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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know.

A production of IHOP radios HowStuffWorks. Hey, welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Bryant, there's Jerry Bush. Roland over there is just getting worse and worse. This is stuff you should know about wind tunnel dish. Mm hmm.

Aren't you glad we're not in the same room so that you can smell my breath when I went?

Yeah, my daughter's gotten a bad habit of doing that. And she thinks it's funny. I'm like, it's really not of what I like breathing and someone's nose on purpose, like right in your face.

And like no one. No one likes that.

Yeah. She's she's just under the age of, what, five to 55. Yeah. Well that's something people do.

Yeah. Not not funny ever.

I tell you what, these masks that we're all wearing and this is a real reckoning with your breath though, isn't it. Oh my God. It's funny. It's like a it's like an hour by hour slide into despair.

Like I don't remember eating garlic. Yeah. It's like the morning is like, oh man, this is great. I love this mask. And later in the day you're you need that toothbrush.

Yes, it's true. They say you can't smell your own breath and they are wrong. And I'm brushing my teeth now more than ever because I'm scared to go to the dentist. Yeah, same here. I'm also flossing like a mad person to you flossing right now.

I can I can hear it. Well, that was the most PC thing I've ever said, is what I'm flossing like a mad person, not a mad man. And technically, I guess not I would was like a mentally ill health person that I think that even bad.

Who knows these days, right? That's right. Let's talk about wind tunnels.

OK, so we're talking wind tunnels. And I had no idea how interesting wind tunnels were. I had an inkling if they were going that there was like more to wind tunnels than people realize, which is absolutely true.

But they're they're pretty deep cut. Yeah. I mean, there was way there's way more to them and you can do way more with them and learn way more from them than I thought, because my experience with wind tunnels, like most people, is seeing the cool TV commercial with the with the like green smoke flying over the car. Right. To demonstrate how aerodynamic it is. And to be sure, that is a very big part of what they use when tunnels for.

Yeah, yeah. And Chuck, you know, you and I were in a commercial in a wind tunnel. I thought you might bring this up. There was a wind tunnel, technically that that indoor skydiving is a type of wind tunnel. It's a vertical wind tunnel. Yeah.

If you guys haven't seen that, it's been a while since we promoted these things. We used to do these little shorts.

No, this was different. Well, no, but these were based on the shorts. Oh sure. Sure, yes. Yes, yeah. We did these little shorts that we called interstitials did a lot of them. And to me, it's like the best video work we've ever done as a team. I love Don't be done. But that was just you. I will go on. Well, it was great. It was you in a room and it was this chair.

And you sort of played a character. Yes. Go on. And some people had problems with the character because they thought you were making fun of a certain kind of person. Yes, sure. Sure. That wasn't true. It was all very kind hearted and just funny. That's right. That was really great. Thank you. Sure. And that's. You're still here in the office, right? Yes, it is.

And I believe my outfit still is. I'm waiting for the Smithsonian to come.

So, yeah, we did this TV commercial for Toyota that was very much in the vein of those interstitials where we are and just all over Atlanta and various parts of Atlanta doing funny things. That was L.A., you remember? Well, now this again, talking about the original interstate, because I'm so confused. Then when we went to L.A., we did the same thing. We replicated that style in Los Angeles. And long the upshot of this all is we end up in a indoor skydiving facility having a conversation like, you know, a normal conversation or trying to.

That was the gig. The gig. That was the gag.

That was it. Really? Yeah. And you get slung against the side of it at the end, which is kind of the funniest part. Yeah.

Really, really. What it was supposed to be an outtake and they made it an intake.

Yeah, sure. Those things were very difficult to if you've never done one before there. I mean it was fun and kind of cool, but it's not easy. You don't just go in there and be like, hey, I'm floating. No, it's really, really hard, actually. Yeah.

Like, you're working every muscle in your body. It's kind of like water skiing. Looks fun, too. Yeah.

You were good at it. I was not very good. I was OK, but it was it was tough. Yeah. So that was what would be technically called a vertical wind tunnel, right. Yeah. And they actually use those to to research spin like when something goes in like a tail spin, like a helicopter goes into a tailspin, they would use a vertical wind tunnel to test for that kind of thing. Right.

But the wind tunnels, we kind of more think over the horizontal tubes where you see a car or something like that, having the cool smoke blown over it for a commercial. Right. But they're very useful. And this is something I didn't really know. I kind of I kind of just thought they were all these big giant things that you would put an actual car in. Most wind tunnels are these little desktop models that you use in a science lab.

Right. That have a scale model that you're using instead of the actual thing. Right.

Which which means. Yeah, that you're using a smaller version, but that is precisely scaled down. That's roughly the right looks, the right size. I'm sure this plane will fly. This is close enough.

But what's neat about that is that they can scale this thing down. They can subjected to, you know, the same conditions as they would a full size model. But then they can correct for the data that whatever the numbers they're getting, the output they can correct to scale it back upwards, just using math. Because, yeah, if there's one thing that goes hand-in-hand with wind tunnels, it is math friends, because the whole point of wind tunnels is to study aerodynamics, which is the flow of air or gases over an object.

And in this case, it's a stationary object and the wind is moving. But what they're really doing is simulating that object moving out there in. The real world, the wind, and I mean, that's a wind tunnel, and when you put it like that, it sounds very simple. They are not simple at all. There's really nothing about wind tunnels that simple from their construction to their cost to what they're used for, to to all the different variables and conditions that they can test for there.

They grew step in step hand-in-hand with the aviation industry, like we probably wouldn't have an aviation industry right now without wind tunnels. And that should kind of give you an idea of how complex the stuff that people are doing in wind tunnels is or the data they're extracting from these wind tunnels tests. It's not just like, look that cool green bending over the car. That's for for yokels like you and I watching ads while, you know, in between golf, you know, like you're watching golf and the ad comes on shore, my brain is the best part of golf.

The ads I've actually kind of gotten.

Are you watching golf now? Yeah, I kind of hear there. It's not something I seek out, but and it's not for the golf. I could care less about the golf. It's it's the views. It's the shots. The golf courses are just the most amazing backdrops and it's just so tranquil and calm. It's really something.

Yeah. You know, I live right down the street from the legendary East Like Country Club in Atlanta and Bobby Jones course. And I've been to one day of that one tournament. That's the only time I've actually been to a professional golf tournament. And, you know, I stood there twelve feet from Tiger Woods and the tee box is pretty, pretty neat. Wow. Like just to see because I played golf a lot growing up and it's a hard sport.

Yeah, it really. And to see someone do it perfectly right in front of your face.

Yeah. Without much power, it was, it was really impressive.

You know what would really help Tiger Woods swing if they put him in a wind tunnel, put some green smoke in the wind and watch them swing, they could tell him how to do it better. You don't smoke. I give him smoke. That's right. That's right. Shout out to our Detroit crew from that day. All right. So if you want to go back in time and talk about human flight, you're going to look at things like deviances or in a theater in fourteen, eighty five and kind of a lot of early stabs at flying.

Were humans looking at birds and thinking, well, if we're going to fly, we're going to have to learn how to flap wings really fast. Yeah, and it made sense. I guess if you're looking at birds, they're the only thing flying around. It would make sense that that's where they would go. But they knew early on, regardless of the flapping, that they needed to understand wind and how wind worked with wings. And so they started going to these little hills and mountains and they started going to caves.

They had this you know, they were looking for some sort of predictable, constant wind. Right. So they could do some early testing. And they realize you just can't do it with Mother Nature. You can't get a consistent wind, not enough to get real data out of it and do that math that we need so, so drastically to make this possible. Right.

So initially, we got that assist from birds and that we knew wings had to be involved, got to have wings. The whole flapping thing really kind of threw things off for a while. But because we knew that there had to be wings, we knew that there had to probably be some ideal or optimum shape of wings. And that's really where wind tunnels first got their start was in testing different shapes of wings or airfoils. There was a guy back in 1746 named Benjamin Robins who created a Worli arm, which is basically like it was.