Mirrorball motor.

Is the frequency of your mains supply that unstable or is the hopi just inaccurate?

David Glover-Aoki

Flashing lights existed BEFORE disco. Same with spotlights. That's all from military stuff like with those navy lamps for signaling and those spotlight things. Disco balls and flashing floors...... Didn't have them in the military. They were purely disco light effects, therefore the earliest disco light effects.

My 15 year old "party rig" consists of a little 8" mirror ball on one of these motorised bases, a halogen mini-flower with a terribly inconsistent "beat sense" effect and about half the brightness it once had (cbf changing the lamp), a little xenon strobe that runs from a 12V wall-wart and has two speeds - "Boring Traffic Beacon" or "Epileptic Fit" , and a $99 mini fogger that overheats and shits the bed after one tank of juice, requiring an hour or so of cooldown time. Whole setup cost me about 300 aussie pesos, more than a decade ago, but the cool kids still fucking love it. :)

Chris Talbot

Well come on then, let's have at it. I propose that the very earliest disco light effect was not, in fact, the MIRROR BALL. It was, of course... THE FLASHING LIGHTS (known, in come circles, as der blinkenlights or das blinkenlichten). Which, in the very earliest days, was achieved by some dude literally just turning a bunch of switches on and off. Then, sometime around the early sixties, the world discovered COLOUR (according to the information I've received from film and television) so then we progressed to COLOURED FLASHING LIGHTS. At some point, a very wise person thought to combined COLOURED FLASHING LIGHTS with MIRRORS, first in a BALL shape, and then in evermore intricate ways until BOOM.... FRICKIN' LASERS!!1!!11one THE END. :)

Chris Talbot

Could the prongs not being evenly spaced/sized (and the one set off of 90 deg to the others) be to try and bias it to a specific rotational direction?

Jorg Jorgensen

...hmmm. If one took the output of the previous disco light mod and bounced the image off of a rotating mirrored hemisphere (half a disco ball), one could in effect create multitudinous moving scattered color changing disco dots! Deee-liteful! (...groove IS in the heart...)

Michael Thompson

These motors were a joy for me to explore and learn about as a kid, but I sure do appreciate modern digital cameras for their ability to document how stuff like this goes together as it is coming apart! -a useful technique for exploring/servicing complex assemblies. Clive, I love the insight that you bring to stuff like this, and I especially ESPECIALLY enjoy seeing an example of something at the end of its service life, as I also have a perverse love of seeing how things wear and fail over time and usage. Awesome sauce

Michael Thompson

incubators just moves eggs 45 degrees in either direction from straight to simulate the mother turning the eggs

Steven Cox

I often wonder what our lives would've been like if Tesla was never borned! Would we have seen AC, or did we have to put up with Edison's crappy DC system? I suppose as in the case for Calculus, where both Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz invented it at the same time, apparently without having knowledge of each other, AC would've been invented by some one else! I guess we'll never know. I love motors, switch mode power supplies and light emitting anything... Very interesting video.

...Eggs, and chickens (and I guess most vertebrates? including humans in utero) need some motion in the ocean. For eggs, it'll help with gas exchange across the shell, as well as circulating nutrients around inside the .......... er, I think still it's amniotic fluid..... could be wrong. In nature, the hen/other bird moving round/nudging the eggs about as they do would accomplish that. For incubators, it's presumably just to replicate that effect. When attempting to hatch bird eggs, you need to give them a little bit of a nudge about a couple of times a day (ish).

"Arguably one of the earliest disco lighting effects"....... I really, really hope that that's an argument that occurs :D "IT WAS DISCO BALLS".... "NO IT WAS LIGHT UP FLASHING FLOORS"... "NO IT WAS SEQUIN TROUSER HEMS"....

"stronger motors for bigger balls"