I’m proud to present -- coming straight to you from a beautiful villa in Rome, Italy.
The world’s very first… noodle chair!
A portion of this video was sponsored by LastPass.
Now let’s go.
Vsauce!
Kevin here, with a very simple engineering project.
All you need is a foam disk, some spaghetti and suddenly you’re demonstrating the compressive
strength that allows tiny rods of pasta to hold up the weight of a hardcover book.
When I saw this, I thought to myself, “What if I’m the book?
Can pasta hold me?”
And then LastPass came along and they said, “Kevin we’d like to work with you on creating
your dream video.”
And I said, “My dream is to build a noodle chair in Italy.”
And they said, “Haha.
No, but really.”
And I said, “Haha.
Yes, but really.”
So I’m gonna do it.
I am literally going to fly to Italy and build a chair out of noodles.
While I travel over 4,000 miles to Rome let me thank LastPass for sponsoring this video.
If you don’t know about LastPass -- I use it for all my logins.
I was tired of forgetting passwords, getting locked out of accounts, or dealing with websites
that have different rules on what a password could even be.
So I got LastPass and now it automatically fills my usernames and passwords everywhere.
Safely and securely.
With unlimited password storage and cross device sync.
Thanks again to LastPass for sponsoring this portion of the video.
So if you wanna eliminate your password frustrations forever, click the link down in the description
below.
I am in Rome.
And if you’re gonna build a chair out of noodles you need to bring in the big guns.
So I’ve flown in two competitors from the World Spaghetti Bridge Building Championship
in Budapest, Hungary.
Introducing…
Norbert Laky.
And Jonathan Lakatos.
They’re here from Óbuda University to represent RECCS -- the annual World Championships in
Spaghetti Building.
Where using just spaghetti and epoxy, competitors build bridges that support hundreds of times
their own weight.
These goliaths of gluten truly are pasta engineers.
And it’s time to procure the noodles they need to hold my heinie.
We all jumped in a taxi from the villa to the supermarket to get our pasta.
I mean, we’re in Italy… there’s no reason to bring your own noodles from home, right?
Wrong.
That was a mistake.
In the World Championships, Johnny and Norbi use pure durum wheat pasta for its amazing
strength.
They panicked when all they could find at the market was cannelloni with egg added to
it.
It honestly never occurred to me that an entire aisle filled with pasta wouldn’t have what
the guys were looking for.
But it didn’t.
Kevin: What are you looking for?
What is the difference?
Norbi: This without eggs.
Kevin: Without eggs?
What’s plan B?
*Nervous Laughter*
We kindly asked an employee to help us find eggless noodles, but even with the language
barrier it was pretty clear that we weren’t going to find the cannelloni we needed.
Here’s why it’s a problem.
Egg is added to pasta to help give it a yellow color, to add some additional nutritional
value, and to influence water absorption.
But it also changes the pasta’s structure.
Egg noodles are more brittle than what Norbi and Johnny usually use.
In materials science, brittleness matters: it’s the measure of how much stress a material
can absorb before breaking.
Durum wheat?
Strong.
Egg?
Ehhhhhh.
But we just didn’t have any other choice.
It was egg or nothing.
Our only course of action was to grab life by the yolks and call upon Ceres, the Roman
Goddess of agriculture and wheat, to bless our egg-fortified noodles.
If our pleas go unanswered, what’s the worst that could happen?
I fall through the chair and break my tailbone?
Okay that would be bad.
Please hold, egg cannelloni!
Please!
Alright, so we’re back from the store on our epic pasta run and here’s what we’ve
got!
We’ve got five boxes of bucatini, sixteen boxes of cannelloni, one box of lasagna, one
bag of extra long spaghetti, five boxes of epoxy, one tube of silicone, five boxes of
super fast epoxy, a bag of silicone disks, a pile of wooden support blocks, a digital
caliper, various tools, and six metal dowels that we supposed to be wooden dowels but uh…
well, here’s a little reenactment of what happened when we found out no one brought
wooden dowels.
Johnny: “Norbi, hand me a dowel.”
Norbi: “I didn’t bring the dowels, did you bring the dowels?”
Johnny: “I thought you brought the dowels.”
Kevin: “Why do you guys need dowels?”
Johnny: “To make straight tubes like this.”
Dom: “You could break my light stand apart if you like!”
Anyway, now that we have everything that we need to create our magnificent noodle chair
that means it’s time for one thing and one thing only and that is.. to whip out our noodles.
We’ve absorbed egg adversity.
We’ve dealt with a dowel disaster.
Against all odds… it was finally time to start building our noodle chair.
First, let’s talk about the sticky stuff.
We’re using epoxy because it’s not a water-based adhesive -- that way it won’t soak into
the noodles and compromise their integrity.
It also creates rigid joints that transfer force to the noodles, because we want the
noodles themselves to bear all the weight.
A chair made entirely out of epoxy resin would support thousands of pounds… but that kinda
defeats the purpose of uhh.. what we’re doing here.
We want to push the limits of pasta… and we don’t have a lot of time.
Because epoxy takes a full 24 hours to cure, Norbi and Johnny needed to build fast.
So Norbi and Johnny started by building the chair’s seat out of meticulously-selected
pieces of cannelloni, a cylindrical noodle that’s often filled with ricotta cheese.
We’re not, however, gonna fill our chair with cheese.
We’re not gonna fill our chair with cheese.
They’ve gone through box after box to find the best-shaped cannelloni so their grid of
the most consistent noodles will have the highest structural integrity -- y’know what
they say, “One wonky noodle and we’ve got a serious weak point.”
Nobody says that.
And that’s when a quality control calamity struck.
It turned out one brand of cannelloni was almost completely worthless because nearly
all of the noodles were misshapen… and most of the nicely-shaped ones had cracks.
We needed perfect cylinders, so in an instant, our supply of materials was cut in half.
At this point, we officially had no room for error.
The top and bottom layers are composed of 14 3-noodle-long rows, and the top layer is
rotated 90 degrees to cross the grain like a plywood composite.
This increases the stiffness of the material, which is a measure of its ability to resist
deformation from an applied force.
In this case, my butt.
The seat will transfer the force to three legs, each of which are comprised of three
pipes of cannelloni.
Every piece is sanded carefully so the joined surfaces are as close to perfect as possible,
and then they’re constructed into a tube using our tripod-dowels as a mold and jig.
The three tubes are then attached to make a chair leg that distributes force through
one of the strongest shapes in engineering: an equilateral triangle.
Norbi and Johnny worked straight through until 5am -- planning, measuring, grinding, and
gluing -- until they finished what they needed to.
As the sun rose over Roma, the hard-working Hungarians collapsed.
Buongiorno!
It is now day two.
Noodle construction went on until 5am this morning and the lingering question I have
in my mind is this: Why does boiling pasta turn a hard thing soft but boiling an egg
turns a soft thing hard?
Weirdly enough both processes are the result of the same thing: water retention.
Let’s start with the egg!
The proteins in eggs, mostly albumen are compacted with weak bonds.
Think of them like balls of cord that don’t really interact with each other.
When heated, the collision with excited water molecules causes them to all smash together
and those bonds break, causing the proteins to unfold.
Then the unfolded proteins tangle all together creating new bonds.
There’s still a lot more water present than protein, but the water is now divided up among
countless little pockets in the continuous protein network, so it can’t flow together
any more, and thus a liquid egg has become a moist solid.
“Moist solid” sounds gross.
Okay but why does boiling spaghetti make it soft?
Because it rehydrates the pasta.
Oh okay, cool!
Wait what does that mean?
Well, uncooked pasta is basically a zillion raw starch granules, embedded in a matrix
of gluten protein.
When cooked in water, starch granules at and near the noodle surface absorb water, swell,
soften, and release some dissolved starch into the cooking water.
This process is called gelatinization and we can visualize this using super absorbent
polymer spheres.
Just imagine these spheres are the starch granules inside the spaghetti rehydrating
it into the soft delicious noodles ready for saucing.
Let’s get back to our chair.
And Day 2 is when Johnny and Norbi radically changed the chair’s design.
Their original plan was to build a chair with 3 legs crossed in mutual support.
Early on the second day, they decided on a 4th leg for a more traditional chair.
That meant building another leg that we hoped would dry and cure in time to be tested.
Because with so many problems and gambles already, why not push our luck?
Then it was bucatini time.
Bucatini is like a thick spaghetti with a hole in the middle, so it was a perfect choice
for a top layer for the seat that could evenly-distribute downward force to the cannelloni layer.
Johnny and Norbi braced the bucatini with strips of lasagna for even more strength.
OH.
And a chair needs a back, doesn’t it?
It does.
They put together a simple open back with rows of noodles similar to the seat.
The joint between the back and the seat just isn’t going to be very strong without many
layers of lasagna, so this one’s gonna be…uhh ...delicate.
But just as you’d expect, the legs are pretty much everything when it comes to holding my
weight.
If the legs don’t work, the chair don’t work.
So, they attached the legs to the seat using silicone pads to give a bit more surface area
to make up for the gaps between the cannelloni.
Then it was about leg-to-floor contact.
They precision-sanded the feet to just the right angle so that all 4 would rest evenly
on the floor.
If just one leg is too far off, the downward force from my body will be distributed unevenly,
which means the other legs will have to absorb additional stress.
And that’s bad.
With the egg noodle uncertainty, a dwindling supply of acceptable cannelloni, and the clock
ticking on epoxy-curing time, they used extra-long spaghetti to attach flat support beams between
the four cannelloni legs.
Look, when you’re quickly building a noodle chair, every little bit helps.
Here’s a question.
WHY ARE WE USING CANNELLONI?
We chose cannelloni because they’re a lot like these Ionic columns from Greek and Roman
architecture.
Now when building noodle furniture, some of the things to consider are: the noodle’s
tensile strength, which is its ability to resist tension that will elongate and break
it.
Then compressive strength, which is withstanding force that compresses the noodle.
And then its shear strength, which is its ability to handle parallel forces acting upon
it.
It’s crunch time.
It’s the 11th hour.
The sun is going down soon and we need to test this chair.
We all have flights to catch.
With the back assembled to the seat and the legs as sturdy and precise as they can get
from our incorrect noodles, we’re finally ready to -- OH GOD THE BACK BROKE.
Yeah, so, the back has just broken off our noodle chair.
We didn’t even see what happened.
One minute it was great, the other minute it was… not.
We didn’t even get it on video because there was nothing to film.
We weren’t gonna record hours of glue drying.
But Norbi and Johnny scrambled to re-attach and reinforce the back so we’d be ready
for testing.
And finally to finish things off, we added a little spaghetti flair.
Hey, we’re in Italy, design matters.
The Flavian Dynasty built Rome’s Colosseum.
Michaelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City.
And here, in a cozy Roman villa, Norbi and Johnny present to me their noodle chair.
Johnny: “Well, there it is!
We’re done, what do you think?”
Norbi: “I hope it support you…
I think it will.”
I’m proud to present -- coming straight to you from a beautiful villa in Rome, Italy.
The world’s very first… noodle chair!
To make this video, I assembled a team from Budapest, Hungary, Bristol, England, Cooperstown,
New York, and Las Vegas, Nevada.
Collectively, we traveled 47,776 kilometers -- that’s 7,701 kilometers more than the
circumference of Earth -- to a 3 acre villa in the heart of Rome, Italy.
And we spent day and night building a chair out of noodles.
And now, for the very first time, none of us have tested this yet.
I’m gonna sit on it.
And if it works, it works!
If it doesn’t work... well….
Here we go!
It works!
It totally works!
We have a noodle chair!
Lean back, see what the back’s like.
No, no, no, no!
It totally worked!
Great job, guys.
Well…
Now what!?
What are you doing, Kevin?
What are you doing?
And as always -- thanks for watching!
Thanks for watching.
This is Hungarian engineering at its finest.
It still works!
Oh no.
I gotta brace myself, it’s going down.
Ohhhhh!
Well, it turns out, if you dunk a noodle chair in a pool and then sit on it, it will break.
The end.
Thanks to Norbi and Johnny, and the RECCS World Spaghetti Building Championship.
And huge thanks to Dom Burgess for shooting this whole thing -- he has a science YouTube
channel called Every Think.
I’ll put a link down in the description below.
He’s got a video on how to build a time machine, how when we find aliens they’ll
be robots.
You’ll wanna go subscribe to Every Think.
If you liked this video, I mean, I thought it was a lot of fun to make.
Let me know if you’d like to see more stuff like this.
And as always… grazi for watching.