A Grandfather Built His Grandson a Working Miniature Gondola
A boy wished he could bring a mountain gondola home, and his grandfather answered with a tiny working version.
TEDx Talks · Innovate for the Future by Developing a Makers Mindset | Berton Yang | TEDxYouth@GrandviewHeightsBerton Yang was seven years old when he went skiing with his grandfather at Grouse Mountain. While they waited to board the gondola, he noticed his grandfather staring through a window into the room where the drive motors worked.
Inside were two large motors pulling thick steel cables. Like his grandfather, Berton found himself fascinated by the machinery, its strength and how smoothly it ran. The gondola itself also caught his attention. It looked large and heavy, and he was surprised that cables alone could carry it up the mountain.
A few months earlier, his grandfather had pulled six small pieces of wood from his closet and fitted them into a ball within a minute, then asked Berton to take it apart. Berton had fiddled until he solved it, and those six wooden pieces gave him hours of enjoyment.
Riding up the mountain that day, Berton told his grandfather he wished he could bring the gondola home with him. His grandfather, an engineer, just smiled.
After returning to Beijing, his grandfather began drawing plans for a tabletop version. When Berton spoke to him by video and asked what he was making, he kept answering that it was nothing. Then one day he showed what he had finished.
It was a small working model of the sky ride, with a pair of tiny cars hung from wires and pulled around by a small motor driven wheel. "I couldn't believe my eyes," Berton recalled.
In Berton's telling: "My grandpa is the best Grandpa any kid could ever have." "Not just because he made super awesome toys but because he taught me something special." What was special was the discovery that a toy you create yourself is one of a kind and unique. As Berton put it, what you can make is "far more special than any brand new Lego set." The model convinced him he wanted to be like his grandpa, a maker of amazing things.
Questions people ask
How does a real sky ride or gondola actually work?
A gondola, sometimes called a sky ride, is an enclosed cabin that hangs from a steel cable and is pulled up and down a mountain. Large motors in stations at the top and bottom keep the cable moving in a loop, so cars keep arriving without an engine on board.
What is the wheel that turns the cables?
A bullwheel is the large wheel in a gondola station that guides the cable around and back down the mountain. The miniature used a small motor driven wheel to do the same job on a tabletop, pulling its tiny cars around in a loop.