Hartley Hoskins makes steel cable sound cool

Hartley Hoskins is a geophysicist and communications engineer who has worked for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute since 1958. Last month, he gave me a behind-the-scenes tour of the places where WHOI's maker/scientists build the research equipment they use from scratch. In this short clip, aboard the research vessel Oceanus, he talks about the special steel cables Oceanus uses to raise and lower scientific equipment, and how ocean research can push even the best tools to their limits.

You can hear more from Hoskins at WHOI's oral history website.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

Maggie goes places and talks to people. Find out where she'll be speaking next.

MORE: awesome mundane • Engineering • research • Science • Technology • tools • video • Woods Hole

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Jake von Slatt

That was cool! Thanks!
iggadore

It’s the fork and knife in his front shirt pocket that really makes this video for me.
teknocholer

Fascinating stuff. Dyneema (aka Spectra) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyneema is replacing wire rope in many applications. It solves some of the issues he describes here.
- tylerkaraszewski
  
  People are using that stuff as standing rigging on sailboats, and I guess it seems to work but I don’t know that I’d put it on my boat because, man, does it not *look* like it should work.
woodly

Does enjoying this video make me a nerd?
David Kopelman

that’s one happy mutant.