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Everything You Need to Know About Modern Day Marvels - Mental Floss Scatterbrained | Mental Floss
Aug 13, 2026
On today's episode of Scatterbrained, we're getting futuristic! We learn some surprising facts about skyscrapers located everywhere from New York City to Shanghai. Our extensive history of robots will take you all the way back to ancient Babylonia. Then we jump ahead in time again to learn about Tesla's Gigafactory in Nevada. Misconceptions about transportation get corrected. Finally, the shockingly huge Three Gorges Dam and its construction troubles.
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Amanda Suk: @sukiestyles
Becca Scott: @thebeccascott
Elliott Morgan: @elliottcmorgan
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Mike Rugnetta: @mikerugnetta
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Hello and welcome to Mental Floss Video. Today we're going to talk about modern marvels. Not
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like the Marvel character universe, but like robots and how we built huge skyscrapers so
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that Iron Man could destroy them. Let's get started. Let's begin with a fact list about skyscrapers. Now, the exact definition of skyscraper is a
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fuzzy. Some say it's a building taller than 14 stories, others say it's 40 or 50 stories
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but what we're talking about here is a very tall building. Like, you wouldn't want to take the
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stairs. For instance, if you took all the concrete used in One World Trade Center, you could create
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a sidewalk between Manhattan and Chicago. But all that space is not always rented. Like, during a
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recession in the 1970s, just 17% of the Chrysler Building in New York was occupied. Also in the
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In the 1970s, an undergraduate architecture student called the chief structural engineer
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of 601 Lexington in New York. According to the student, the building was at risk of blowing over on a windy day
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And that turned out to be true, so a team worked secretly doing repairs at night until
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it was fixed. Of course, probably the most famous New York skyscraper is the Empire State Building
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And you might not know that in 1945 a US Army bomber crashed into it
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14 people died, but there was also a woman in an elevator that dropped 75 floors as a result, and she survived
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Moving on to Chinese skyscrapers, the Shanghai Tower aims to be pretty environmentally friendly
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There are 270 wind turbines at the top. But if you love heights, you should visit the Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai
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There are no glass walls or handrails on their skywalk. Instead, you experience it by putting on a harness to look over the ledge
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I'll take things I literally wouldn't do for a million dollars for 400, Alex
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In 2015, a construction company put up a 57-story skyscraper in 19 working days
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It was made out of prefabricated parts. Abraj al-Bait in Mecca is technically seven skyscrapers
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It includes the Maka clock tower with four faces that are the biggest clocks in the world
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and it lights up during the call to prayer, which can be seen from 18 miles away
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Speaking of views, on a clear day you can see four states from Willis Tower in Chicago
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Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin. The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat sometimes rates skyscrapers on their vanity
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meaning extraneous vanity height at the top of buildings to make them taller
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Like the Burj Khalifa in Dubai has 244 meters out of 828 meters total of such space at the top in the form of a spire
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This, by the way, is my imitation of a spire. Anyway, if you want to build the world's tallest building, you're gonna probably need a spire
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The Taipei 101 in Taiwan has a secret VIP club on the 101st floor known as Summit 101
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For years, people questioned whether it actually existed. You can't get there on the public elevators, and the building's website stated that there
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was a private function room on the floor, but in 2014, filming was allowed in the club
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so its existence was verified. A robot is a machine that can move around and do tasks that a human might or might not or can or doesn want to Obviously robotics is a little complicated so it would be impossible to give you its full history in a couple minutes
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We're going to highlight some fun moments instead. About the 14th century BCE, the Klepsidra was invented, possibly around Babylonia
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It was basically a clock that used water to mark the passage of time. Some experts view this as a robot predecessor
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The Alexandrian man Ctesibius, who lived during the third century BCE, improved the Clepsydra
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He also invented a few early models for robots, like a bird that could sing using pneumatics
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meaning it could be controlled by air pressure. In China, Su Sung created a 30-foot-plus tall clock tower
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In it, there were little figures of humans who would play bells and gongs
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In 1206, Al-Jazari published his Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices
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It included a design for a floating mechanical orchestra, which ran thanks to a drum with pegs that you could switch out to play different rhythms
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Some people say Leonardo da Vinci built a robotic knight in 1495
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We know that he at least sketched one. It would have been powered by a crank
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In 1739, inventor Jacques Vaucanson debuted a duck he'd created that, among other things, could eat food out of your hand and then poop
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It's worth noting that it was fake poop. Swiss inventor Pierre Jacques-Hydreau created a few interesting robots, including The Writer, circa 1768
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which was a little doll at a desk that you could program. It wrote 40 characters in one go
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In 1801, Joseph-Marie Jacquard debuted his automated loom. Workers could operate it to make complicated woven designs that previously would have required a very skilled worker to set
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Within a decade, Friedrich Kaufman created a humanoid robot, a soldier that could play the trumpet
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And in 1898, Nikola Tesla displayed his small, remote-controlled boat at Madison Square Garden
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And up until this point, robot wasn't even a word. It was coined by Carol Chapik in his 1920 play R.U.R., from a Czech word meaning drudgery
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Eric is considered the UK's first robot. He was revealed to the public in 1928
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He could stand, talk, and move his head and arms. At the 1939 World's Fair, you would have found Electro, who talked and moved, like Eric
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but could also blow up balloons and smoke cigarettes. Exciting! A couple years later, George Duvall patented a programmable robot arm
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that grasped objects and could lift them. This technology eventually gave us assembly line robots
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The first advanced mobile robot, Shakey, was developed between 1966 and 1972
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Thanks to a camera and sensors, it could move around a space and avoid objects in its way
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In 1970, the Lunahad 1 became the first robotic rover to successfully land on the moon
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Jumping ahead in time a bit, Genghis was an insect-like robot with six legs
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It was designed to walk towards a moving animal. And if the animal stopped, Genghis would stop too
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During the mid to late 1990s, the computer Deep Blue beat the world champion of chess
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Gary Kasparov, in multiple games. In 1999, the popular robot dog, Aibo, was released
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It cost $2,000. And just three years later, we get robot vacuums thanks to the Roomba
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In 2005, a group of researchers from Cornell University created a complicated robot that
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could build copies of itself. Self-replication is considered an important part of robotics
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because it's something that happens in nature. So sure yeah let teach the robots to self What the worst that could happen Meanwhile a team at Stanford University was working on the Stanley a self car In 2005 it completed the DARPA Grand Challenge a course with more than 100 turns over 132 miles
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In 2011, IBM's Watson competed on Jeopardy! against two former champions. They played for three episodes. Watson beat the humans with $77,147
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And in 2012, NASA sent the first humanoid robot into space, to the International Space Station
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20 miles from Reno, Nevada, you can find Tesla's Gigafactory. In the massive factory, the car company and its partner, Panasonic, produce lithium-ion batteries, which then go into Tesla cars
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The idea for the company partnership dates back to a calculation done in 2012 by one of Tesla's founders, J.B. Straubel
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He tried to determine how many lithium-ion batteries they'd need if they wanted to make 500,000 cars per year
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and he deduced that they'd actually need every single lithium-ion battery being outputted
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The original goal was to have 6,500 workers at the Gigafactory, but in 2016, Tesla CEO Elon Musk estimated that it might be more like 10,000
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One day, it will be the largest manufacturing plant ever. The company thinks that using such a huge plant will help them lower the battery prices
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so electric cars can get cheaper in turn. Construction on the factory started in May of 2014
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and it's actually still being built to this day, though the factory is already in operation
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As of November 2017, it was just 30% complete at a massive 1.9 million square feet. The Reno
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Gazette Journal reported that the foundation alone cost $16 million. Despite its size
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the company hopes that the building will have net zero energy, thanks to things like solar
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panels and wind turbines. As for what's inside, it's hard to know for sure because Tesla can be
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pretty secretive about it. Luckily, a few journalists have been allowed in, so we have a
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few details from over the years, like the fact that Tesla brews its very own blend of coffee
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for employees and that the company mission appears on the factory wall. It reads
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to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy. And gigafactory conference rooms are
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apparently named after chemical elements related to batteries. Slightly cooler than conference rooms
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are robots, and you can find those in the building too. They're known as AGVs, which stands for
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automated guided vehicles. AGVs are mostly used to move objects from place to place. Robot arms
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also do some of the production. In addition to the robots, you might even find Elon Musk himself
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at the Gigafactory. He camped on its roof back in October of 2017. He's a big fan of the location
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once calling it quite romantic because it will be a diamond shape that points to true north
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Even though the building isn't quite finished yet, Tesla continues with its ambitious plans
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Their current goal is to produce 500,000 cars annually. By 2020, they'd like to extend that goal to a million
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And this may not be the only gigafactory for long. J.B. Straubel has said that they want to build many more
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In his words, ones that are actually quite a lot bigger than this one. Most of us benefit from modern transportation
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but maybe we don't know everything about it that we should. Here are some misconceptions Submarines aren actually that modern it turns out The earliest known functioning submarine prototype was created by a man named Cornelius Drebbel during the 17th century It went 15 feet down into the River Thames
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In 1800, Robert Fulton developed plans for the first modern submarine. If you're taking the subway in New York City, you might want to know that service and line
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aren't synonyms as some people believe. Service refers to the subway's route, and the term line is actually the track that it
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it takes. One is physical and the other is conceptual. And people have a couple misconceptions
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about airplane travel. It's not true that planes discard the waste from toilets while
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midair, at least not on purpose. There have been some unfortunate accidents, but I'm
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not going to get into them here. You can Google if you're into that. But in general, the
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waste gets removed by the ground crew after the plane has landed. And finally, you'll
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be happy to hear that turbulence isn't causing your plane to drop hundreds of feet. According
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to pilots, it's rare for a plane to experience over 20 feet of altitude loss. 10 to 20 feet
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is probably average. Still kind of scary. We're going to wrap it up with another short story. In 1994, construction began on the Three
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Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River in China. The idea actually had been around for a while. In
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1919, Nationalist leader Sun Yat-sen announced his proposal for it. As for why they needed a
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massive hydroelectric dam, there are a couple reasons. They wanted the energy source, plus the
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Yangtze River had a bad habit of flooding. The project was a huge undertaking, costing an estimated
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37 billion dollars. It also involved flooding 13 cities, 140 towns, and over 1,350 villages
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One unfortunate loss was the flooding of an area where there were artifacts from the ancient Ba
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people of about 4,000 years ago. About 26,000 people were on the dam's construction team
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And the amount of water it stores has, in theory, slowed the Earth's rotation
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In 2012, the dam reached its full capacity with 32 working hydropower generators
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It's 1.4 miles long and 607 feet tall, which means it's five times bigger than the Hoover
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Dam in the United States. Since then, the dam has also opened the world's largest elevator, which can lift or lower cargo ships
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It holds 6.7 million pounds and is taller than a football field's length
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As you may have guessed, this project had its fair share of controversies
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Flooding all of those cities, towns and villages meant relocating people. The official number released was 1.3 million, but some consider that figure to be questionable
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Those people were supposed to get money, homes and jobs. But according to National Geographic, there has been a widespread local corruption, resulting
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in people not getting the compensation they were promised. There have been landslides and other major environmental issues
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Plus, by flooding so much area, biodiversity is in danger. But hey, big giant elevator
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That's cool, right?
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