seal them, ensuring they won't shed lint or fibers during the cleaning of sensitive equipment. You can see the difference this makes in the pipe cleaner on the right. Pipe cleaners today are no longer just for pipes. They're used to clean all kinds of things like bicycle gears or any gear at all. They can also be used for paint touch-ups, odd jobs in the garage, cleaning rifle barrels, wrapping electronics cables, and cleaning any long tube. But, of course, it's not all work and no play. There's always arts and crafts time. That's when things take a creative twist and pipe cleaners become anything you want them to. Stilton is a creamy and crumbly british blue cheese whose roots date back to the early 1700s. It tastes mellower and less salty than many other varieties of blue cheese. Always produced in an 18-pound cylinder format, it has veins of blue mold radiating from the center outward. The production of stilton is strictly regulated. Only half a dozen dairies in the world located in three specific english counties are licensed to produce it and only from locally produced pasteurized milk. It takes 20 gallons of milk to make each 18-pound cylinder of stilton. They begin by pouring milk in a vat. Next, they add starter culture, laboratory-grown natural organisms. Then they mix a blue mold culture called penicillium roquefort with distilled water and add this to the milk, as well. After about three hours, they stir in enzymes that coagulate the milk fat. After about 90 minutes, workers run a wire knife through the now-gelatinous milk, separating the fat, called curds, from the liquid, called whey. Then, overnight, they drain the whey out of the bottom of the vat. The next morning, the firm curds go through a mill, which breaks them up into a crumbly consistency. Workers weigh out portions of 24 pounds, each of which will become an 18-pound cylinder of cheese. After adding salt-- the company won't disclose just how much-- two workers gently hand-mix the portion, two different mixing styles blending the ingredients more thoroughly than one. Then they funnel each portion into a cylindrical plastic cheese mold called a hoop. The curd still contain whey. So workers stack the hoops for five days. Typically, cheeses are pressed to drain the whey-- not stilton. Here gravity does the job. The cheese drains under its own weight. Workers flip the hoop once daily to drain through both the top and bottom. After five days, they remove the hoop. The cheese, now drier, stands on its own, while, with a knife, they perform a critical procedure called rubbing up. They rub the entire surface with a flat blade, sealing all the holes so that air can't penetrate and cause premature internal mold growth. Now the cheese goes on to a stillage, a type of trolley, and begins its journey through the climate-controlled bluing rooms, named for the color of the internal mold growth which occurs there. Workers flip the cheese daily to prevent its cylindrical shape from distorting under its own weight. Within a week to 10 days, grayish white, sometimes orange, naturally occurring mold begins growing on the outside, and from that point on, when the cheese acquires a certain amount of mold, they move it to the next level room, then to the next one, and so on. At about the five-week mark, they mount the cheese on the turntable of a piercing machine. With each press of a foot pedal, the turntable rotates slightly, and long, stainless-steel needles pierce the cheese. These tiny holes permit oxygen to enter and kick-start the penicillium roquefort blue mold culture that the dairy put in the milk earlier on. Before long, blue mold gradually grows from the center of the cheese outward. To monitor the extent of the blue-mold growth, the dairy's cheese graters draw samples using a tool called a cheese iron. The iron reaches all the way to the core of the cylinder. When the sample shows that the bluing runs right through, the cheese is ready, more or less. The timing's actually a bit tricky. Stilton is a relatively young cheese, best eaten between 12 and 14 weeks. The dairy does its best to coordinate shipping so that the cheese is at its optimum quality when it reaches the customer. Therefore, it ships 8- or 9-week-old cheese to local stores and 7-week-old cheese to international customers so that the blue stilton will be an ideal 8 or 9 weeks of age when it arrives at its destination. Smart meters are electricity meters that don't have to be read by a person. Instead, they wirelessly send your home's electricity use to your utility in real time. Your bill then shows how much electricity you used and when, making it easier to better control your energy use. Old technology meters require a human being to take a meter reading once each billing period. Smart meters can report consumption in real time by wireless transmission. Inside the smart meter are three different electronic circuit boards, the brains of the unit. They're built on large, blank fiberglass panels. One panel yields six or eight identical circuit boards depending on the meter model. In the first machine, for tracking purposes, a laser etches a serial number for each future circuit board. The next machine applies a stencil on the pattern of the components to be mounted on the board, then spread solder and paste form across it. The board now wears solder paste shaped in position exactly to receive the upcoming components. The next machine's two lasers verify that the solder paste application is perfect. Depending on the size of a specific circuit-board component, there can be anywhere from 5 to 20,000 of them stored on a tape reel under a transparent, protective strip. Workers mount the rail for each component on what's known as a pick and place machine. This computer-controlled high-speed device peels back the protective strip and picks the required parts off each reel, then places them in their designated solder-pasted position on the board. Bulkier components are stored on a different-sized reel, which workers mount on another type of pick and place machine. It does the same operation as the previous one, only slower due to the larger-sized components. The boards now travel through a soldering oven. The precision-controlled temperature, peaking at 468 degrees fahrenheit, melts, then cools the solder paste, fusing all the components to the board. Next, each board undergoes testing. This machine applies electricity to ensure each and every component meets specifications. When the board gets the all clear, it moves to the next machine, which cuts it into separate circuit boards. Meanwhile, robots assemble the meter's digital display. They take a plastic half-circle housing and install a liquid crystal display into its rectangular window. At the next station, a robot uses a vision system to align snaps to attach a circuit board to the liquid crystal display. Assembling the meter body begins with a plastic base plate. The first station prints a serial number on the bottom. The next station then flips the base plate upright and installs the components of the remote disconnect switch. This switch enables the electric company to switch power on and off from any location. A switch cover closes up the base. The protruding wire will connect to a circuit board. The next station installs two terminals through the switch cover. These function as part of the switch operation as well as part of the meter's measurement of electricity consumed. Once those terminals are in, an automatic screwdriver secures the switch cover. Now the first of three circuit boards. This one, the metrology board, measures energy consumption. The unit comes off the automated line, and a worker completes the assembly. He attaches a connector to the digital display circuit board, installs the display, then connects the switch wire to the display's board. The metrology board sends its measurements to the display circuit board, which interprets the data and sends it to a third circuit board, which transmits it by radio frequency to the utility. Once workers have fully assembled the housing, they install a metal tamper-evidence seal. Every meter undergoes rigorous final testing. An automated station verifies the display using a vision system. It checks that the remote disconnect switch operates properly, that the meter measures electricity accurately, and successfully transmits and receives messages. The telescope was invented by a dutch optician four centuries ago. Before that, it was believed the earth was the center of everything. The theory that it actually revolved around the sun was discounted. In the hands of italian astronomer galileo, the telescope brought reality into focus. Modern telescopes are light-years ahead of those early versions, and through their eyepieces, the universe continues to unfold. A reflecting telescope bounces and concentrates light with mirrors. Production begins with the machining of cylindrical metal parts. These are baffles, and when screwed together, they'll block stray light that would interfere with the telescope's operation. More tools transform a solid aluminum disk into a ring with spokes. This part, called the spider, is a framework for supporting the telescope's secondary mirror. After coating the metal parts with a protective oxide, they plunge them into a vat of black dye. The dye soaks into the oxidized pores and seals the surface of the parts. Next, this molded disk of thick low-expansion glass will become the telescope's primary mirror. A diamond-edged tool rotates on a calculated tilt to make the glass slightly concave. To improve the concave profile, a worker coats the glass with abrasive. He adds a weight to a precisely curved cast-iron disk and spins it. The weighted iron disk bears down on the abrasive coated glass to fine-tune its curvature. A worker then examines the finely ground surface for scratches, and using a calibrated gauge, he measures the radius of the disk to confirm that the concave profile is precisely what it needs to be. The glass now spins while a cylindrical cutter aims dead center to cut out a hole. This center hole is sized to accommodate the baffles we saw earlier, and it will also enable the mirror to be held securely in the telescope. Next, the glass disk oscillates as an automated tool rubs a compound against it to polish it. A worker then applies some of the compound onto a polishing disk and works the surface of the glass against it repeatedly. This hand polishing improves the surface considerably. In the laboratory, a technician compares the primary mirror glass to a grid to verify that the dimensions are accurate. He aims a laser at the glass. A computer analyzes the reflected light. If the angle is off by 1,000th of the width of a hair, the telescope's image could be blurry. The glass is now ready for its mirror finish. They lock it facedown in a vacuum chamber. They add small amounts of titanium oxide, silicon monoxide, and aluminum. They close the chamber, tightly encasing the contents, and then pump out most of the air, creating a partial vacuum inside. They activate a 6,000-volt electrode. This sparks a glowing discharge of ions onto the now rotating glass disk. These ions blast any lingering contaminants from the glass to give it a serious cleaning. They heat the aluminum, titanium, and silicon pellets, which evaporate into a cloud of vapor. Atoms condense landing on the surface of the glass to form a glossy mirror surface. It takes just minutes for this highly reflective coating to be applied. This telescope mirror is now ready to reflect light from the stars and planets in the sky. Next, a technician screws lights into the metal housing for the primary mirror. He adds a mount mechanism for the eyepiece, complete with knobs for focusing. He flips over the assembly and slides the precision-made mirror onto the housing. A cork ring cushions the mirror so a retaining ring can be installed without a scratch. The telescope's primary mirror is now secure to the housing. He pieces together the three-part baffle, then screws it to the lens holder protruding from the center of the telescope mirror. He joins the baffle and mirror assembly to the telescope tube. The tube has already been equipped with a secondary mirror that will bounce reflected images from the primary mirror back for magnification and viewing. It's taken about six weeks to build this telescope. And now it's ready to help unravel the mysteries of the universe.