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The Kid Should See This

The Engineering of the Drinking Bird

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How is a drinking bird like a heat engine? In this video from Engineer Guy Bill Hammack, we can see how this famous drinking/dipping bird toy “exploits a temperature difference to convert heat energy to a pressure difference within the device, and performs mechanical work.” A peek inside the bird’s hat and head, and a closer look at the red methylene chloride its body contains, shows what’s really going on.

Find the drinking bird toy on Amazon for your own hands-on experiments.

There are more videos from the Engineer Guy on this site, including Plastic Injection Molding, The Ingenious Design of the Aluminum Beverage Can, and How Does a Retractable Ballpoint Click Pen Work?

Plus: More toy videos, Feynman’s Building Blocks of Thermodynamics, and why don’t perpetual motion machines ever work?

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