Tom Scott

http://tomscott.com – http://twitter.com/tomscott – In Spijkenisse, in the Netherlands, are a set of small bridges that most of Europe should recognise instantly: because they’re the fictional ones from their banknotes, made real as a wonderful piece of public art and infrastructure.

http://tomscott.com – @tomscott – I was walking through Kings Cross, spotted Platform 9¾, and thought I’d share something you might not know: thanks to redevelopment of the station, right now it’s in the wrong place. It won’t be for long, though.

The Chicago and Sanitary Ship Canal is the path that invasive carp would take to reach the Great Lakes. So to stop them, the US Army Corps of Engineers has installed an electric barrier. Although for obvious reasons, I didn’t get to see it close up. Sources, apart from the interview and the team I

On Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, there’s a summer tradition: “mail jumping”. It’s a bit dangerous, a bit ridiculous, and would never be allowed to start today. But it’s a tradition. ■ Thanks to the Lake Geneva Cruise Line: https://www.cruiselakegeneva.com/ Edited by Michelle Martin https://twitter.com/mrsmmartin I’m at https://tomscott.com on Twitter at https://twitter.com/tomscott on Facebook at https://facebook.com/tomscott and

It sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. At the Cooper Union Foundation Building in New York, there’s the world’s first elevator shaft: constructed four years before the safety elevator was invented. • Thanks to Prof. O’Donnell and all the team at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art: you can find out more

Sometimes, you regret asking a question. • Win your Ultimate Tech Bundle by entering Fasthosts’ Techie Test here: https://www.fasthosts.co.uk/tomscott Thanks to Graham Haerther for the main audio mix, and for recovering the terrible sound in my echo-filled flat! (For the folks asking: I’m not planning to release the ranked list — partly because “ranked list

At the Remote Encoding Center in Salt Lake City, keyers process 1.2 billion images of mail every year. It’s a more difficult job than I thought. Edited by Michelle Martin: https://twitter.com/mrsmmartin Thanks to Zack from JerryRigEverything for being the camera op: https://youtube.com/jerryrigeverything I’m at https://tomscott.com on Twitter at https://twitter.com/tomscott on Facebook at https://facebook.com/tomscott and on

The Hudson River Special Flight Rules Area is an incredible thing: unrestricted airspace right next to Manhattan. We flew it. ■ Thanks to John De Groot, and to Century Air (who mostly provide pilot training, so I’m grateful that they took the time to arrange this!): http://centuryair.com/ – this is not sponsored, I paid for

If you’re in Canada, you need good winter boots. But how do you know whether they’re actually safe, or whether you’ll fall over the first time you step on ice? This is WinterLab, part of the Challenging Environment Assessment Laboratories at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute, where they’re testing winter shoes with science. More about the

http://tomscott.com – @tomscott – In every Hollywood movie where someone dials a phone number, it starts with 555. Turns out Britain’s got a similar system, and it’s one of the few good decisions Ofcom’s ever made.

I feel like there are other YouTube channels that would take a different approach here. ▪ With thanks to Professor Brian Kalt: his original article is here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=691642 — any inaccuracies that have slipped in are mine alone, and this is, obviously, not legal advice! To save you doing the research, my location while recording

http://tomscott.com – http://twitter.com/tomscott – Under the Elbe river in Hamburg, Germany, lies the Old Elbe Tunnel in St Pauli. Like early 20th century tunnels around the world, it has lifts or stairs to take you down and under the river. But this is on a whole different scale to those you might have seen elsewhere…

http://tomscott.com – http://twitter.com/tomscott – This weekend, the Royal Navy was offering public tours of HMS Defender, one of their new-generation Type 45 destroyers. It’s an astonishing ship: about 8,000 tonnes of steel and high-tech equipment designed to defend an entire fleet against air and missile attack. There’s another type of attack it’s more vulnerable against,

Victor Gruen is, according to history, the man who invented the shopping mall… but that wasn’t quite what he was aiming for. And it seemed like an appropriate day to do a video about suburban sprawl — happy Independence Day, America! I’m at http://tomscott.com on Facebook at http://facebook.com/tomscott on Twitter at http://twitter.com/tomscott and on Instagram

Crash Safari dot com — and no, I’m deliberately not linking to it! — crashes your phone. Or your browser. Pretty much instantly. How? And after several months of obscurity, why did it go viral so fast today? And yes, I did have to put this video together really quickly. Thank you SO MUCH to

In Wuppertal, Germany, there’s the Schwebebahn: a suspended monorail that carries 80,000 people a day above the streets of the city, and above the river Wupper. It’s a wonderful thing: but it wasn’t the future of travel, and here’s why. INSTAGRAM: tomscottgo FACEBOOK: http://facebook.com/tomscott TWITTER: http://twitter.com/tomscott or on the web at https://tomscott.com

http://tomscott.com – @tomscott – Remember the “dumbest dot-com”, AllAdvantage? They paid you to surf the web, at least for a while. And one day, they announced that they were incredibly popular in rich Beverly Hills, California. The reason connects them to the US Postal Service… and Jason Priestley.

http://tomscott.com – http://twitter.com/tomscott – There’s a strange avenue of trees in Richmond Park, ten miles from St Paul’s Cathedral; and an odd, wedge-shaped skyscraper in the city. At the New London Model, at the NLA Galleries at the Building Centre, I explain both of these. London is going vertical: but there are quite a few

http://www.tomscott.com – http://twitter.com/tomscott – I was walking through New York and found a couple of seemingly-abandoned liquid nitrogen tanks on the street. Except they weren’t abandoned: they were full, making a very quiet hissing noise, and plumbed into… somewhere. I did a bit of research, and found out why they’re really there. Thanks to David

http://tomscott.com – @tomscott – If a GPS goes over 1200mph or 60,000 feet, it’ll shut down. And the reason why is linked to here, at the Kennedy Space Centre, and the Cold War.

http://www.tomscott.com – Jedi! Are you bored since the fall of the Empire? Well, the Coruscant Juggling Club wants you. Featuring Robin, Anna and Tim juggling lightsabers; Jess on lightsaber devilstick; Sam attacking; and Nic’s balls.

http://tomscott.com – @tomscott – There were a lot of embarrassing things on TV in the 1990s, and Andy Crane in a baseball cap was just one of them.

There are only a few working Link Trainers left in the world: but before microprocessors, before display screnes, half a million pilots learned the basics of instrument flying inside one. More: https://www.most.org/explore/link-flight-trainer/ Edited by Michelle Martin, https://twitter.com/mrsmmartin I’m at https://tomscott.com on Twitter at https://twitter.com/tomscott on Facebook at https://facebook.com/tomscott and on Instagram as tomscottgo

Torpenhow Hill, in the Lake District in the north-west of England, is the only place in the world whose name has the same word four different times. That’s the story, anyway. The truth is a bit more complex. Filmed safely: https://www.tomscott.com/safe/ REFERENCES: The Debunking of Torpenhow Hill: http://digitalcommons.butler.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4733&context=wordways Etymology from the Oxford English Dictionary https://oed.com

http://tomscott.com – http://twitter.com/tomscott – Welcome to Svalbard, a group of islands in the High Arctic, north of Norway; the one place on the planet where carrying a gun is a legal requirement, and for a very good reason.

At the headquarters of Cloudflare, in San Francisco, there’s a wall of lava lamps: the Entropy Wall. They’re used to generate random numbers and keep a good bit of the internet secure: here’s how. Thanks to the team at Cloudflare – this is not a sponsored video, they just had interesting lava lamps! There’s a

El Caminito del Rey, the King’s Little Pathway, is now a tourist attraction near Malaga, in southern Spain. But once, it brought adrenaline junkies here – sometimes fatally. Now it’s safe: but the internet doesn’t really know that yet… I’m at http://tomscott.com on Facebook at http://facebook.com/tomscott on Twitter at http://twitter.com/tomscott and on Snapchat and Instagram

At the Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, California, there sits a small teapot. It’s the world’s most famous teapot, after a computer graphics researcher called Martin Newell digitised it. You’ve probably seen it: here’s its story. And thanks to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California: you can visit them online here: http://www.computerhistory.org/

Monte Kaolino, in Bavaria, Germany, is 35 million tonnes of quartz sand, piled up over the years from a nearby kaolin mine. In the 1960s, one guy just turned up with skis, and now half a century later it’s a theme-park destination for sandboarders and skiiers. ■ More: https://www.montekaolino.eu/ Location camera: Moritz Janisch Producer: Marcel

Next to Amsterdam Schiphol Airport is the Buitenschot Land Art Park, a giant set of ridges and furrows cut into the landscape. Yes, it’s art: but it also stops some local residents from being exposed to jet noise. More about the park: https://www.schiphol.nl/en/schiphol-as-a-neighbour/page/landscape-design-plan-to-combat-noise-nuisance/ I’m at https://tomscott.com on Twitter at https://twitter.com/tomscott on Facebook at https://facebook.com/tomscott and