Popular YouTube channel 'How to Make Everything' has published a new video showing the creation of a camera lens from scratch. The project didn't start with pre-made components, as many DIY projects do, but rather with the purely raw materials, including sand and rocks for the eventual lens glass and copper housing.
The new project follows one involving the creation of a pinhole camera from scratch that the channel published in September 2018. This time around, the channel's Andy George spends nearly half an hour walking viewers through the lens creation process, including many failed attempts.
Producing clear glass presented one of the project's most time-consuming challenges, though casting the copper lens housing introduced its own difficulties. After weeks of work, however, the end result was a decently clear, though sadly ill-fated, camera lens with zoom functionality.
I wonder if it would have been easier/better to make copper sheet metal and then shape it to a cylinder rather than casting it. It certainly would have been lighter.
Everyone knows that, the video does not suggest that you abandon manufacture-made lenses and go make your own ... it just shows you a processes of making one, why this is hard to understand?
@mnml98, this video teaches nothing because this guy knows nothing. In a fictional post apocalyptic scenario I would hope smarter people with real skills or at least the concepts of, for example, annealing glass would survive to restart the civilization. LOL
@photomedium So what? i said "showing a process" not "the only process" or correct process, i didn't say the video is educational or useful, and yes, they guy knows nothing, that's the whole point of his channel, as he said in the intro video, he is trying to learn ... while making everything.
I was SOOOO disappointed he just showes us how the image looks from a crappy self-made film camera. Put that thing in front of a mirrorless camera let us see the freaking image!!
What are you talking about? I did watch it long enough to draw my conclusions. There are excellent channels that are absolutely amazing and other clickbait channels. This one was the latter.
How is this click bait. Click bait articles don't deliver what their headline promise. That's why it's called click bait. The heading is making a camera lens from scratch...He literally did this. This included making glass from sand or remelting glass he previously made from sand. (He has a seperate episode on how to make glass in more detail). He ground down three lens elements himself. He smelting copper from copper ore to cast the body of the lens (the details of doing this is also in another episode). So where's the click bait.
Holy sh*t! Please God, not another boy-wonder with a god complex and a penchant for nuclear fission! Shove this guy through a stargate to the Orion galaxy or something.
It's a 50/50 at this point that we can even get past Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffet and Jeff Bezos, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
I've never seen such a mix of modern v. "hand made" stuff. Do you know how many hours went into the design and manufacture of the propane torch used for thermal treatment of the glass, or even how many hours go into the production of the PROPANE to run it? Or the backup of the grid to power everything he used?
Why? Just.....why?
We stand in the shoulders of giants. AND, we cannot shrug them off!
If society goes haywire like The Walking Dead, will it take another 1.8 million years (or few hundred thousand, or six thousand years...depending on your perspective of how long man has been around) before we can get back to the moon?
Why not? one person in a youtube channel named "How to Make Everything", it's really simple, i'm baffled by comments like yours, people make stuff for fun and profit, sometimes to learn and have fun, there isn't anything more to it than that.
"If society goes haywire like The Walking Dead, will it take another 1.8 million years (or few hundred thousand, or six thousand years...depending on your perspective of how long man has been around) before we can get back to the moon?"
Another rise of civilization comparable to current times will NOT happen on this planet because all of the easily obtainable resources and mineral deposits have been used. Certainly not within anything less than a geological timeframe.
Look at what it takes to get oil out of the ground, large scale mining for minerals. Even making glass on an industrial scale.
This is it folks, we have one shot as a species to make it.
Well he has a shop and the glass lens looks good. But I wonder about his craftsmanship level after looking at the "woodworking" he did on that view camera. I put more refinement into birdhouses that I make out of scraps.
while i admire this fellows stick-to-it-ive-ness and determination , i have to say , after the Apocalypse i hope to see anyone but him trying to recover photography for surviving humanity
I am hoarding these videos in case the virus escapes the CDC in Atlanta, GA and the TV series "The Walking Dead" is re-classified from Horror/Drama to Documentary...much as the movie "Idiocracy" was recently re-classified from Comedy to Documentary by the U.S. Library of Commerce....humor people.
On a serious note, I have considered learning how to make my own emulsion to coat 4x5 glass plates in case the production of same stops.
A joke: God accepted a challenge from a scientist to create life in a laboratory. God reached outside the window and grabbed a handful of Earth, breathed life into the palm of his hand and the Earth was made man. The scientist reached outside to grab a handful of Earth to place in a container into which he intended to add various chemicals and electric current...God said "no cheating, you have to make your own Earth from nothing like I did".....
The scientist retorted: "No cheating indeed. No lying either. Creating Earth out of nothing? Please. Fragments from the cores of dead stars, certainly, are more than just 'nothing'." "For your information, our star, the Sun, was here first. Our planet was formed after that. (Not the other way around, as they erroneously claimed in some Book.) And who created Thee, anyway? I know who: my ancestors' vivid imagination. So please stop claiming undue credit."
@Smitty1 One response that I can reasonably fit in dpreview's 1000 character limit is this: "Cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be."
Some people may have a need for a mythical middleman (or middlewoman, if one considers Gaea for example) to justify the birth / creation / etc. of everything, and of the cosmos itself. Still unable to justify the creation of the creator itself. That is acceptable. But I, for one, have no need for such imaginary middle-entity.
@Ebrahim Saadawi besides the obvious answer (42) there is this other one: "We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself." This is not just philosophical, it's actually literal. Every atom, other than hydrogen, was forged inside a star, and then exploded away in a supernova. A violent star death that had occurred long before the birth of our own star, the Sun, and of our own planet, the Earth.
The universe is self-aware, through us, sentient beings, observing the universe.
Well I find it interesting that you are so upset about a joke over a God you don't believe in on the origin of life that has caused you to retort in a sarcastic response posed as a joke.
If you can claim the universe always was around, then it didn't have a beginning. And if it didn't have a beginning, then we can remove that pesky God/Creator out of the picture. But scientific discoveries (Hubble's redshift, Vilenkin Borde and Guth's cosmic inflation work, etc) do seem indicate the universe had a beginning.
And if the universe had a beginning, it had to have a cause for it's existence. Things don't just pop into existence on their own. If they did, I'd like a legitimate, million dollar check to pop into my mailbox.
So your view is quite a stretch for me, as it doesn't explain or prove anything. Or even begin to explain... it isn't acceptable.
@Smitty1 What we know today about spacetime in our ever-expanding universe is that it originated from a singularity. Like the Big Bang.
When Carl Sagan said (and I quoted), "Cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be", the word "ever" does not need to imply something infinitely back in time. Time does not need to be infinite. The opposite is true, as you've correctly pointed out.
Matter, energy and time may start from a singularity (like the Big Bang), and may also end into a singularity (like a black hole). Since time itself originated in the Big Bang, there is no such concept as "before Bing Bang", because the "before" concept requires a time axis that you just can't have at that particular point.
Please note that I am hugely oversimplifying here. I have 1000 characters max for my response. This is a photography website, not a forum for debating cosmology.
@ctruta I'm interested in knowing your theory on how the big bang was ... 'banged' so to speak and what generated the energy to go bang? And why did it go bang?
Surely it was caused. Things don't just *poof* into existence, and surely not out of true nothing. Uncaused things don't occur in a natural world. There is cause and then effect. But you're telling me there is just all effect and no cause. That contradicts. I cannot believe that.
That is an exceptional question, @Ebrahim Saadawi! You're in exceptional company, wondering about the cosmos. Its origins are our origins. Carl Sagan described us, the humans, as "organized collections of ten billion-billion-billion atoms", and as "star stuff contemplating the stars".
I realize I'm being repetitive, but for the sake of completeness, here is the entire quote:
"And we, who embody the local eyes and ears and thoughts and feelings of the cosmos, we've begun, at last, to wonder about our origins. Star stuff, contemplating the stars; organized collections of ten billion-billion-billion atoms, contemplating the evolution of matter tracing that long path by which it arrived at consciousness here on the planet Earth, and perhaps, throughout the cosmos."
For your information, @Smitty1, scientists have been creating matter (AND antimatter), in the laboratory, for more than half a century.
You're flattering me by wanting to know "my theories". But no, I did not develop the Relativity Theory (Albert Einstein did). I also did not compose The Four Seasons (Antonio Vivaldi did), I did not write Les Miserables (Victor Hugo did), I did not paint Mona Lisa (Leonardo DaVinci did), etc.
All I'm doing here is being aware and knowledgeable, and celebrating humanity's achievements.
I would not require you to know how to derive Einstein's field equations, for example. But if you insist on questioning major scientific accomplishments, then you should have known, as the bare minimum, that E=mc^2. And it's not "things don't just pop into existence" as you incorrectly claimed: it's m=E/c^2. We cannot continue our debate on science without you having this prerequisite knowledge.
You misread -- I never said things pop into existence, but the other way around -- I was pointing out things do NOT just pop into existence. If they did we'd still have things popping into existence on their own out of nothing. And clearly that doesn't occur. We don't live in a state of just effects.
The point being there is a cause and there is an effect. You cannot explain what caused matter in the beginning. You claim "scientists have been creating matter (AND antimatter), in the laboratory, for more than half a century" yet miss that, if true, it would be a scientist creating this matter. It had an agent. A being. Yet what created matter before the scientist existed? Matter out of nothing... (the scientists technique requires energy)
The theist has a source and an answer to these pesky matters.
"All traced back to ONE initial cause..." Not really, if you take the quantum world into account. Actually, scientists recently performed an experiment that questions the very nature of reality itself with entangled photons. It could well be that a lot of our assumptions about the causality of things in the universe are dead wrong...
@Turbguy1 that is correct in linear spacetime, and even in distorted spacetime. Not correct in singularities. Have a look at Penrose diagrams and see how that works. Not correct after crossing the event horizon in a black hole, for example. Et cetera. [Edit: fixed typos]
@Kharan you are correct about the quantum world. Here is another example: the delayed-choice quantum eraser. It baffles everyone, nobody understands why it's happening, and yet, it's happening. Unless somebody has a better explanation, it is tantamount to going back in time and changing things. And yet, science doesn't accept time travel. And yet, the experiments clearly prove that it's really happening.
Oh, and by the way, black holes, however gigantic they may be, are exhibiting themselves quantum behavior.
If you're claiming there was a source, an origin, for the whole of existence then I'd agree. But that 'cause', which I'd say is an all-knowing, intelligent God, has sparked a creation from true nothing that has provided a well tuned environment (the cosmos as some might say) for life as we known it to flourish. This includes the vacuum of space, energy, and all forms of matter.
@Turbguy1 "we" have "no idea"? Roger Penrose, the Professor Emeritus at Oxford who developed the equations, does have "some idea". And that "some idea" makes sense to me, as the natural extension of relativity theory. I have the math, the physics, the knowledge that Relativity Theory was confirmed over and over and over and over, and the ability to understand the calculations.
Also, more recently, I have the observations from the Event Horizon Telescope. The ones that are public, of course.
Singularities are not "non-explainable". Partially-explainable (with what we know so far), yes. Research on black holes is still in its infancy.
> Is there ANYTHING that does not exhibit "quantum behavior" at some level?
Of course. Calculate using Planck's constant. Quantum is everywhere, but quantum behavior is not. Not at mundane levels, and not at planet/star levels. Only at atomic and subatomic levels, and (thanks to recent discoveries) at black hole levels.
@Smity1 I respect theists. I don't attend church. I've seen the Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham debate. To me, creationism is a form of theism, but not really representative of it, philosophically or statistically.
I don't mind theism, and I even have some (small) interest of academic persuasion in theism in general, as a source of symbolism; but I have zero interest in creationism, or in other forms of biblical literalism.
As far as I can tell, there may not even be a singularity inside a black hole.
Once the event horizon is "crossed", everything is theory, based on assumptions that physics and math developed "outside" apply "inside". There could be entirely new physics "inside".
That is not to say it's not worthwhile performing the thought experiments about what "should" be inside. Spacetime itself may no longer exist "inside"...
In any event (outside of a black hole), all events are the result of some prior events.
@Turbguy1 (I wanted to, but couldn't edit my previous post). About quantum behavior, I forgot to mention the obvious: the De Broglie hypothesis. I meant to say calculate using the De Broglie formula, using Planck's constant. It applies to everything, except for black holes. Black holes are entirely different beasts altogether.
> Once the event horizon is "crossed", everything is theory.
Nobody ever was even close to a black hole, so you can say that even, before that's crossed, everything is still "theory", no?
But do you, at least, find it believable that the event horizon is inescapable, and that spacetime as we know it no longer exists inside?
Just as we, here in flat spacetime, inescapably fall from the past to the future, the falling underneath the event horizon is inescapable from the exterior to the interior. Time and (one dimension of) space switch places. With a Penrose diagram, you can express that switch, so beautifully.
Maybe it is as you say: no singularity, and the falling is happening without limit -- just as here, in our flat spacetime, our falling along the time axis is happening without stopping.
Time (t) is not really a 4th dimension, but the distance (c multiplied by t) is. We fall at speed of light from "past" to "future" along that 4th dimension.
What the video doesn't go into is the source of the knowledge needed to construct the lens, or any other item of manufacture, for that matter. That's where the patent system comes in. If you want to learn how to make literally anything, search the patent database and you will find your answer. Of course, YouTube provides all the shortcuts....
If you even look at the patent registry, you are heavily responsible for breaking the IP rights if you are found guilty in court. But, if you can proof that you have no idea of at all about the patents, then you are not purposely trying to use others work and even if are found guilty then you are not purposely doing it and fines are smaller.
That is just the case that you can't go even look that are you using others IP.
I think he's referring to expired patents, of which there are over two hundred years worth. Besides, any process worth patenting in the last twenty years is probably far too complex and specialized for a DIY project anyway.
If those patents are anywhere near a existing and valid patents, then you are likely in trouble as you went to search for them.
If you can proof that you have not seen anything from anyone else, not by even by accident, then you are not purposely trying to use others patented work.
That is the reason why almost all patents are public (some are secret) so citizens can go and search the solution to your problem and license the solution from the person who solved it.
But it doesn't really go so easily. As people get greedy that they want silly licensing money or rights to your products etc. Why the patent systems are totally broken as they do not anymore serve what the idea was all about.
Of course you are correct that the patent system is broken. However, my point is that any patent that contains information that could be useful for making a homemade lens has probably expired a long, long time ago. Patents are only valid for 20 years, so any patent granted before 1999 is now expired. Besides, any lens patent that is still valid is probably useless to a home lens maker since the replicating it would require incredibly expensive industrial equipment.
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