December 5, 2013 • 30 mins
Thanks to the amazing properties of magnets, clever engineers have figured out how to make entire trains levitate above their tracks, letting them move frictionlessly and allowing them to reach incredible speeds. Learn about how maglev trains work and what's taking so long for us to get aboard in this episode.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the all new Toyota Corolla. Welcome
to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's
Charles W. Chuck Chuckers Briant. Yeah, and this is is
(00:26):
that where you're going with? Sure? Yeah, my bus right
into CC writer all the style. How are they going
with the Muppet? Oh? Yeah, it's time we put on makeup. Yeah?
What was that somebody's giant stomach stuffed bike? What was that?
That's weird? Yeah, that was crazy. That couldn't have been
(00:47):
Jerry's stomach. There's no way. All right, what's what's your intro? Huh? Chuck? Yes,
uh you remember our Magnet podcast. Yeah, I've personally thought
it was a great episode because we explained how magnets work. Yeah,
it was just good, tough but good. Yeah, it was tough,
(01:09):
but it was also kind of um. It was one
of those ones where you're like, oh, okay, that explains
pretty much everything about magnets, the thing that I've used
before in my life, and I just kind of took
for granted some people think that their magic, but we
kind of said, this is how they work. I liked it.
So um, I liked this this um article in theory,
(01:33):
the one we're about to do a show on. Yeah,
about maglev trains. Yeah, we did a video on maglev trains.
Remember that one of our one of our interstitial shorts
was on magleft trains. Uh do we I remember doing
the quantum levitation? Was that it? Yeah, because that's the
(01:56):
only way I knew about any of this was the
fact that we had talked about it before. Well what
did we talk about, uh magleb you know the basic
principle in one minute behind magnetic levitation. Well, that's pretty
much what we're gonna do here, except slightly longer. Yeah.
So that was my intro, but intro, and we should
say also, um, everyone, it is next to impossible to
(02:20):
get up to the minute, up to the year information
about what maglev trains are in operation, what are still planned,
what's still going on. So it is possible we may
get that part a little incorrect, but we're going to
try our best to be as accurate as possible. Yeah,
(02:40):
And the reason why is because magnetic levitation to power
a train so new. Well, it's actually not that new,
because they've been doing it for a while and well,
it was proposed ever since Tesla started noticing what was
going on in the late nineteenth century. But it's so
new in this regard as far as super fast speed
trains powered by magnets transporting lots of people over distances,
(03:06):
maybe great distances. That is so new, and there's so
a few different technologies that it is kind of hard
to keep track on which one is in the forefront,
which ones are being funded because the stuff is expensive.
It is, um, it's hard to get funding, especially here
in the States. Yeah, and if you go on if
you just type mag LEVI into Google or your favorite
search engine, um or duck duck go if you're you know,
(03:31):
kind of watching who's watching you? Oh? Is that like
a secret? It's like an anonymous search engine? Okay? Um,
you will find there's projects all over the United States,
and all of them are like, we're shove already, we're
ready to go. Just give us some money. And they're
not getting any money because the construction costs are so
enormous because with maglev trains you can't use existing railways.
(03:54):
It's all new. And uh, I saw one quote and
again who knows how recent this is, but fifty million
euros per mile. I can believe this is what the
German Consortium is quoting. The thing is is, once you
get it built, maintenance is not bad, not bad at all,
because there's not a lot of wear and tear on it.
(04:14):
As you'll see um and if you do look into
Maglav you will see that it is very much like
the the transportation technology of the future that's going on today. Um,
especially after looking into Elon Musk's um tube hyper loop thing.
I heard of that. So basically Elon Musk, who is
(04:36):
like our good friend, yeah, uh he super rich guy, right,
he basically just jotted down this idea on a cocktail
napkin and all of a sudden it's like the new thing.
But um, it's a an enclosed tube system that just
you put in a little car whatever that seats twelve
people or something comfortably and you suck all the air
(04:57):
out of it, no resist it, so you can go
really fast. Basically I think it goes about seven miles
an hour, a little under the speed of sound, so
you can get from the west coast to the east
coast or vice versa very very fast. The thing is
the construction costs for this are just preposterous. But if
(05:20):
it can come along or come down a little more,
then it will give Maglev a run for its money.
But if it, if Maglev can start to really kind
of get some traction and get some lines going, it
will be the the movement of the future for at
least a decade or two. Yeah, I saw where they're
proposing both in the future Maglev trains that operate inside
(05:43):
vacuum tubes. Okay, as fast as two thousand miles an
hour as crazy. Right now they're breaking records like an
hour plus what's the fastest right now? The so apparently,
and this is kind of mind boggling because Maglev as
again we realized everybody, we haven't explained what maglev is
we're talking here, but um, Maglev. The the great advantage
(06:08):
it has is that it's supposedly goes faster than the
normal steel wheel train apparently a TGV train, which is
a steel wheel train. UM. In Europe, they they beat
a Maglev land speed really that was held by the
Japanese Maglev of about three hundred and fifty one mile
an hour. I think it went like three sixty. Man,
(06:30):
I don't know if i'd feel safe. Yeah, I can imagine.
I was. I was reading a quote from a Maglev
rider and they were saying, like, you can tell you're
going really fast, like on the bullet train. You was
gonna be so disappointed because she's taught me how to
say it in Japanese so many times that I don't
want to butcher. But the bullet train, it goes pretty fast,
(06:52):
like hundred and fifty miles an hour or something, but
it just looks like everything's a blur. You don't feel
like you're going fast. Apparently in a Maglev it goes
fast enough to wear like you feel like, holy cow,
we're going three fifty miles an hour. Well, our very
unparent company did a show World's Fastest Trains, and I
watched the Maglev segment and the dude you know, was
(07:14):
in the front room with the driver and they were like,
all right, we're going three hundred miles an hour now,
and it's hard to tell on the TV you know
exactly how fast you're going because I looked and I
was like, well, then, you know, it looks like about
a hundred to me. But um, yeah, I think being
on the train and I think the key to not
feeling too weird is obviously you're not being shot out
like a bullet. You're you're ramping up to that speed,
(07:35):
so that helps. Plus if you dressed normally for your
train ride, you'll feel less weird too. That's right. Um. Also,
hold on one more thing, um, the we're talking very
high speeds an that's the that's the speed record of
a maglev. But they're averaging like to fifty or more,
(07:56):
which means if you, if you get these things built,
you're going to expand the range of where people can
live and commute and go to work every day tremendously. Um.
So there's a lot of value in creating these maglevs.
Right are we there yet? Well, before we do that,
let's just might as well do a message break now, huh.
I think it's a good time, all right, So now
(08:23):
can we get down to brass tacks. Let's okay. Um,
this is kind of confusing because I read a paper
in ight, I think where this guy was saying like
there's a lot of people calling all these different technologies maglev.
This is all very early stage proposal hadn't been proven yet,
(08:45):
but he was saying there's at least seven different kinds
of technology here that everyone's calling maglev that are different
enough that it doesn't they're just different. But for the
purposes of this podcast, we can get it with maglev,
but we have to point out that there are some
really different systems that are in use and being proposed
right now, and a lot of them have to do
(09:05):
with the suspension system. Yeah, I think what's going on now?
There are three pretty much leading competing systems, right. Yeah,
because we should say, chuck. A maglev train is a
train that uses magnets to float above a track by
either a half a centimeter too. I saw one that
(09:27):
floats up to a foot off the track. That's a
little scary. It seems a little scary, but apparently the
higher you go, and that that high end of the range,
the more stable it is. Yeah. But so the the
train is literally not touching the tracks and it floats along.
And the reason that's why it can go so fast
is because there's no friction, no friction, The only resistance
(09:48):
is air and they're super sleek of course, so even
the error is cut down. Uh. So let's go. Let's
go to Germany first, because they have a system, uh
trans rapid it's called the actually company is called trans
Rapid International. There's also a trans Rapid USA now I
think us. That's right. Uh. And the German version is
(10:10):
electro magnetic suspension. And the way that the guy on
the Discovery Channel show described it was that electro magnets, Well,
when you use electromagnets, they're only um magnetize when there's
a power source, when there's electricity running through exactly. So
that's important to remember it is, and we'll point out
(10:31):
why later, because in the German system, uh, the E
M S system, it's all about attraction. It's not repelled
magnets repelling each other. It's magnets that are attracted to
each other. And the reason that they float is they're
basically switching it on and off, pulsing the electromatic magnets
so fast that it creates that hovering attraction. Okay, so
(10:57):
that's the German version, so um okay. And apparently this
German version, I think they do use repulsive magnets, but
on the sides for the guidance magnets, so to make
it hover, they're turning it on an awful lot. So
it wants to stick, but no, but stick but no,
and there's not a dude on the switch doing it
really fast. It's right. They have computers handling it UM.
(11:21):
And then so this is the the suspension system you're
talking about, right, the electro magnetic suspension. And the word
suspension is kind of easily overlooked, but in this case
we're literally talking about how the train is suspended in
mid air above the track in this case, and with
the e M S it's about I think half a
(11:43):
centimeter to a centimeter. It's it's very close to the
to the track, and they use the electro magnets to
attract and they use the guidance magnets, which are magnets
installed on the side of the train UH that are
along the side of the track to repel magnets along
the side of the track to keep the train from
(12:05):
bumping into the guide rails. But it requires a UH
computer system to constantly make adjustments to the current that's
going through these electro magnets to either um to either
attract the train to make it float or to repel
it from the sides to adjust it to make sure
it never bumps into the rails or the track. Because
(12:27):
if you're going three fifty miles an hour and your
train scuffs the track, you're in big trouble or big trouble.
One advantage of this, uh the German system, is that
you only need the power on for the section of
track that you're using at the time. So they literally
will turn on a section of track, the train goes
(12:49):
over it, and then they'll turn it back off. Right,
So it's very like economically fuel will not fuel efficient
because it's not fuel right, and that's the power efficient right,
And it doesn't use fossil fuel in the sense that
a normal train does, although if you go far enough
down the line, that electricity has to come from somewhere,
so ultimately it is coming from possibles. But the efficiency
(13:11):
fuel efficiency is incredible compared to you know, a normal
train that burns cossal fuels just to move God's shoveling
coal into a fire. Yeah, yeah, I should say so.
My understanding of the delivery of electricity to the track
is the same for both suspension systems that you propel
(13:33):
like that. So the whole track is made of electromagnets
right from on both systems, and you're just sending electricity
to the electromagnets that are immediately in front of and
immediately behind the train immediately under. Yeah, because you need it.
You need to float the train. Then you need to
propel it right, and the way you're propelling it is
(13:55):
the magnets that are just ahead of the train are
going to be positive, and so that's going to attract
the train, meaning it's gonna pull it forward. And then
the the magnets behind it are gonna be charged so
that they're negative and they're going to repel the train
push it. So in the front, the magnets are pulling
it in the in the back, the magnets are pushing it.
(14:17):
And again, remember there's no friction here, it's just air.
So it doesn't take a whole lot to make this
train go really really fast just using magnets. Yeah, and
they in two thousand two debuted commercially in Shanghai, China,
a pretty short run transporting people um from airport to
airport basically um at a speed it speeds over two
(14:41):
fifty miles an hour. So I read that the journey
the nineteen mile journey. Now it takes about seven and
a half minutes as opposed to about an hour in
a cab, and they were going to expand it, but
that was halted in two thousand eight over radiation fears
by people, And now it's being proposed as an underground system,
(15:03):
like to go underground to halt those fears. But in
two thousand and ten another high speed train in the
area was a non maglev system opened, so they basically said, well,
we probably won't do this. Uh, we probably won't extend
the Shanghai line now. So yeah, I heard it's definitely
on hold, but I didn't hear that they decided they
weren't going to do it. Well, the regular bullet train
(15:26):
popped up and they're like, well, now that we have that,
I guess we don't need the maglev. Oh well, oh well,
so Japan's got the other um big rival system. Uh
So the propulsion systems are the same. You use magnets
ahead of the train and behind the train to attract
a repel it right to push it forward. I believe so,
so um the suspension systems are what differ. In Germany
(15:49):
you're using magnets to um repel it right, to attract
it to attract it. In Japan you're using something called
the Meisner effect. So basically, Chuck The Meisner effect is
where you take a super cooled superconductor, right, I think
like liquid helium temperature, which is very very cold, and
(16:10):
you put it in a magnetic field. The magnetic field
basically hugs it. It goes around it rather than through it. Okay, Um,
So when you do that, the field actually levitates the thing.
So if you take enough superconductors that are at the
right temperature and you put them in the presence of
(16:33):
a magnetic field whole bunch of magnets, say on a train,
the the magnet will float, it will levitate, And that's
the electrodynamics expension that the Japanese are using. So basically
you have a tunnel, a magnetic field tunnel that these
things are traveling through, which means that there they don't
(16:56):
they don't need any extra magnets on the sides, or
they don't need any on the bottom or extra magnets
on the bottom. It's just going to stay put within
this bent magnetic field that's warped to wrap around it.
That's right. It's never going to drop and it's totally stable,
which is the big that's a big advantage from what
I understand of the Japanese system over the German system.
(17:18):
The stability doesn't require a bunch of computers to constantly
adjust it, and it is just inherently more stable because
it's not just being held up from the bottom and
then a little on the sides. It is wrapped in
this basically blanket of an electro magnetic field UH. It
can conduct power electricity even when the power is cut off,
(17:41):
so that's a definite advantage UM. Although the German system
does have like battery backups, it's not like if the
power went off, the train would just go and stop.
But the German one doesn't never doesn't need tires, and
the Japanese one does, yeah, because it needs to ramp
up to a certain speed in order to begin the
float and just start immediately. What is it like eighty
(18:02):
eight miles per hour. That's back to the future sixty two.
And I think they use liquid nitrogen and it's just
expensive to super cool these UH coils, and I think
that's one of the drawbacks. But they're all expensive. They're
none of this is they haven't figured out a cheap
way to do any of this. Now, there's a proposed
(18:24):
line um in Japan. It's already it's the one that
set the uh that land speed record for maglev trains.
It's the j R tok Um that's the railway company,
the JRR Tolkien kind of close, but it's their line. Um,
it's supposed supposedly is already in operation. I read somewhere
(18:45):
that it's moved like a million people already. But they
have a proposed line that they want to open by
seven and it's from Tokyo to Nagoya, and then they
want to extend that from Tokyo to Osaka. And they're
talking like it's like a fifty billion dollar project and
I think that's just the first line. That's Yeah, it
(19:07):
sounds about right. But the reason that it probably will
happen is they're they're um facing all of this on
data showing that people are going to keep moving to
Japan and Osaka, so they're going to have customers and
they're not relying on any government money. They have so
much money they're just going to fund it themselves. Is
privately funded. Yeah. Yeah. Another con though of the Japanese
(19:28):
version is that if you have a pacemaker, you don't
want to get on that train because, um, that magnetic
field will reek havoc and you probably won't live. It
will shut you down. We'll shut you down. And then
there's the in duct track and that is another type
of E d S system, which is the Japanese system,
(19:48):
except that they use room temperature magnets. And from what
I could tell, this is as close to just the
whole thing of magnets, regular magnets opposing each other, and
they're just gonna use that, right, Yeah, Like it's as
close do we get as you going out to the
store and getting two magnets and putting their like poles
(20:12):
against each other so that they repel. Yeah, there's actually
something called the hull Bock array, which is a way
to just line up the magnets UM in certain directions
so that their poles are facing north, southeast or west. UM.
And when you put them together in a clump, basically,
the the magnetic field below the magnets doubles, the magnetic
(20:34):
field on the top of the magnets cancels one another out,
so you have your extra strong magnetic magnetic field that
can produce this Misner effect basically um without this super
cooled superconductor. Yeah, and these aren't even electro magnets. I
don't think aren't they just magnets. I think they're permanent
room temperature magnets. Is crazy. Yeah, there are three UM
(20:56):
designs right now the in duct track one, two, and three.
UM one is high speed, two is slow speed, and
three is heavy load slow speed. Yeah, so I guess
just freighting stuff back and forth. Yeah. They did this
in London at one point, but then shut it down.
Like in the eighties, they had a maglive train. Yeah,
just a very slow moving like it might have been
(21:18):
an airport type situation. And I looked up the one
here in Atlanta, the new airport train. I thought it
might have been maglev, but of course it's not. It's
just wheels, just stupid wheels. UM. Although they had Atlanta
have its day, Well, they have proposed one. Atlanta is
one of the city's UM that's trying to get maglev
going between Atlanta and Chattanooga. And there's one proposed between
(21:42):
d C and Baltimore. One in Las Vegas, Yeah, La
in Vegas UM, and I think one from Pittsburgh to someplace,
but I'm not sure exactly where I saw that one too.
I don't remember where it might have been d C Stittsburg, Philly, yeah, well,
hold on, we're getting ahead of ourselves. Well, no, these
are just proposals and and they're having a hard time
(22:03):
getting the funding they need for any of these to
really take off, right, because it's expensive, it is chuck,
how about a how about a message break? Huh hey,
let's do it alright. So, um, this whole idea of
going three fifty miles an hour through space even without
(22:27):
friction is um awesome, It is awesome. It can also
be deadly. They've they've already been maglev accidents. Yeah, the
one in Germany was a little distressing because in two
thousand and six it crashed into a repair car that
was accidentally left on the track. And this is a
test too, so it's like everything should have been Yeah,
(22:50):
like why do you leave a car on the track? Period?
I don't know, I don't know. Uh So they actually
people died in that one. The train was going at
least a hundred and twenty miles an hour when it
struck the car. We must have just been getting up
to speed, I guess, yeah, but yeah, twenty nine people
died on that one. There's another one in Shanghai on
that line that is an operation. Yeah, that was just
(23:10):
a fire though, and I don't want to make light
of that, but it wasn't like a crash or an
incident like that. Yeah, I'm just glad no one got
hurt exactly. Uh. And this is breaking news, dude. This
was in the paper today as we record it in
real time. Okay. The Washington Post said that Northeast Maglev
everyone's getting in on the mag Love game. Uh, because
(23:34):
I mean, like, it really is a great idea. It's
just really really expensive, but if you can get it
up and running, it's awesome. I Mean I imagine in
literally in a hundred years, there'll be a lot of
this as major transportation, you know, but not we won't
see it. But as of today, November four, Northeast mag
(23:54):
Love is AH has raised fifty million dollars in private funds.
They can build five inches of track with that exactly.
And they're trying to get the Washington Baltimore lag going
with private funding because the government's not pony any money
for it. I think we'll see it in our lifetime.
They think ten billion between d C and Baltimore, although
(24:15):
they're not They don't have a firm cost yet, but um,
I wonder how long it would take, because I mean,
that's not even that long of a drive anyway. Yeah,
I agreed. Let maybe ten minutes, which I mean if
you live in Baltimore and work in d C. I'm
sure that would be extremely attractive. Yeah, that's true. Um,
I don't know about the Atlanta at Chattanooga thing. Who cares, right,
(24:37):
you know, people in Chattanooga be psyched, I guess because
they could get to the airport in like thirty minutes. Yeah,
I guess, not just in Chattanooga. I'll go there and
paying for gold. I saw this, um. This It was
some Discovery show video from a Discovery show too, um,
and it had our good friend Michio Kaku, and he
(24:57):
was talking about train, bullet train that could get you
from one side of the world to the other in
an hour, and the way that it would do that
is to go through the middle of the Earth. Basically,
you would have to create this to basically like Elon
Musk's idea, you create a tube, you evacuate all of
(25:19):
the air out of it so that there's no resistance whatsoever,
and you just drop in the force of gravity takes
you up to about eighteen thousand miles an hour, and
then once you make it to the center and out
the other side, your gravity starts to work against you,
so it slows you down. So within an hour you
should be able to make it from one side of
(25:40):
the Earth to the other. But as Dr Coku put
put it, um, it's gonna be very difficult getting through
the center of the Earth, all of all these theoretical
ideas that come up with it, like it's not even
even remotely possible. And he'd probably say, like, I was
just talking about what they ask me to talk about.
(26:01):
It's like, dude, I was at McDonald's one day when
I said that, I was waiting in line at McDonald's.
So what else you got? I got nothing else? Maglev? Yeah,
the Way of the Future. Yeah, we've got a we
have a standing bet. Now we will see a maglev
train in operation that we can ride on while we're
both alive. That's my bet. You say no that we will, Like,
(26:23):
I mean, if we went to Shanghai, we could do
it right now. So I feel like I just want
my bet well health that you're gonna pay for us
here in the United States, um, within our lifetime, which
for me is gonna be about twenty years. We're both
still healthy enough to ride it. Okay, I'll take that
bet okay. Uh. Let's see. If you guys want to
(26:44):
learn more about maglev, you can type that word in
the search part how stuff works dot Com. And since
I said a search part, it's time for listener mail.
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M hmm. Brought to you by the all new twenty
four team Toyota Corolla
Brought to you by the all new Toyota Corolla. Welcome
to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's
Charles W. Chuck Chuckers Briant. Yeah, and this is is
(00:26):
that where you're going with? Sure? Yeah, my bus right
into CC writer all the style. How are they going
with the Muppet? Oh? Yeah, it's time we put on makeup. Yeah?
What was that somebody's giant stomach stuffed bike? What was that?
That's weird? Yeah, that was crazy. That couldn't have been
(00:47):
Jerry's stomach. There's no way. All right, what's what's your intro? Huh? Chuck? Yes,
uh you remember our Magnet podcast. Yeah, I've personally thought
it was a great episode because we explained how magnets work. Yeah,
it was just good, tough but good. Yeah, it was tough,
(01:09):
but it was also kind of um. It was one
of those ones where you're like, oh, okay, that explains
pretty much everything about magnets, the thing that I've used
before in my life, and I just kind of took
for granted some people think that their magic, but we
kind of said, this is how they work. I liked it.
So um, I liked this this um article in theory,
(01:33):
the one we're about to do a show on. Yeah,
about maglev trains. Yeah, we did a video on maglev trains.
Remember that one of our one of our interstitial shorts
was on magleft trains. Uh do we I remember doing
the quantum levitation? Was that it? Yeah, because that's the
(01:56):
only way I knew about any of this was the
fact that we had talked about it before. Well what
did we talk about, uh magleb you know the basic
principle in one minute behind magnetic levitation. Well, that's pretty
much what we're gonna do here, except slightly longer. Yeah.
So that was my intro, but intro, and we should
say also, um, everyone, it is next to impossible to
(02:20):
get up to the minute, up to the year information
about what maglev trains are in operation, what are still planned,
what's still going on. So it is possible we may
get that part a little incorrect, but we're going to
try our best to be as accurate as possible. Yeah,
(02:40):
And the reason why is because magnetic levitation to power
a train so new. Well, it's actually not that new,
because they've been doing it for a while and well,
it was proposed ever since Tesla started noticing what was
going on in the late nineteenth century. But it's so
new in this regard as far as super fast speed
trains powered by magnets transporting lots of people over distances,
(03:06):
maybe great distances. That is so new, and there's so
a few different technologies that it is kind of hard
to keep track on which one is in the forefront,
which ones are being funded because the stuff is expensive.
It is, um, it's hard to get funding, especially here
in the States. Yeah, and if you go on if
you just type mag LEVI into Google or your favorite
search engine, um or duck duck go if you're you know,
(03:31):
kind of watching who's watching you? Oh? Is that like
a secret? It's like an anonymous search engine? Okay? Um,
you will find there's projects all over the United States,
and all of them are like, we're shove already, we're
ready to go. Just give us some money. And they're
not getting any money because the construction costs are so
enormous because with maglev trains you can't use existing railways.
(03:54):
It's all new. And uh, I saw one quote and
again who knows how recent this is, but fifty million
euros per mile. I can believe this is what the
German Consortium is quoting. The thing is is, once you
get it built, maintenance is not bad, not bad at all,
because there's not a lot of wear and tear on it.
(04:14):
As you'll see um and if you do look into
Maglav you will see that it is very much like
the the transportation technology of the future that's going on today. Um,
especially after looking into Elon Musk's um tube hyper loop thing.
I heard of that. So basically Elon Musk, who is
(04:36):
like our good friend, yeah, uh he super rich guy, right,
he basically just jotted down this idea on a cocktail
napkin and all of a sudden it's like the new thing.
But um, it's a an enclosed tube system that just
you put in a little car whatever that seats twelve
people or something comfortably and you suck all the air
(04:57):
out of it, no resist it, so you can go
really fast. Basically I think it goes about seven miles
an hour, a little under the speed of sound, so
you can get from the west coast to the east
coast or vice versa very very fast. The thing is
the construction costs for this are just preposterous. But if
(05:20):
it can come along or come down a little more,
then it will give Maglev a run for its money.
But if it, if Maglev can start to really kind
of get some traction and get some lines going, it
will be the the movement of the future for at
least a decade or two. Yeah, I saw where they're
proposing both in the future Maglev trains that operate inside
(05:43):
vacuum tubes. Okay, as fast as two thousand miles an
hour as crazy. Right now they're breaking records like an
hour plus what's the fastest right now? The so apparently,
and this is kind of mind boggling because Maglev as
again we realized everybody, we haven't explained what maglev is
we're talking here, but um, Maglev. The the great advantage
(06:08):
it has is that it's supposedly goes faster than the
normal steel wheel train apparently a TGV train, which is
a steel wheel train. UM. In Europe, they they beat
a Maglev land speed really that was held by the
Japanese Maglev of about three hundred and fifty one mile
an hour. I think it went like three sixty. Man,
(06:30):
I don't know if i'd feel safe. Yeah, I can imagine.
I was. I was reading a quote from a Maglev
rider and they were saying, like, you can tell you're
going really fast, like on the bullet train. You was
gonna be so disappointed because she's taught me how to
say it in Japanese so many times that I don't
want to butcher. But the bullet train, it goes pretty fast,
(06:52):
like hundred and fifty miles an hour or something, but
it just looks like everything's a blur. You don't feel
like you're going fast. Apparently in a Maglev it goes
fast enough to wear like you feel like, holy cow,
we're going three fifty miles an hour. Well, our very
unparent company did a show World's Fastest Trains, and I
watched the Maglev segment and the dude you know, was
(07:14):
in the front room with the driver and they were like,
all right, we're going three hundred miles an hour now,
and it's hard to tell on the TV you know
exactly how fast you're going because I looked and I
was like, well, then, you know, it looks like about
a hundred to me. But um, yeah, I think being
on the train and I think the key to not
feeling too weird is obviously you're not being shot out
like a bullet. You're you're ramping up to that speed,
(07:35):
so that helps. Plus if you dressed normally for your
train ride, you'll feel less weird too. That's right. Um. Also,
hold on one more thing, um, the we're talking very
high speeds an that's the that's the speed record of
a maglev. But they're averaging like to fifty or more,
(07:56):
which means if you, if you get these things built,
you're going to expand the range of where people can
live and commute and go to work every day tremendously. Um.
So there's a lot of value in creating these maglevs.
Right are we there yet? Well, before we do that,
let's just might as well do a message break now, huh.
I think it's a good time, all right, So now
(08:23):
can we get down to brass tacks. Let's okay. Um,
this is kind of confusing because I read a paper
in ight, I think where this guy was saying like
there's a lot of people calling all these different technologies maglev.
This is all very early stage proposal hadn't been proven yet,
(08:45):
but he was saying there's at least seven different kinds
of technology here that everyone's calling maglev that are different
enough that it doesn't they're just different. But for the
purposes of this podcast, we can get it with maglev,
but we have to point out that there are some
really different systems that are in use and being proposed
right now, and a lot of them have to do
(09:05):
with the suspension system. Yeah, I think what's going on now?
There are three pretty much leading competing systems, right. Yeah,
because we should say, chuck. A maglev train is a
train that uses magnets to float above a track by
either a half a centimeter too. I saw one that
(09:27):
floats up to a foot off the track. That's a
little scary. It seems a little scary, but apparently the
higher you go, and that that high end of the range,
the more stable it is. Yeah. But so the the
train is literally not touching the tracks and it floats along.
And the reason that's why it can go so fast
is because there's no friction, no friction, The only resistance
(09:48):
is air and they're super sleek of course, so even
the error is cut down. Uh. So let's go. Let's
go to Germany first, because they have a system, uh
trans rapid it's called the actually company is called trans
Rapid International. There's also a trans Rapid USA now I
think us. That's right. Uh. And the German version is
(10:10):
electro magnetic suspension. And the way that the guy on
the Discovery Channel show described it was that electro magnets, Well,
when you use electromagnets, they're only um magnetize when there's
a power source, when there's electricity running through exactly. So
that's important to remember it is, and we'll point out
(10:31):
why later, because in the German system, uh, the E
M S system, it's all about attraction. It's not repelled
magnets repelling each other. It's magnets that are attracted to
each other. And the reason that they float is they're
basically switching it on and off, pulsing the electromatic magnets
so fast that it creates that hovering attraction. Okay, so
(10:57):
that's the German version, so um okay. And apparently this
German version, I think they do use repulsive magnets, but
on the sides for the guidance magnets, so to make
it hover, they're turning it on an awful lot. So
it wants to stick, but no, but stick but no,
and there's not a dude on the switch doing it
really fast. It's right. They have computers handling it UM.
(11:21):
And then so this is the the suspension system you're
talking about, right, the electro magnetic suspension. And the word
suspension is kind of easily overlooked, but in this case
we're literally talking about how the train is suspended in
mid air above the track in this case, and with
the e M S it's about I think half a
(11:43):
centimeter to a centimeter. It's it's very close to the
to the track, and they use the electro magnets to
attract and they use the guidance magnets, which are magnets
installed on the side of the train UH that are
along the side of the track to repel magnets along
the side of the track to keep the train from
(12:05):
bumping into the guide rails. But it requires a UH
computer system to constantly make adjustments to the current that's
going through these electro magnets to either um to either
attract the train to make it float or to repel
it from the sides to adjust it to make sure
it never bumps into the rails or the track. Because
(12:27):
if you're going three fifty miles an hour and your
train scuffs the track, you're in big trouble or big trouble.
One advantage of this, uh the German system, is that
you only need the power on for the section of
track that you're using at the time. So they literally
will turn on a section of track, the train goes
(12:49):
over it, and then they'll turn it back off. Right,
So it's very like economically fuel will not fuel efficient
because it's not fuel right, and that's the power efficient right,
And it doesn't use fossil fuel in the sense that
a normal train does, although if you go far enough
down the line, that electricity has to come from somewhere,
so ultimately it is coming from possibles. But the efficiency
(13:11):
fuel efficiency is incredible compared to you know, a normal
train that burns cossal fuels just to move God's shoveling
coal into a fire. Yeah, yeah, I should say so.
My understanding of the delivery of electricity to the track
is the same for both suspension systems that you propel
(13:33):
like that. So the whole track is made of electromagnets
right from on both systems, and you're just sending electricity
to the electromagnets that are immediately in front of and
immediately behind the train immediately under. Yeah, because you need it.
You need to float the train. Then you need to
propel it right, and the way you're propelling it is
(13:55):
the magnets that are just ahead of the train are
going to be positive, and so that's going to attract
the train, meaning it's gonna pull it forward. And then
the the magnets behind it are gonna be charged so
that they're negative and they're going to repel the train
push it. So in the front, the magnets are pulling
it in the in the back, the magnets are pushing it.
(14:17):
And again, remember there's no friction here, it's just air.
So it doesn't take a whole lot to make this
train go really really fast just using magnets. Yeah, and
they in two thousand two debuted commercially in Shanghai, China,
a pretty short run transporting people um from airport to
airport basically um at a speed it speeds over two
(14:41):
fifty miles an hour. So I read that the journey
the nineteen mile journey. Now it takes about seven and
a half minutes as opposed to about an hour in
a cab, and they were going to expand it, but
that was halted in two thousand eight over radiation fears
by people, And now it's being proposed as an underground system,
(15:03):
like to go underground to halt those fears. But in
two thousand and ten another high speed train in the
area was a non maglev system opened, so they basically said, well,
we probably won't do this. Uh, we probably won't extend
the Shanghai line now. So yeah, I heard it's definitely
on hold, but I didn't hear that they decided they
weren't going to do it. Well, the regular bullet train
(15:26):
popped up and they're like, well, now that we have that,
I guess we don't need the maglev. Oh well, oh well,
so Japan's got the other um big rival system. Uh
So the propulsion systems are the same. You use magnets
ahead of the train and behind the train to attract
a repel it right to push it forward. I believe so,
so um the suspension systems are what differ. In Germany
(15:49):
you're using magnets to um repel it right, to attract
it to attract it. In Japan you're using something called
the Meisner effect. So basically, Chuck The Meisner effect is
where you take a super cooled superconductor, right, I think
like liquid helium temperature, which is very very cold, and
(16:10):
you put it in a magnetic field. The magnetic field
basically hugs it. It goes around it rather than through it. Okay, Um,
So when you do that, the field actually levitates the thing.
So if you take enough superconductors that are at the
right temperature and you put them in the presence of
(16:33):
a magnetic field whole bunch of magnets, say on a train,
the the magnet will float, it will levitate, And that's
the electrodynamics expension that the Japanese are using. So basically
you have a tunnel, a magnetic field tunnel that these
things are traveling through, which means that there they don't
(16:56):
they don't need any extra magnets on the sides, or
they don't need any on the bottom or extra magnets
on the bottom. It's just going to stay put within
this bent magnetic field that's warped to wrap around it.
That's right. It's never going to drop and it's totally stable,
which is the big that's a big advantage from what
I understand of the Japanese system over the German system.
(17:18):
The stability doesn't require a bunch of computers to constantly
adjust it, and it is just inherently more stable because
it's not just being held up from the bottom and
then a little on the sides. It is wrapped in
this basically blanket of an electro magnetic field UH. It
can conduct power electricity even when the power is cut off,
(17:41):
so that's a definite advantage UM. Although the German system
does have like battery backups, it's not like if the
power went off, the train would just go and stop.
But the German one doesn't never doesn't need tires, and
the Japanese one does, yeah, because it needs to ramp
up to a certain speed in order to begin the
float and just start immediately. What is it like eighty
(18:02):
eight miles per hour. That's back to the future sixty two.
And I think they use liquid nitrogen and it's just
expensive to super cool these UH coils, and I think
that's one of the drawbacks. But they're all expensive. They're
none of this is they haven't figured out a cheap
way to do any of this. Now, there's a proposed
(18:24):
line um in Japan. It's already it's the one that
set the uh that land speed record for maglev trains.
It's the j R tok Um that's the railway company,
the JRR Tolkien kind of close, but it's their line. Um,
it's supposed supposedly is already in operation. I read somewhere
(18:45):
that it's moved like a million people already. But they
have a proposed line that they want to open by
seven and it's from Tokyo to Nagoya, and then they
want to extend that from Tokyo to Osaka. And they're
talking like it's like a fifty billion dollar project and
I think that's just the first line. That's Yeah, it
(19:07):
sounds about right. But the reason that it probably will
happen is they're they're um facing all of this on
data showing that people are going to keep moving to
Japan and Osaka, so they're going to have customers and
they're not relying on any government money. They have so
much money they're just going to fund it themselves. Is
privately funded. Yeah. Yeah. Another con though of the Japanese
(19:28):
version is that if you have a pacemaker, you don't
want to get on that train because, um, that magnetic
field will reek havoc and you probably won't live. It
will shut you down. We'll shut you down. And then
there's the in duct track and that is another type
of E d S system, which is the Japanese system,
(19:48):
except that they use room temperature magnets. And from what
I could tell, this is as close to just the
whole thing of magnets, regular magnets opposing each other, and
they're just gonna use that, right, Yeah, Like it's as
close do we get as you going out to the
store and getting two magnets and putting their like poles
(20:12):
against each other so that they repel. Yeah, there's actually
something called the hull Bock array, which is a way
to just line up the magnets UM in certain directions
so that their poles are facing north, southeast or west. UM.
And when you put them together in a clump, basically,
the the magnetic field below the magnets doubles, the magnetic
(20:34):
field on the top of the magnets cancels one another out,
so you have your extra strong magnetic magnetic field that
can produce this Misner effect basically um without this super
cooled superconductor. Yeah, and these aren't even electro magnets. I
don't think aren't they just magnets. I think they're permanent
room temperature magnets. Is crazy. Yeah, there are three UM
(20:56):
designs right now the in duct track one, two, and three.
UM one is high speed, two is slow speed, and
three is heavy load slow speed. Yeah, so I guess
just freighting stuff back and forth. Yeah. They did this
in London at one point, but then shut it down.
Like in the eighties, they had a maglive train. Yeah,
just a very slow moving like it might have been
(21:18):
an airport type situation. And I looked up the one
here in Atlanta, the new airport train. I thought it
might have been maglev, but of course it's not. It's
just wheels, just stupid wheels. UM. Although they had Atlanta
have its day, Well, they have proposed one. Atlanta is
one of the city's UM that's trying to get maglev
going between Atlanta and Chattanooga. And there's one proposed between
(21:42):
d C and Baltimore. One in Las Vegas, Yeah, La
in Vegas UM, and I think one from Pittsburgh to someplace,
but I'm not sure exactly where I saw that one too.
I don't remember where it might have been d C Stittsburg, Philly, yeah, well,
hold on, we're getting ahead of ourselves. Well, no, these
are just proposals and and they're having a hard time
(22:03):
getting the funding they need for any of these to
really take off, right, because it's expensive, it is chuck,
how about a how about a message break? Huh hey,
let's do it alright. So, um, this whole idea of
going three fifty miles an hour through space even without
(22:27):
friction is um awesome, It is awesome. It can also
be deadly. They've they've already been maglev accidents. Yeah, the
one in Germany was a little distressing because in two
thousand and six it crashed into a repair car that
was accidentally left on the track. And this is a
test too, so it's like everything should have been Yeah,
(22:50):
like why do you leave a car on the track? Period?
I don't know, I don't know. Uh So they actually
people died in that one. The train was going at
least a hundred and twenty miles an hour when it
struck the car. We must have just been getting up
to speed, I guess, yeah, but yeah, twenty nine people
died on that one. There's another one in Shanghai on
that line that is an operation. Yeah, that was just
(23:10):
a fire though, and I don't want to make light
of that, but it wasn't like a crash or an
incident like that. Yeah, I'm just glad no one got
hurt exactly. Uh. And this is breaking news, dude. This
was in the paper today as we record it in
real time. Okay. The Washington Post said that Northeast Maglev
everyone's getting in on the mag Love game. Uh, because
(23:34):
I mean, like, it really is a great idea. It's
just really really expensive, but if you can get it
up and running, it's awesome. I Mean I imagine in
literally in a hundred years, there'll be a lot of
this as major transportation, you know, but not we won't
see it. But as of today, November four, Northeast mag
(23:54):
Love is AH has raised fifty million dollars in private funds.
They can build five inches of track with that exactly.
And they're trying to get the Washington Baltimore lag going
with private funding because the government's not pony any money
for it. I think we'll see it in our lifetime.
They think ten billion between d C and Baltimore, although
(24:15):
they're not They don't have a firm cost yet, but um,
I wonder how long it would take, because I mean,
that's not even that long of a drive anyway. Yeah,
I agreed. Let maybe ten minutes, which I mean if
you live in Baltimore and work in d C. I'm
sure that would be extremely attractive. Yeah, that's true. Um,
I don't know about the Atlanta at Chattanooga thing. Who cares, right,
(24:37):
you know, people in Chattanooga be psyched, I guess because
they could get to the airport in like thirty minutes. Yeah,
I guess, not just in Chattanooga. I'll go there and
paying for gold. I saw this, um. This It was
some Discovery show video from a Discovery show too, um,
and it had our good friend Michio Kaku, and he
(24:57):
was talking about train, bullet train that could get you
from one side of the world to the other in
an hour, and the way that it would do that
is to go through the middle of the Earth. Basically,
you would have to create this to basically like Elon
Musk's idea, you create a tube, you evacuate all of
(25:19):
the air out of it so that there's no resistance whatsoever,
and you just drop in the force of gravity takes
you up to about eighteen thousand miles an hour, and
then once you make it to the center and out
the other side, your gravity starts to work against you,
so it slows you down. So within an hour you
should be able to make it from one side of
(25:40):
the Earth to the other. But as Dr Coku put
put it, um, it's gonna be very difficult getting through
the center of the Earth, all of all these theoretical
ideas that come up with it, like it's not even
even remotely possible. And he'd probably say, like, I was
just talking about what they ask me to talk about.
(26:01):
It's like, dude, I was at McDonald's one day when
I said that, I was waiting in line at McDonald's.
So what else you got? I got nothing else? Maglev? Yeah,
the Way of the Future. Yeah, we've got a we
have a standing bet. Now we will see a maglev
train in operation that we can ride on while we're
both alive. That's my bet. You say no that we will, Like,
(26:23):
I mean, if we went to Shanghai, we could do
it right now. So I feel like I just want
my bet well health that you're gonna pay for us
here in the United States, um, within our lifetime, which
for me is gonna be about twenty years. We're both
still healthy enough to ride it. Okay, I'll take that
bet okay. Uh. Let's see. If you guys want to
(26:44):
learn more about maglev, you can type that word in
the search part how stuff works dot Com. And since
I said a search part, it's time for listener mail.
That's right. This is I'm gonna call this opportunity for
students filmmaking students to get your film on Hey guys,
to work for nonprofit Antiquity Now, which is dedicated to
(27:06):
raising awareness of the importance of preserving our cult cultural
heritage by demonstrating how antiquities legacy influences and shapes our
lives today. Yeah, they have good stuff. We follow them
on Twitter. Oh you do nice? We do, Yes, we do.
Many of us at Antiquity Now are big fans of
you guys. We thought you would be interested and this
upcoming project that we are holding the first ever Legacy
(27:29):
Quest International Children's Film and Video Festival, which aims to
get tweens and teens excited about history. The festival will
be held in conjunction with the Archaeology Channel International Film
and Video Festival on May nine through and Eugene Oregon.
So here's what you gotta do, kids, young people, if
(27:50):
you're between twelve and fifteen, you can submit videos that
represent antiquities legacy in our contemporary life. For example, you
could depict how the invention of the wheel or calendar
her has contributed to modern society, or how ancient methods
of solar energy have been formed today's green technology. Yet
that yes, entries may be submitted by an individual student
(28:11):
or by a group or class under the guidance of
a teacher. As the festival was designed in accordance with
the United States National Curriculum Standards for Social Studies, Legacy
Quests would be a great project for teachers to do
with their classes. Creating the video will support the development
of literacy research skills, writing skills, visual communication, and storytelling.
And they have prizes first, second, and third prize among
(28:35):
along with ten honorable mentions. Will be announced at the
Archaeology Channel International Film and Video Festival and promoted online
by both the Archaeology Channel and Antiquity Now and U
and us so UH. For more information and submission forms,
go to antiquity Now dot org. And that is from
(28:55):
Chahandra Goldfinger, not Chandra. She points out it's Chandra Goldfinger,
which is a great name. It really is. And again
that's May nine. The next year teachers students, where can
they go to find out more info? Yeah, antiquity now
dot org, or you can follow them on Twitter and
ask them yourself. Yes. Uh. If you want to let
(29:18):
us know about any cool stuff you've got going on
that you want to share with everybody who listens to
Stuff you should Know, your fellow s y s K family,
you can tweet to us at s y s K Podcast.
You can join us on Facebook dot com, slash Stuff
you Should Know. You can send us an email to
Stuff Podcast at Discovery dot com, and as always, you
(29:39):
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(30:00):
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