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IrelandTom Scott puts London's giant breaking machine to work
At Kirkaldy Testing Works, volunteer guides show why bending, denting and snapping materials can tell engineers very different things.
Tom Scott
Story of Why this story? One of the most watched videos since yesterday, with 760,740 views.
This machine breaks things.
Things we can learn from the video
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- 1:05Room-temperature mild steel bends rather than breaks in the Charpy impact test.
- 3:10A dry-ice-cooled steel sample shatters, demonstrating how cold can make steel brittle.
- 6:30Jonathan uses the Avery tensile testing machine to pull a packing strap apart under measured load.
- 12:15Jane explains how hydraulic rams and a steelyard balance let the Universal Testing Machine apply and measure force.
- 20:32Scott clarifies that testing often proved materials could withstand specified loads without destroying them.
- 22:27The team calculates that breaking the steel specimen required 41,650 pounds of force.
Bill puts a steel sample beneath a swinging hammer, and it bends without breaking. A second sample, chilled with dry ice, shatters. Tom Scott's visit to Kirkaldy Testing Works makes an engineering problem startlingly visible: the same material can behave very differently in the cold.
That's only the beginning of "This machine breaks things.", which has drawn about 760,000 views since yesterday. The London museum's volunteers take Scott through machines built to answer practical questions about what materials can withstand, with the enormous Universal Testing Machine as the centerpiece.
Scott supplies a suitably stripped-down explanation of the impact test: "Secure thing in machine, hit thing with hammer." But each demonstration makes a different distinction. Julian shows how hardness testers indent a surface. Jonathan pulls a packing strap until it snaps. Jane explains the hydraulic power and balancing mechanism behind the main machine, including how it preserves a reading when a sample breaks.
By the final demonstration, Scott is helping keep the balance beam level while Colin opens the hydraulic valves. The steel visibly stretches before breaking with a loud pop and a cloud of chalk dust. The measured force comes to nearly 19 tons.
There is an important qualification to all this destruction: Scott explains that the machine also proved materials could withstand a specified load without breaking them. The works' motto, "Facts Not Opinions," meant testing a promise, not simply producing an impressive bang. The video also includes a paid NordVPN segment.
In the comments, viewers compare the Universal Testing Machine's name to something from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Others ask for more of Julian's explanations, including the machinery that might seem less visually spectacular.
Published on Trari
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- Channel
- Tom Scott
- Subscribers
- 6,750,000 ▲ 10,000 this week
- Channel views, last 7 days
- 2,548,014
- Channel views, pace per day
- 201,058 (on a normal day: 383,259)
- Video published
- October 26, 2026
- Video views so far
- 760,740 (less than a day online)
- Video views, pace per day
- 1,042,927
The numbers
The total below is the video's actual viewing since yesterday, with its first day still underway.
💡 Test your knowledge
Which London district does Tom Scott visit for this testing-machine tour?
Kirkaldy Testing Works is on Southwark Street in Southwark, London.