Hey, it's me, Destin.
Welcome back to Smarter Every Day
You read the title of
the video, didn't you.... you know
what's about to happen. Here's the deal
though. I got to explain it to you.
This is not some dude trying
to make an internet video.
This is me trying to answer a question
that I've wanted to know my entire life.
What happens when a baseball
goes past the speed of sound?
And there's very specific reasons why
I want to know this. This is a Smarter,
Every Day baseball, by the way more
about that later.
When I was a kid I did a book report on this
book, "Nolan Ryan Strikeout King."
And I learned that in 1974,
Nolan Ryan while playing for the Angels
through the first recorded baseball
past a hundred miles per hour.
After learning about that pitch,
every time I stepped onto the field,
I thought about the ballistics of
throwing a baseball through the air.
When I went forward into school,
I started learning about aerodynamics
and I realized there was math associated
with all this stuff.
And I started to learn these equations
and I fell in love with the mechanics of
how things fly through the air and to
the point where as a part of my job,
as a developmental weapons tester,
I developed a pretty intimate
relationship with air cannons.
This is me in a German air
cannon. Anyway, here's the deal.
If you were to draw a Venn diagram of
everything, I love aerodynamics, baseball,
air cannons, right in the center of
all that Supersonic Baseball Cannon.
So today's video had to happen, for me.
I have to know what happens when a
baseball goes past the speed of sound like
does the cover rip off
because of the shockwave?
What exactly happens when
this thing goes Mach one,
let's go learn and get Smarter Every Day.
[Guitar theme music]
In an earlier episode of Smarter Every
Day, we made a golf ball air cannon.
We put a golf ball in there, pressurized
one side and put tape over the end.
We use the vacuum pump to pull
a vacuum inside of a barrel.
When we release that pressure, the golf
ball will accelerate down the barrel,
rupture the tape, and exit
at an incredible velocity.
What we want to do here is
basically the same thing.
Only at a much larger scale.
The baseball is 1.6 times larger than
the golf ball in three times as heavy and
Mach. One is 767 miles an
hour. So in order to do this,
we have to do some serious engineering.
So I got some buddies to help me
out and we started brainstorming.
You'll remember David from
the vortex collision device,
Jeremy Fielding from the mad batter
and Trent from the lawn tool videos.
If you got holes in there it's
got to go around corners.
Okay, so imagine this... Imagine.
So right now we've got pipe and then
we're pulling the plug out {FOOMP} and then all
the air rushes in the
end there, right? Yeah.
What if we have the pipe
all the way inside the tank,
This really is just a cone to
[Destin] Guide it in there... Dest
make sure to reengage barrel every time.
And it also retains the seal.
And we may be able to get super signed
velocity with air just because of the
vacuum here. And because of the
Venturi,
As soon as I start modeling I'm going to have a bunch of questions.
Cause at that point I'm putting screws there. I'm putting like, where ...
How do you make it? It's going to be
long
[Trent] Just get a longer trailer man...
Just get a longer trailer...
We need to talk about that
So I've been successful in
uniting you both against me.
So it sounds like we're ready to go
{Everyone laughing}
Now that we've decided how we're going to do
We'll tell Destin what we came up with.
Okay. I want to show you how this
thing works because it's awesome.
This is the solid works model.
And we're going to cut this thing in half
and we're going to zoom in right here
and show you what it
looks like on the inside.
The whole idea here is we want that
baseball to go stupid fast. So to do that,
we needed a whole lot of air on one
side and not a lot of air on the other.
That difference in
pressure will make it go.
This seal right here is how we
create that difference. In pressure,
we can pressurize the
tank on the left here,
and then we pull a vacuum on the barrel
on the right when we're ready to fire.
If we pull that rod back,
it'll break the seal,
dumping all that air behind the
baseball and off she goes.
Pressurizing this tank is a little bit harder than
it might seem because you have several
different places. Air could leak
out. We have a gasket here, here,
here, and a dynamic seal on the rod back
here. So when we pressurize that tank,
it's going to try to push that
rod out the back of the tank,
just like a syringe, which
sounds like a bad thing,
but it's actually good because we're
going to use that force to try to pop the
cork on the baseball even faster.
To do this, we designed this sear mechanism
at the back of the tank.
We push the rod into place really hard.
And then we compress that front gasket,
making a seal behind the baseball.
We then click up this little thing
and it holds everything together.
If we get all the alignment right,
since it's one long rod that keeps the
gasket in the front sealed until the
moment we want to release it, we then
pressurize everything in the tank.
And then we release that sear and it'll
dump all the air into the baseball.
So it goes stupid fast.
The problem is now the rod is free and
it starts to move back very fast and it's
so heavy. It could break
stuff. So to fix that,
we have this shock absorber in the back
that we can tune with a valve to try to
slow down and stop the rod.
Let's go forward and look at some of the
cool things we did to the vacuum side on the barrel.
With the golf ball cannon. 
When we looked at the slow-mo,
I observed that as the ball got
closer to the end of the barrel,
it started to inflate the tape.
Kind of like a balloon that told me that
there was still air inside the barrel,
meaning we were losing some of the
velocity in the barrel due to drag
In an effort to get rid of any extra
air in this 20 foot long barrel.
We had two extra vacuum
volumes on the front.
We've got this big cylinder up front here.
And then we have this big red box beam
underneath the barrel. The idea is,
as the ball goes down
that 20 foot long barrel,
if there's any extra air in
there, it has a place to go.
I don't really know if
this part is going to work.
I honestly just kind of made
it up, but it makes sense.
You want to suck the ball to the end of
the barrel and you want to like get rid
of the air that's in the way. So you've
got what I call extra vacuum ullage.
Anyway, it doesn't matter. 
BUILD MONTAGE.
[Happy Banjo Music and Machine noises]
Since the dawn of blacksmithing 
the relationship between welders and 
engineers has been contentious
Wouldn't you say?
Laughter
[Engineers] You laughing at us?
[Welders, off screen] We like to see Engineers work.
We don't get to see that very often
Okay. Moment of truth. We're
going to pressurize this thing.
The question here is we've got that
rod running all the way through.
Does the pressure seal off
right here where that plug is?
And also do our seals back here work. 
 What do you think? 300 PSI?
Yeah that sounds like a good test.
IT IS TIME
The moment we've been waiting for. Oh
my goodness. Look at that. Oh dude.
Oh it's moving now!
Oh dude. What Hath We Wrought?
Going Up!
Oh dude
This is insane man...
This, is insane. Oh, golly guys. Okay,
Here we go. Mk. 1 Supersonic Baseball
Cannon. Take One. Baseball's loaded,
Goggle up. Guys. Science is
about to happen. Here we go.
[Hissing Gasses Filling Tank]
It appears to be held and all
right, so first shot 300 PSI.
It's definitely quiet. I don't
hear anything up here. No leaking.
You guys ready? Three, two, one.
[SUPER LOUD BLAST]
[Excited Redneck noises]
[inaudible]
[Grown men losing the ability to communicate]
OH MY GOSH.
Oh my goodness.
I think we need to paint this thing and
we need to get out in a more scientific
environment and probably get the high
speed camera out and see what's going on.
But this is NUTS.
Okay. We have the thing built. We
have all of the baseballs ordered.
That is a ton of baseballs.
They're really cool. By the way,
they have a Smarter Every Day logo on one
side and the Rocket City Trash Pandas
on the other more about that later,
there's a way you can actually get
one of these baseballs. Anyway,
now that we built it, we have to
control it. This is what we want to do.
We want to make a controller
for the whole thing.
We need gauges all in one location so
we can monitor the chamber pressure.
We also need to know the vacuum
pressure in the barrel itself.
We need to have all of this information
in one location so that when it comes
time to hit the big red button and send
this baseball at supersonic velocities,
we'll have it all right there in
one spot. So we painted the cannon.
We did some low pressure testing,
which I'm sure the neighbors blamed on
Redstone Arsenal nearby.
[Cannon Fires, sounds like a weapon from Star Wars] And I dubbed it.
The Mark one supersonic baseball cannon.
Today is the day we're going to shoot
the first baseball in a relatively
controlled environment.
So the goal for today is just to see if
we can get above the speed of sound in
one shot with nitrogen. I doubt
we can. This is Trent setting up.
Schlieren here.
We've got this mirror and we're just going
to see if we can see the shockwave go
across and the shadow graph of the
baseball we're shooting with nitrogen.
The reason we're shooting with nitrogen
is the molecular weights around 28.
Jeremy's excited. Are you excited?
Definitely excited. We are excited.
We're gonna be shooting with nitrogen
because the speed of sound of nitrogen is
higher than the speed of sound in
air. Interestingly, I learned this,
the speed of sound and humid air
is higher than dry air. Anyway,
what I'm going to do is because
we're going to be pressurizing.
That thing really high.
We're going to be setting this
thing up as a place to get behind
when we are getting up,
ready to shoot. I gotta,
I got to focus on what I'm doing. Can
you spin this at a 45 the other way? Uh,
orthogonal to the gun coming
down. If that thing blows up,
we don't want Destin and
Jeremy soup back here.
Alright, so let's get ready for the shot.
We are using a single light
source for our schlieren set up.
So that's a fiber optic light.
The fiber optic light goes and
bounces off the mirror comes back.
We're cutting the light with, Oh,
we're cutting the light with that
razor right there. It's hard to see.
Cause I was in the way. Trent,
do you mind getting the matches?
[Trent] Yep! I have it.
But what happens is if you,
if you look here at our schlieren set up,
Trent's gonna light the matches
right there. You should see a double.
Yeah. Hold it up just a little bit.
There you go. See the double match?
That's because there's a shadow going
across the match and then coming back
through the match. So let's
talk through, what about,
we're about to see there's
some stuff going on here.
So back when Nolan Ryan used to pitch,
they would measure the speed
of the pitch at the plate. Um,
Now they measure the speed
of the pitch at the hand.
This is important because I don't think
what we're about to do is going to be
supersonic. This is day one,
we're ringing everything out.
I'm going to come out here and fiddle
in the field for however many weeks
it takes to get the exact
shot I'm looking for,
which is a shockwave over the baseball.
So what I think is going to happen is
we've got the baseball as it exits here.
I think it's going to exit supersonic
just because of the speed of sound in Nitrogen
But the shockwave is
going to come out and the baseball.
At some point, it's going to outrun. It's
going to be transonic in this region.
My hypothesis is that the baseball will
be subsonic when it passes the mirror
and we won't get the supersonic
shot today. It might be supersonic,
but we won't see it. So this thing,
the math says we can be
rated up to a thousand PSI.
We're going to go to 750
PSI. We've got a big thick,
real big thick shield over there.
Let's go look at it real quick.
So here you go to one inch
thick sheets of steel.
That is a massive target.
Let's get a baseball.
It's time.
It is time. Okay. We're about to
go through the safety checklist,
which is right here. Um, this is
what the control panel looks like.
We tried to make it as straightforward
as possible. We're going to add gas here.
We're gonna do the first shot at 750 PSI,
which is the highest pressure
we've ever pressurized
this thing to. If you know anything
about pressure vessels.
We're going to be behind this
steel. Right?
Absolutely
So uh....here we go. Ready for
loading procedures. Ramrod
is your heart beating fast?
It is. You're excited too.
It doesn't feel right to be this excited about a thing.
[Tape Cutting]
Confirm all clear up the trailer.
CLEAR.
Switch tank to vent. Ready? Oh
man. You're ready. I'm ready. Okay.
Okay. So the tank is capable
of holding pressure now.
So we're pulling the vacuum.
Now my heart's not beating
quite as fast as yours.
Doesn't have a chance to calm down. Okay?
All right.  [More heavy breathing]
So an absolute vacuum
is negative 14.7 PSI.
If we can get somewhere below 13,
we're good.  About to pressurize here,
by adding gas. Alright.
Tank is pressurizing.
Nobody get outside the steel right
now. That is a lot of volume.
So we're gonna be holding
this for quite a while.
This is tickling all of the brain
parts that need to be tickled.
Yes
We got baseball. We've got golly,
we've got ideal gas law. We've got
aerodynamics. We have mechanics.
We have mechanical design. I get to
push a button and loud things happen.
You get to push a button
underneath the red cover switch.
[Both laugh]
Alright, here we go. 180 PSI.
We're at minus 13.9 on the vacuum.
There will be a significant sonic
boom.
[Trent off screen] I'm scared a little,
I'm tingly
we're not quite 300 PSI, dude.
We have a really good
vacuum right now.
540 PSI
[Urgently] We're losing our vacuum. Hey, we're
losing our vacuum. Do you want to shoot?
Here we go. Get ready?
Ready? Three, two, one
[BARBARIC YAWP]
[ECHOES BLASTING OFF TREES]
WHAT ON EARTH.  WHOAH! Where did it go?
[Jeremy] That ball disintegrated!
[Destin] No it didn't ?
I think it hit the.... It
did hit the back. [Lots of laughing]
[Laughing noises]
get the, get the
[Jeremy off screen] Hold on, the tank is safe!
[Grow men giggling]
It shredded it man!
Oh wait you can see the seams!
Fantastic
Okay. So at some point we're
going to get that high speed.
Oh man. Okay, cool. Let's go do science.
I don't think that one's going to
be super Sonic. Okay.
[Voice over] OK, here we go, moment of truth. I got to
admit when I first saw this,
it was genuinely hard to believe my eyes.
Okay yeah so..
[Screams of disbelief]
Oh man.
Duuuuude
What have we done? Look at it? It's beautiful.
Can we just walk over
and put a ruler in front?
That's supersonic.
You can tell it's supersonic by the angle.
Like, it has a Mach cone!
There's another... what is that?,
is it closing behind it?
Something funky going on? I
have no idea what we've done.
We need to measure. We need
to figure out that velocity.
So you have something we
can calibrate? Yeah!
[Calculating] Point Zero One Four.....
Now this is rough. Okay. Now...
1,050 miles an hour.
1,050 miles an hour. Where's
my phone.
Mach 1.38. Okay.
[Laughs]
I'm legitimately having
problems functioning correctly.
It just seems too fast.
Like this is just imagery and
math. That's all. This is.
We're going to make sure that we
actually did go supersonic because the
shockwave was detached from the
nose of the baseballs on schlieren.
So we've got a stob here
and a stob here.
They're 12 foot apart. We've
got the camera right there.
So as the baseball goes across, not
only can we get velocity this time,
we've got a really good pixel calibration
and we'll be able to get
the drag coefficient and the baseball
530 PSI about
minus four on the vacuum.
Okay, here we go. Five, four,
Three.
Two.
One.
[It kind of sounds like what you'd imagine a dinosaur scream would sounds like... but also lasers]
Okay. The indisputable two stick method.
Velocity is equal to
distance divided by time.
The time to the first stick is
29 milliseconds. And remember,
this is happening fast. We're
recording at 28,500 frames per second.
The time to the second stick
is 36.8 milliseconds subtract
those two and divide that
gives us 1,538 feet per second,
which is basically 1050 miles per hour.
Adjust for altitude and temperature.
And yeah. Hey, it's supersonic.
That was Mach 1.35. I mean,
that's just measured
straight up with poles.
Okay... we have a supersonic baseball, Canon.
It is verified.
Ready? Three, two,
one fire.
[Explodey things]
We've all heard the expression
"knocking the cover off the ball",
but the ability of a baseball
to be destroyed by literally
ripping itself apart
with kinetic energy is something I
never thought I would see.
That's how leather breaks. When it's
beyond his tensile strength.
After several shots,
we realized the cannon was extremely
consistent with its targeting.
So I decided to put the high speed camera
in a little bit of danger in hopes of
seeing something amazing.
We ordered a set of official
major league baseballs.
So we could begin to understand what
would happen if an MLB fastball traveling
at over a thousand miles an
hour, where to hit something.
Okay, you ready? Three, two, one fire
[Piercing blast, this time coming at you]
Trigger? Yeah.  It didn't go over,
but it definitely moved.
Okay. Even though I thought I knew
what this would look like up close,
I was totally blown away by what I saw.
Okay. So I've thought for a year
about how I'm going to say this.
And I still don't know
if I have it, right.
So I'm just going to tell
you everything. And just,
I trust that you're going to
understand. Here's the deal,
a project like this is gigantic and it's
very difficult to get a sponsor to sign
up for something like this. There's
just too much risk. Right? However,
back in the day I had a crazy idea and
I was able to convince my wife. And so.
The crazy idea is what if I
get a baseball with a
Smarter Every Day logo on it. And I mail it
to everyone who supports on Patreon,
literally everyone who supports
smarter everyday on Patreon.
And maybe over time,
we can get enough support on Patreon
to offset something this large.
And hopefully we don't have to worry
about schedules and.... you're smart...
You know how the internet works.
But there was a problem.
I didn't have that many baseballs and I
didn't have a way of getting that many
baseballs,
which is why I reached out to the new
minor league baseball team in town,
the Rocket City, Trash Pandas,
which I think we will agree is the best
minor league baseball team name in the
history of minor league baseball
teams. And I said, Hey, trash pandas.
Here's the deal I would like to do
this crazy supersonic baseball cannon.
Would you consider helping me get
baseballs? And they said, yes!
Just tell people about the Trash Pandas.
You know, our first season's coming up,
we're really excited about it. Well, they
didn't get to play their first season.
So the Trash Pandas really need people
to know about the Trash Pandas right
now, they have great
shirts and stuff like that.
I'm sure they would love the support.
They helped me make these baseballs.
And over several months, like four
months, I signed all these baseballs.
You understand what I'm trying to do here.
I'm trying to break free of a calendar
slash schedule based model
for why and how I can make videos.
This is what I want to do.
I want to make the most amazing video
at any given time that my mind can
come up with, free from obligation...
and Patreon would help me do that
If you would please consider signing up
for Patreon at patreon.com/smartereveryday,
that will enable me to be free...
to do whatever my mind wants to do.
My goal was smarter every
day is to change the world for good.
Whether it be making a
student curious, uh, you know,
making somebody want to excel
beyond what they think they can do,
or just straight up helping people
in ways that they don't see coming.
So that's what I like to
do is Smarter Every Day,
I can promise you that any support you
give to Smarter Every Day will go to good
in the world. All that being said,
please consider subscribing to
Smarter Every Day on Patreon.
I would greatly appreciate that.
And I will send you this baseball.
If you are a Patron already,
I need to know your address because I
need to send you your baseball because I
have it. I signed it. I just don't
have your address in the system.
So if you already support Smarter
Every Day on Patreon, please do that.
Patreon.com/smartereveryday.
Big thanks to the trash pandas for helping
me do this. They're really great people.
I want to see them succeed. They're
an affiliate of the Angels also. Yeah,
that's it. By the way,
we now have a supersonic baseball
cannon on Smarter Every Day.
We can do whatever we want now.
I thank you for watching this video.
I thank you for supporting this goofy
little channel that this guy in Alabama has,
where he explores math and science and
tries to do things that are intelligent,
respectful, humble, and
fun. That's kinda my goal.
Thank you for considering
your support on Patreon. Also.
Thank you for considering subscribing.
I'm Destin. I'm grateful to you.
You getting Smarter Every
Day, have a good one.
