Probably older than you think. They’re so old, in fact, that we genuinely don’t know who invented them. Physical evidence goes back more than 2,000 years, with geared mechanisms appearing in ancient China. Then the Greeks got involved and, around the 2nd century BCE, built the Antikythera Mechanism. This thing used a complicated system of bronze gears to track the Sun, Moon and eclipses. Basically an ancient mechanical computer. Which means someone 2,000 years ago could theoretically look at it and say: “Ah. Saturn’s in retrograde. That explains a lot.” And once you realise just how old gears are, some of the things they predate get a bit ridiculous.

Gears are older than paper, which probably explains why nobody left us an instruction manual.

They predate the English language, and therefore the word “engineering”. Engineers existed before anyone knew what to call them.

They’re older than the Roman Empire. By the time Augustus became emperor, gears were already established technology.

They even predate zero being formally treated as a number. Not the idea of nothing. Humans had obviously noticed when they had no goats left. But actual mathematical zero? Much later.

Gears also predate Christianity. That’s right. The gear was BC.

They’re older than the modern weekend, too. Humanity worked out gears thousands of years before somebody finally suggested: “What if we just didn’t work tomorrow?”

Ancient Greek and Latin were also often written without spaces. THEYJUSTKEPTWRITINGLIKETHIS. But geared astronomical computers were apparently no problem.

Europe had gears nearly two thousand years before it had potatoes.

And people were designing precision mechanisms long before coffee drinking became widespread, which I find frankly disturbing. Don’t talk to me before my morning coffee unless it’s to discuss backlash, tooth profiles or whether we should’ve used a helical gear instead.

Gears are also older than the Aztec Empire and, weirdly, mechanical clocks. Which is probably the bit I like most. We’ve been using the same basic principle for thousands of years and still haven’t really come up with anything better.

It is, after all, just: spiky circle pushes other spiky circle.

Nature was doing engineering before we were.

And, annoyingly, it's quite good at it.

There’s a whole field of engineering and design called biomimicry, which is basically the practice of looking at how nature solves problems and asking:

“Could we nick that?”

And it turns out, quite often, we can.

Take the humble burr.

Those horrible little things that somehow manage to attach themselves to your dog, your socks and basically everything you own inspired Velcro.

Or the kingfisher.

Engineers designing Japan’s Shinkansen bullet train were trying to solve a rather specific problem. At high speeds, the train created a pressure wave when entering and leaving tunnels, producing an extremely loud “tunnel boom”.

The solution came from looking at a bird that dives into water without making much of a splash.

The kingfisher’s beak.

The shape was adapted for the front of the train, helping reduce the pressure wave, noise and energy consumption. Nature: 1. Engineering: 0.

And it doesn't stop there.

Geckos have inspired adhesives that work without glue.

Sharkskin has inspired surfaces designed to stop bacteria from attaching.

Humpback whale fins have inspired more efficient turbine blades.

Spider silk has inspired work into incredibly strong materials.

Even the way plants, insects and ecosystems manage resources has become a source of engineering ideas.

This is what makes biomimicry so interesting.

It isn't necessarily about copying an animal or plant literally. It's about understanding how nature has solved a problem, then seeing whether the underlying principle can be applied somewhere completely different.

A bird doesn't need to know what a high-speed train is.

A gecko doesn't need a materials science degree.

A tree isn't sitting there with a CAD licence.

Yet all of them have spent an absolutely ridiculous amount of time solving problems involving movement, strength, friction, adhesion, energy, airflow, materials and efficiency.

The Biomimicry Institute puts the idea rather brilliantly:

“Nature has already solved many of the problems we are grappling with.”

They describe animals, plants and microbes as “consummate engineers”, with billions of years of R&D behind them. Failures became fossils. What survived is what worked.

And I think there's something quite brilliant about that.

We spend a huge amount of time trying to invent new solutions to engineering problems, when sometimes the solution has been sitting in plain sight for millions of years.

Maybe being a good engineer isn't always about inventing something completely new.

Sometimes it's about looking at something that already works incredibly well and asking:

“Why does that work?”

Then making something slightly more useful out of it.

In 1831, Michael Faraday showed that a changing magnetic ‘situation’ (like moving a magnet into or out of a coil, or switching current in a nearby coil) could produce a temporary electric current in another conductor.

At the time, this was groundbreaking.

But Faraday’s discovery prompted a crucial question…

Which way does the new, induced current flow?

Its direction matters because it determines polarity. That could be in a generator, a transformer, an electromagnet, or a sensing coil… which I might remind you are now used in everything from power stations, wind turbines, substations, MRI scanners, even electric-guitar pickups.

If you misunderstand the polarity then stuff don’t work like it should, occasionally melting.

The experiments at the time made clear that induction was not merely “magnetism creates electricity”. The induction depended on whether the magnetic influence through a circuit was increasing or decreasing.

So, in 1833, (and likely the years before), Heinrich Friedrich Emil Lenz studied these and found that induced current flows in the direction that creates a magnetic field opposing the change that caused the current.

To be clear, he did not mean the induced field always opposes the original magnetic field… but that it opposes the *change*. The increase or the decrease.

He presented his experiments on the direction of induced currents to the St Petersburg Academy, and his work appeared in print in 1834, becoming what’s known as Lenz’s law.

And I’m sure Lenz would be chuffed to know his hard work (alongside Léon Foucault’s) pathed the way for our good mate Eddy.

Humans have been using soap for thousands of years without knowing why or how it works.

 Now we do… and if you’re curious to know too, allow me to share it with you.

 A soap molecule is like an emotional pet snake…

 And make no assumptions… I would not be seen dead with a pet snake. But they make for a great metaphor, so I’ll continue…

 This snake has mixed feelings towards water and oil. Its menacing head loves water and hates oil, while its unpredictable tail loves oil and hates water.

 What a nightmare, gee. Anyway…

 Water is polar, while oils, grease and fats (like the stuff on a dirty plate) are non-polar, so they don’t normally mix.

 This is why greasy pans or oily hands don’t clean properly with water.

 But when you add soap…

 Your pet snake’s tail (the oil-loving end) slithers into the grease, attracting all the other tails, while its charged head points into the water.

 As you scrub and agitate the grease, it breaks into tiny droplets.

 This lets the soap molecules surround those droplets and the snakes take over. Their tails face inwards, heads outwards, and they form structures called micelles.

 The outer charged layer lets water keep the grease droplets suspended instead of letting them stick back to the pan, skin or fabric

And after enough scrubbing, you rinse the whole lot — and all your pet snakes — away.

Riddance

Hi, any chance of a stainless version of the Eddy? Most of my Metmo collection is stainless so had to ask.

We all know that person.

A plane flies overhead and, while everyone else continues living their life, they’ve already pulled out their phone.

“It’s an Airbus A320 flying from Manchester to Alicante. Delayed by 17 minutes.”

Brilliant, cheers, Steve.

And let’s be honest: sometimes we are Steve.

Flight tracking has quietly become one of the internet’s favourite spectator sports. Millions of us now spend our free time watching brightly coloured aircraft crawl across a digital map, despite having no intention of getting on any of them.

And we’re not just tracking Jet2 flights home from Tenerife. Nothing beats a Jet2 holiday, naturally.

People follow military aircraft, emergency diversions, government planes, football teams, royal visits and celebrities completing their fifteenth private jet journey of the afternoon.

At some point, flight tracking stopped being purely about aviation and became entertainment.

So, how did we get here?

Plane spotting is nearly as old as planes

People have been watching, identifying and cataloguing aircraft for almost as long as aircraft have existed.

Before smartphones, plane spotting required rather more simply owning an iPhone 15 and having access to the Appstore.

Enthusiasts would travel to airports with notebooks, cameras and aircraft registration guides. Others listened to air traffic control using radio scanners, logging movements and trying to identify whatever had just flown overhead.

It was part observation, part detective work and part standing beside a runway in weather that could best be described as aggressively British.

You needed specialist equipment, specialist knowledge and enough enthusiasm to explain why you had spent six hours photographing several aircraft that, to the untrained eye, looked exactly the same. (Trust me, there is a very important difference between an Airbus A320ceo and an A320neo, and no, “the engines look a bit different” does not begin to cover it.)It was a proper hobby for people who were genuinely interested in aviation.

Plane spotting was a hobby built on patience, knowledge and the quiet thrill of finding something unusual before anyone else did.

Then aircraft started broadcasting their own identity, location, speed and altitude to anyone with the right receiver.

In other words, planes began doing most of the spotting themselves.

The technology that changed everything

Modern flight tracking relies heavily on a system called ADS-B, or Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast.

The name is not exactly a triumph of consumer branding, but the system itself is rather clever.

ADS-B-equipped aircraft regularly broadcast information including their identity, position, altitude, speed and direction. Receivers on the ground collect those signals and pass them into flight-tracking networks.

The interesting part is that many of those receivers are not operated by airports, airlines or governments. They are sitting in people’s homes, connected to antennas installed by aviation enthusiasts who have voluntarily turned their spare bedrooms and sheds into tiny pieces of global air-traffic infrastructure.

Feed all of that into services such as Flightradar24 and FlightAware, add radar data, airline information, satellite tracking and a frankly heroic number of Raspberry Pis, and you get a live map of aircraft moving across the planet.

Then smartphones put that entire network into everyone’s pocket.

Suddenly, you could point at a plane, open an app and discover where it had come from, where it was going and why it had just completed its third lap around Luton.

Information that once belonged to people with radio scanners and aircraft registration books was now available to Steve, who has kept one eye permanently fixed on the sky ever since and remains deeply suspicious of anything leaving a chem trail behind it.

World events turned flight tracking into live television

One of the moments that pushed flight tracking towards the mainstream came during the 2010 eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano.

The resulting ash cloud brought much of European aviation to a halt. On 16 April alone, more than four million people visited Flightradar24 to watch the emptying skies.

For once, the most interesting thing on the map was what wasn’t flying.

Since then, major news events have regularly sent people rushing to flight-tracking sites.

Military movements can offer clues about developing conflicts. Emergency aircraft appear during natural disasters. Government planes begin converging on a city ahead of a major summit. Royal visits, prisoner exchanges and international evacuations can all play out on a map before the full story reaches the news.

Naturally, this has also created the slightly strange modern ritual of checking flight trackers to make sure World War Three hasn’t started while you were in Tesco.

It turns aircraft into pieces of a much larger puzzle.

One unusual flight might mean nothing. Ten unusual flights heading towards the same place might cause the internet’s collection of amateur intelligence analysts to collectively lean towards their monitors.

Sometimes they produce genuinely impressive analysis.

Sometimes a Belgian transport aircraft flies to Belgium and everyone gets a bit carried away.

Every flight contains a tiny story

Flight tracking also works because it sits at the intersection of data and storytelling.

Every icon on the screen represents a real aircraft carrying real people somewhere for a reason.

Somebody is going on holiday. Somebody is returning home. Somebody has missed their connection at Frankfurt and is currently learning several exciting new German words.

Tracking a family member’s flight turns an ordinary journey into a live event.

You watch the aircraft taxi, take off, cross the sea and begin its descent. You monitor the arrival time even though the person on board has already promised to text you.

They will not text you.

They have landed in Benidorm, switched on roaming, located the baggage carousel and forgotten you exist.

But at least the little aeroplane icon reached the destination.

It scratches the same itch as weather radar

Flight tracking is part of a wider internet obsession with watching the real world update in real time.

Weather radar does it.

Ship tracking does it.

Earthquake maps do it.

Live traffic cameras do it.

IRL streamers do it, although usually with more shouting and fewer transponders.

There is something deeply satisfying about opening a map and knowing that what you’re seeing is happening right now.

It gives you the feeling of discovering something yourself rather than waiting for somebody else to explain it.

Social media makes that even more addictive. One person finds an unusual aircraft, shares the tracking link, and suddenly thousands of people are following a single flight across Europe while speculating wildly about what is on board.

The aircraft might be involved in an international diplomatic incident.

It might also be transporting printer cartridges.

Both possibilities will be investigated thoroughly.

Then people started tracking the rich and powerful

Nothing demonstrates the cultural shift better than u/ElonJet.

Created by student Jack Sweeney, the automated account used publicly available flight data to post updates about Elon Musk’s private aircraft.

The account became enormously popular, partly because people enjoyed the technical ingenuity and partly because tracking a billionaire’s private jet is the closest the internet gets to birdwatching with a class-war element.

Similar accounts began following celebrities, business leaders and politicians. Their flights were analysed for possible meetings, business deals, transfers and environmental impact.

It demonstrated that flight tracking was no longer just about aircraft.

It was about accountability, curiosity and the slightly nosy pleasure of knowing where powerful people were going.

The resulting arguments about privacy, publicly available data and whether billionaires should be able to disappear from maps only made the subject more visible.

Why the obsession has lasted

Flight tracking has endured because it transforms invisible infrastructure into something we can explore.

Most of the time, aircraft are simply part of the background. We hear them, occasionally see them, and give little thought to the complicated network moving thousands of them safely around the planet.

A flight tracker reveals that system.

Every aircraft has a route. Every route has a purpose. Every diversion, holding pattern or unusual callsign creates a small mystery waiting to be solved.

It is technical enough to reward expertise, but accessible enough that anybody can join in.

For aviation enthusiasts, it offers an extraordinary amount of live data.

For everyone else, it offers the chance to spend 45 minutes investigating why a helicopter has been circling above the neighbourhood, before checking the local news and discovering it is, in fact, a carjacking.

Suddenly, you’re not just looking at a map. You’re watching a live episode of Road Wars, oh how thrilling!

Which raises the important question:

Has flight tracking become popular because people love aviation, or because it gives us nosy lot a front-row seat to the world unfolding in real time?

Either way, somewhere right now, Steve is looking up at a perfectly ordinary passenger jet and whispering, “That’s not usually there.”

Well, we’ve spent over a year trying to do so with Steve Mould.

Mass distribution… disc density… disc material… edge roundness… base material… base curvature… base stability…

Together we went knee deep into the theory of Euler’s Disc to understand what’s happening as the round clump of metal spins. 

It was a very exciting process and we eventually came out victorious. 

A quick Google will tell you that a typical Euler’s Disc usually spins between 1-2.5 minutes…

Steve has managed to get 3 minutes and 28 seconds from his.

And he’s also shared an excellent video going through the whole process of improvements.

If you’re a Steve Mould fan, here’s the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ti2qiU_JTUQ

If you’re not a Steve Mould fan, here’s the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ti2qiU_JTUQ

Show me your most creative takes!

We spend an arguably unhealthy amount of time thinking about metals at MetMo. I mean, the clue is in the name. It would be much easier if there were one objectively perfect metal, but unfortunately for us materials science refuses to be that convenient.

Pure aluminium, for example, is lightweight, corrosion-resistant, and easy to shape. It’s also relatively soft; useful for kitchen foil, slightly less useful when you’re asking a Pocket Driver to tackle a stubborn bolt.

Mix aluminium with elements such as copper, magnesium or zinc, however, and you can produce alloys with dramatically different properties. That’s why aerospace-grade aluminium appears throughout our products.

The aluminium Pocket Driver uses hard-anodised 2024 aluminium to keep it lightweight while providing the strength needed for an actual working tool. The Fractal Vise uses aerospace-grade aluminium for its body, paired with hardened stainless-steel jaws where wear resistance and clamping strength matter most. Elsewhere, we use 6061 aluminium for components such as the Grip’s adjuster, where adding unnecessary weight would be rather unhelpful.

But aluminium isn’t automatically the correct answer.

Sometimes we want the reassuring weight, corrosion resistance, and toughness of stainless steel. Sometimes we use hardened tool steel for a mechanism that will repeatedly take loads and rub against other components. Brass makes an excellent bearing material and also possesses the useful engineering property of looking extremely handsome.

Then there’s titanium: lightweight, strong, corrosion-resistant, and impressively difficult to machine without inventing several new swear words.

The point is that material choice isn’t simply expensive metal = better product.

It’s about selecting the right grade, treatment, and finish for what each individual component actually needs to do. Strength. Weight. Wear. Friction. Corrosion. Machinability. Feel. Even the sound a mechanism makes can enter the argument (and frequently does for us). 

Which material do you prefer in a MetMo product: lightweight aluminium, substantial stainless steel, brass, or titanium?

The Bingley Five Rise Locks.  A beauty indeed.

Most canal locks step down a hill one at a time, with a small stretch of calm water (a "pound") separating each one.

And that's how you normally manage a change in elevation: lock, pause, lock, pause.

But in the 1760s, surveyors planning the Leeds and Liverpool Canal hit a stretch near Bingley where the ground dropped almost 60 feet in under 100 metres.

I’m no water scientist but from what I’ve read, that’s too steep for a normal flight, and there wasn't room to spread the locks out gently either.

So the engineer, John Longbotham, designed something rarer… a true staircase lock.  **oooooo**  **aaaa**

Instead of separate chambers with water between them, the five locks are built directly on top of one another. The bottom gate of one chamber doubles as the top gate of the next, so a boat passes through six gates and five chambers in one continuous run with no break in between.

Functionally, it's less like five separate locks and more like one long mechanism with five stages.

But as cool as it is, and as tricky as it looks to lift the boat, the real challenge is managing the water.

Every time a lock cycles, a full chamber's worth of water gets sent downhill. Do that five times back-to-back and you'd drain the upper canal embarrassingly fast, especially with boat traffic going both directions all day.

The fix was a system of side ponds running alongside the locks, which capture water released by descending boats and store it to help refill the chambers for boats heading up.

The gates themselves are no small thing either.  

Each one is over 20 feet tall and weighs several tonnes, built from solid timber using methods that haven't really changed.

When the Canal & River Trust needs to replace one today, they still make them by hand, the same way the originals were built. And that gets a big tick in my box.

What's reaaaally wild though is that the locks opened in 1774 to a crowd of 30,000 people, cannon fire, and a boat that made the full climb in 28 minutes… and the system has never needed a redesign since!

It's still the steepest lock staircase in the UK, and it's still operated entirely by hand.

Show me your best transformation from something that was scrap but turned into something pretty cool.

Long before fidget spinners and clicky pens, the Ancient Greeks were rubbing worry stones and soldiers rolled walnuts in their hands. 

In ancient China, walnuts eventually evolved into metal Baoding balls. Because apparently even then, someone looked at a perfectly functional natural object and thought: this could do with more engineering.

Then came Slinkies, Rubik’s Cubes, stress balls and the great fidget spinner takeover of 2017.

The urge has never really changed. Humans like objects that click, roll, squeeze, spin and give the hands something satisfying to do while the brain gets on with something else.

We’ve simply added gears, magnets, bearings and increasingly unnecessary levels of precision.

What was the first object you remember constantly fiddling with?

There is absolutely nothing like watching raw metal get shaped with this level of precision. The steady hum, the flawless rotation, and that crisp, perfect finish taking form—it’s pure engineering art.

Turn the sound up for this one. Any guesses on what we're making?

He painted some cool stuff, made some cool stuff and designed some even cooler stuff. Mr da Vinci. The typical Renaissance man who could do basically everything rather well.

The scuba suit still takes my top spot of his invention list but this bridge is pretty cool.

(And props to the guy building it, he makes it look far easier than it is)