timhunkin/other lectures

AN IRREVERENT HISTORY OF WOOD This lecture traces man's uses of wood with slides, experiments and demonstrations. It starts with the extremely difficult problem of fire lighting (rubbing sticks together etc) faced by stone age man. It follows the development of furniture and shipbuilding through classical and medieval times, the emergence of cabinetmaking and the discovery of tropical hardwoods, the introduction of the nail and the screw (bizarrely invented long before the screwdriver). It ends with the 20th century introduction of portable power tools, and also new materials like plywood, chipboard, hardboard and last but not least MDF, which is rapidly replacing real wood in all sorts of applications.		DEMYSTIFYING ELECTRICITY Electricity is mysterious stuff. Its invisible, it usually doesn't even smell or make a noise. I had an engineering education, including complete courses in electricity, and though I could do all the sums and formulas, I don't think they made electricity any less mysterious. However, while researching the TV series on machines I spent a lot of time messing about doing practical experiments with electricity, and found this gave me a strong intuitive feel for the stuff. This lecture is about some of my experiments. I hope it will be interesting both to people who know nothing about electricity (as an introduction for complete beginners), but also it will interest electrical experts, as an alternate way of looking at the subject.

AN IRREVERENT HISTORY OF FOOD This is an irreverent history for two reasons. First because the history of food is an enormous subject, and this is not an attempt to be a comprehensive account, just a collection stuff I've come across that fascinated me. The other reason it is irreverent is that I'm no gourmet - I have no interest in eating fine food and wine. If anything I prefer plain food like bread and chips, but I'm really not too bothered what I eat, its just fuel to me. However I do find the history of food interesting, particulary because so much of what we now takw for granted has such recent and interesting origins.		THE STUFF THAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF This lecture is about some of today's everyday materials, and the ideas people had about them when they first came into use. When I try out some material I haven't used before in my workshop I often get absurdly excited, playing with it to find what it can do and what it might be useful for. It gives me some sense of the intense thrill surrounding 'new' materials, which at times have encouraged absurdly utopian visions of a better world. The lecture contains demonstrations of the properties of concrete, celluloid and diamonds, amongst others.