Simple Machines_ The Inclined Plane

Hi, I am Jared. Welcome to Fun Science Demos. We are starting with a little bit of a challenge today. The challenge is that I need to load this weight, which weighs a thousand grams, into the back of this truck. Now I could just lift the weight up and put it in the back of the truck, but we are going to use science today. We are going to use a simple machine to make that work easier. Now to show you that simple machines really do make our work easier, we are going to need to use the spring scale. Watch what happens when I take this thousand gram weight and lift it with the spring scale. I attach the spring scale. I am going to lift up, and you can see the spring stretch, and it should stretch all the way down to a thousand grams. So it takes a thousand grams to lift this weight into the back of the truck, but we can use a simple machine to make that work easier. Can you think of any simple machine, any way to load this weight into the back of the truck that would be a lot easier than just lifting it? So take a look at our simple machine. I know this does not even really look like a machine, but this will make our work of lifting this thousand gram weight easier. To show you that, we are going to use our spring scale again, and we are going to use our thousand gram weight. Scientists call this an inclined plane, and an inclined plane is a simple machine that makes work easier. So let us pretend that this is the back of my truck. Now remember, we used the spring scale to lift that thousand gram weight up into the back of the truck. We are going to see if this inclined plane can actually make that work easier by using our inclined plane to load our weight into the back of the truck. Let us take a closer look and see what will happen. What do you think will happen? If our work is made easier, what kind of reading will we get on our spring scale? So let us find out what happens. Let us put our weight at the bottom of our inclined plane, attach our spring scale, and now let us move our weight. Moving the weight, we are going to zoom in and take a look at what our spring scale says. Take a look at our spring scale. It says it is taking 500 grams to move this weight. Remember, when we lifted the weight straight up, it took a thousand grams. Now using our inclined plane, it is taking 500 grams. What does that mean? That means that this inclined plane has made our work easier. So what do you think will happen when we change the angle of our inclined plane? What happens if I take our inclined plane and take it up higher? What do you think will happen? Let us take a look. I have my weight. I have my spring scale. I put the weight on the bottom of my inclined plane, and now let us move the weight with our simple machine. We are going to zoom in so you can take a closer look at our spring scale. So take a look. Our spring scale is reading 700 grams. Remember, this is a thousand gram weight. Our work is easier when we use the inclined plane. So let us think about this inclined plane. If I were to take this inclined plane all the way up, well, that would just be like lifting my weight straight up. It would be a thousand grams. But when I take my inclined plane and I angle it down, I am making my work easier. What would happen when I drop my inclined plane down even lower? Let us take a look at that. We have our inclined plane lower. Let us load up the weight, attach it to the spring scale, and see what kind of reading we get. Here we go. I pull it along, and we will zoom in and take a closer look at the spring scale. But you are going to see it has really made our work easier. Our spring scale is reading 250 grams. Think about that. It is still a thousand gram weight, but it is taking 250 grams to move that weight. I would say our work is made a whole lot easier with this simple machine. So let us take another look at our simple machine, the inclined plane in action. Instead of using this thousand gram weight, I am going to use this four-wheeler, this quad. What if I had to load this quad into the back of this trailer? Do you think I could actually lift that machine up and move it back into the trailer? I do not think I could, but I could use our simple machine, the inclined plane, to make it a whole lot easier. So let us see if we can use some inclined planes to help us load our four-wheeler. Put my inclined planes up on my trailer and see if we can move our quad up the trailer instead of lifting it. And it works. That job was made a whole lot easier using inclined planes. Now inclined planes may seem very simple, but we can do really cool things with inclined planes. Take a look at this. I have my inclined plane, but watch what happens when I wrap that inclined plane around something. Get it started here. I am going to wrap this, and I want you to see what happens when I take that inclined plane and wrap it up. What does it look like I am forming? Well, see the blue line, the top of my inclined plane? It looks an awful lot like a screw. We have zoomed in so that you can see that a screw is nothing more than an inclined plane wrapped around a piece of metal. Inclined planes and simple machines are all around us. See if you can find your own examples of simple machines anywhere. If you want to learn more about simple machines, check out our links in the video description. Science is so cool, especially when it makes our work easier. Thanks for watching.