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In more than one hundred episodes, the hosts of Discovery Channel's MythBusters have made many strange and amazing devices. Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, along with Tory Belleci, Grant Imahara, and Kari Byron, have built a two-story Newton's cradle, a salami-powered rocket, and a pair of metal teeth that could catch a bullet in midair. In each epi- sode, the hosts take apart and transform familiar objects, raise everyday activities to absurd scales, and create things that no one has made before. As they build and test these devices, they laugh with the joy of technical practice. MythBusters presents a vision of technology in which the material world can be endlessly transformed by playful activities. This vision is part of a long tradition of enthusiastic amateur engagement with technology and also resonates with the vision of technology inherent in the contem- porary maker movement.
Each one-hour episode of MythBusters is structured around testing several "myths." These myths are drawn from urban folklore, common sayings, and movie scenes. Would a bullet hole in an airplane window cause the plane to explode? Can helium balloons lift a person in a lawn chair? Could a car drive with square tires? The MythBusters create a series of tests to investigate different aspects of the phenomena. They start with small-scale versions before moving on to full-scale tests. Episodes often end with a larger-than-life test, featuring spectacular explosions and crashes. After the series of tests, they declare the myth "busted," "plausi- ble," or "confirmed." They have kept this effective formula over the ten years that the show has been on the air.
Though the show is motivated by the myths, the process of building the apparatuses occupies most of each episode. Through the depiction of the process, MythBusters presents a vision for interacting with the material world in which broad technical mastery is achievable, commercially avail- able objects can easily be transformed, and almost nothing is impossible. The hosts of MythBusters are technical polymaths. During most builds, they move between a wide variety of techniques. They weld structural steel, machine...