EP133: Tale of the Tapes: Engineer Guy Explains How VHS Beat Betamax, How The Pilsner Arrived, Survived and Thrived in America and John O’Neil On The First B-17 To Bomb Berlin
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 3 December 2021
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, Bill “Engineer Guy” Hammack tells the story of how Betamax was defeated by the VHS tape; Tom Acitelli, author of Pilsner: How The Beer of Kings Changed The World, tells the story of how America's favorite drink came here and stayed here despite a world war and Prohibition; and John O'Neil, Chairman of the Board of Trustees at the National Museum of the Mighty Eighth Air Force, tells the story of his father, the tail and waist gunner on the B-17.
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Time Codes:
00:00 - Tale of the Tapes: Engineer Guy Explains How VHS Beat Betamax
10:00 - How The Pilsner Arrived, Survived and Thrived in America
35:00 - John O’Neil On The First B-17 To Bomb Berlin
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show, from the arts to sports and from business to history, and everything in between, including your stories, |
| 0:21.4 | send them to Our American Stories.com. That's Our American Stories.com. They're some of our favorite. |
| 0:28.7 | Over the years, there have been many format and console wars, including Nintendo versus Sega, |
| 0:34.8 | PlayStation versus Xbox, Apple versus Android. But there was one full-fledged |
| 0:40.5 | format war that ruled them all. Years before we had to decide between streaming the |
| 0:46.1 | latest video or taking it home on DVD or Blu-ray, a format war between Sony's |
| 0:52.6 | Betamax and JVC's VHS began. |
| 0:57.0 | The battle lasted for more than a decade, with neither Betamax nor VHS giving up. |
| 1:04.0 | Bill Hammock is a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Illinois. |
| 1:10.0 | He is known as the Engineer Guy, |
| 1:12.2 | as the creator and host of his popular YouTube channel explaining the engineering of everyday |
| 1:18.4 | objects. In 1976, Sony introduced the Betamax video cassette recorder. It catalyzed the on-demand |
| 1:26.3 | of today by allowing users to record TV shows |
| 1:30.3 | and the machine ignited the first new media intellectual property battle. |
| 1:35.3 | In only a decade, this revolutionary machine disappeared, beaten by JVC's VHS cassette recorder. |
| 1:43.3 | Here's Bill Engineer Guy Hammock telling the story of how Betamax was defeated by the VHS tape. |
| 1:54.8 | This mighty machine sparked a revolution in our use of media. It's a Sony, Beta Max video cassette recorder from 1979. |
| 2:03.6 | This monster weighs about 36 pounds. |
| 2:06.6 | The engineer in me finds it fascinating. |
| 2:08.6 | There's nothing digital. |
| 2:10.6 | It's a truly analog machine. |
| 2:12.6 | All moving pieces and parts. |
... |
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