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The Great Egg Race

Season 3 1981
TV-G

  • 1981-05-04T23:00:00Z on BBC Two
  • 29m
  • 30m (1 episode)
  • United Kingdom
  • English
Teams of university boffins would create weird and frequently Heath-Robinson gadgets out of shockingly scant apparatus in order to crack problems like building bridges to support someone's weight, burglar alarm detectors that people couldn't avoid triggering, or indeed the weekly challenge of transporting an egg over some great distance without breaking it. The programme went through a number of different formats. Originally it was studio based and featured teams trying to race home-made machines as fast as possible without cracking their egg-like cargo. Meanwhile, Professor Heinz Wolff would set three other teams challenges to solve. Over the years, the egg racing was dropped and it became a purely challenge-based programme. Later series broke out of the studio, with challenges varying from building a wave machine to taking a photograph of an oil rig using a kite.

1 episode

1981-05-04T23:00:00Z

3x03 Gramophone

3x03 Gramophone

  • 1981-05-04T23:00:00Z30m

Have you ever found yourself on a desert island with a 78 but no record player? Then take note. Heinz Wolff, principal judge on 'The Great Egg Race', instructs the contestants to make a gramophone from household materials. The guest judge is Terry Pamplin, a musician and musical-instrument maker.

One of the earliest devices for playing music was created by American inventor Thomas Alva Edison in 1877. Known as a phonograph, it played back sounds via a stylus or needle following grooves in a cylindrical sheet of foil. In the late 1880s, Emil Berliner invented the gramophone, a modification of its predecessor that used grooves on a flat, rotating disk to play back recorded sounds. The music was reproduced and the sound amplified through the sound box, tone arm and sound horn. Stereo sound was introduced in the 1950s.

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