Electrical insulators are WEIRD

These weird transparent discs are what they call an electrical insulator. But despite the boring name, this whole massive structure would be completely useless without them. I'm talking 50 million miles worth of metal cables and gigantic towers, each weighing as much as a blue whale, all relying on this fragile stack of glass. And if it breaks, this is what it looks like. So what exactly do these things do? That's what I want to find out. And along the way, we're gonna learn why are these everywhere? Why discs? And why are they shaped like that? Plus, what do they secretly have in common with this ordinary object? These things you've seen a thousand times have two purposes. First, they hold the wires so that they wouldn't fall off. And second, they stop electricity from going down through the pole and gently saying hi. If this is a normal house outlet that you've been taught all your life to not play with, then these wires are a hundred times more powerful. So powerful that you don't even have to touch them to be instantly killed. Okay, but do we really need such an alien-looking complex technology just to keep electricity away from a pole? Why not just use a plastic coating like all normal cables do? Well, let's say we want to coat all these wires. For scale, this is us. This is the moon. If you stack together all electricity lines in the world, that would be as long as this distance times 200 or 2000 times around the planet. And if we were to coat this entire enormous length, that'd be very, very expensive. Also, plastic melts. And these guys often get quite hot. Like this hot. And that's a bad combo. What about a pole material that doesn't conduct electricity? Wood clearly doesn't, which makes it a good dielectric. Or a concrete, maybe. In theory, it could work. But no matter what the material is, when our delicate environment interacts with it, those poles will soon be covered in a delicious mix of dirt, dust, salts, and only God knows what else. And that thin layer is more than enough to pass electricity through itself, bypassing a wooden or concrete core entirely. Okay, so if we can't do anything with a pole and with the wires, there must be something in between these two that would make this lethal power above our heads safe. What about a glass of some kind? Maybe a glass cylinder? Okay, let's put it in here. And looks like it should work. Until it doesn't. If this is how the cylinder was in the beginning, this is how it looks just a week after. And just like a wooden pole covered in dirt turns into a huge wire waiting to electrocute you, our little glass friend here is no exception. If so, how does this weird shape solve that problem? An umbrella? I mean, look how dry the inside of it stays in the rain. Now, if this end of the umbrella would be attached to the pole and that one to your wire, then no matter how wet the top of the umbrella gets, the electricity will have a very hard time jumping over that dry portion. And that's quite close to how the actual thing works. It's made out of glass, so the electricity can't just go straight through it. And it's shaped just like an umbrella. So no matter how strong the rain is, there always will be some dry spots left. Fine, but how come there are so many of these disks here and only a few here? Well, they are modular, which means we can nicely stack them up. Now, here's something to keep in mind. The more of those you see, the more reasons you have to stay away. No, really, go away. Don't even look at it. But seriously, the more of these disks you see up there, the more powerful and dangerous the electricity is. It's like with water dams. The more water you have, the stronger this barrier needs to be. Adding more disks makes it harder for electricity to find a way through such a complex structure. And just like that, you've just learned about this strange glass hanging above our heads. So go ahead and tell your friends about it or something. I don't know.