Everything you touch was once a plan.
Inside the factories, machines and workshops that make the things around us. Calm, clear, oddly satisfying.
Engineers at UC San Diego used a shaped laser beam, instead of a magnet, to flip data in a stack of nine metal layers. It could one day make memory more than 1,000 times faster.
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Long before the cheerful orange grin, people in Ireland and Scotland carved faces into turnips, potatoes and beets. Here's how a cheap root vegetable became a pumpkin, and why the old version looked like a shrunken skull.
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Wafer, filling, chocolate, snap. Simple, right? Inside the factory it's robots, giant wafer sheets and one recycling trick most people never guessed.
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A paper cup, a layer of chocolate, a plug of peanut butter, a little shake and a puff of air. And behind it, a family row that made Hershey promise to go back to the classic recipe.
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Peeps, the sugar-coated marshmallow chicks Americans love (or love to hate), are all made in one factory in Pennsylvania. Robots give them their eyes, and a camera throws out the cross-eyed ones.
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Plastic grains, a lot of heat, a mould accurate to two thousandths of a millimetre and a few robots that never sleep. Inside the factory in Billund, Denmark.
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Wax, colour, a mould and seven minutes of patience. Inside the Pennsylvania factory that still makes most of the world's best-known crayons.
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Most cars crawl down one long line. Tesla's little two-seater is built in big chunks at the same time, then clicked together. Clever trick, big promises, and one very public haircut bet.
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