- [Jeremy] I'll let you know!

(machine whirring)

- Ready?

Oh my goodness.

(bat snaps) (laughs)

(Smarter Every Day Intro music)

The major league baseball home run distance record

is around 575 to 580 something feet,

depending on where you get your data.

Today on "Smarter Every Day",

we're gonna try to beat that with engineering.

We know that major leaguers swing the bat

at about 90 miles an hour,

and so you get this exit velocity that's really high.

I don't know what it is, 100 something miles per hour.

We have devised an apparatus,

my buddy Jeremy Fielding's

been working on it for months now.

We got a three phase generator hooked up to a huge motor

and a pulley system that gives us the right gear reduction

so that we can spin this bat at crazy velocities.

We're on this little league baseball field

that I played on when I was a kid.

We're gonna try to crank some homers at over 600 feet

and see if we can beat the home run distance record,

hopefully even put one back in those cows.

Alright, I'm Destin.

Let's go get smarter every day.

First thing was to get everything off the truck

and to get it over to the batter's box

and begin to line it up

and take into account where the sun is

so that we can get the right slow motion footage

and what angle we wanted to set the bat to.

Oh yeah, it's about to get crazy.

I'd like to stop and acknowledge

the ongoing launch angle discussion.

This is an entire field of study

having to do with the exact angle of attack

that you need to swing the bat at

in order to impact the ball at just the right position

and get the right exit velocity

in order to put these balls over the fence.

This is an entire thing.

Unfortunately, the reality for us at this moment

is that we're just trying to point at the fence

and swing a bat as fast as we can.

Where are we gonna be, dude?

(Jeremy) - I don't know,

but I want to be outside the fence, wherever else.

- If the ball comes off the bat like we expect,

then death will be imminent for the pitcher, which is me.

Hopefully this will stop any splintered bat

and or 200 mile an hour baseball.

We'll see.

Alright, here we go.

80 miles an hour, let's see if we can hit the bat.

(baseball whizzing by and hitting the backstop)

So the problem with this whole set up

is we have no active feedback

because the batter can move the bat as he swings, we can't

so we're just gonna throw it a ton of times

and hope that we get one that just lines up just perfect

because then it's sailing.

That's it, money shot, let's do it.

What just happened?

Okay, low speed swing test.

Good.

- Yes, that's about as high as I want to go

if we're standing here.

- That, but 200 miles an hour, that's next.

The problem is, Jeremy realized

we weren't getting full power

from the industrial generator we rented to run this thing.

Now is probably a really good time

to explain to you who Jeremy Fielding is.

Jeremy Fielding and I became friends at ThinkerCon

where we realized we were both dads

who loved to build things.

Jeremy has his own YouTube channel about mechanical design

and he's really good with electric motors,

so it's super fun to learn about this stuff from him,

especially when he's trouble shooting the equipment.

- We've only got 30 volts between lines one and three.

- So one of your legs is out? - [Jeremy] Yep.

- The power that comes out of the wall in your house

is called single phase power.

It's a sign wave that goes up and down,

and everywhere there's a dip in the power,

that represents a little spot in time

where there's no torque on a motor.

Nikola Tesla was a genius,

and he came up with a very clever way to get around this.

It's called three phase power.

As one of the sign waves dropped down,

another sign wave which is offset

120 degrees out of phase will be rising,

so you always have sign waves rising

to cover those gaps in torque.

So, instead of three wires, if you use four wires,

you can use the Tesla method, you can use three wave power

and get way more torque on your motor.

- See I was right, I was only getting single phase

and that's because it's set to single phase.

So that's what we want.

- So that's the faster button?

- (laughs) That's the faster button, yeah.

- 50%, go! - Okay, E-Stop is OFF.

(machine whirring)

[It sounds like a helicopter]

- Holy cow.

It's just like a helicopter.

You ready?

Oh my goodness.

All right, grounder to shortstop.

[Rattling, and breaking]

Holy cow!

(laughs)

We broke a bat.

- You broke a bat on the first try!

- Well we didn't get the high speed of the bat breaking,

however it did break where we expected.

The stress concentration right here,

that's where we expected the bat to break.

So if it went that way,

then as the bat was bending that would be in tension

and that's exactly what we have, a tension break.

Yeah, okay.

50% power?

- I think so, it might have been a little over 50%.

I was trying to look at the number and I went past it

and was trying to back up,

so not quite sure where I ended up.

- Okay, I didn't tell Trent when to trigger,

I messed that up.

Okay, so we'll set up aluminum bats?

- [Jeremy] Yeah.

- Okay, aluminum bats, here we go.

So while Jeremy fixed the machine

and attached the metal bats,

I decided to work on upgrading my battle station.

So after seeing the wooden bat fly off,

we're gonna repurpose this for a little extra shielding.

I'm not gonna lie, this feels like

the best idea we've had out of this whole thing.

Okay, here we go aluminum.

Let's do it!

- All the way?

- Go 75%. - 75?

- No, just do it man, go all the way!

- [Jeremy] Okay! - All the way!

- All the way, 100%.

- 100%, scary as junk, here we go.

Oh dear me.

- [Jeremy] I'll let you know!

- Holy cow, ready?

Oh my goodness.

(bat snaps)

(laughs)

- Did we throw a bat? - It's over the fence!

- What? - That was so scary dude.

Okay, what failed, the bolts?

- I think it did.

- No, I think the end of the bat failed and it slipped out.

- There's no way the end of the bat failed.

- [Jeremy] Yeah. - No!

- Wasn't looking at the bat, but that's what it looks like.

You look at the grip over there, it's still intact.

It slid out of the handle.

- It's 70% done. - No, no.

- I can't believe.

- Dude, it went over the fence man.

- I know! (laughter)

- It was so graceful too.

- It was so fast and I didn't even,

I was in shock for a few seconds like wait,

what happened?

- [Destin] I didn't even get to pitch at it.

- [Trent] Okay, so look, ooh!

- [Destin] What happened?

- [Jeremy] Yeah, the end of the bat!

- [Destin] Wow, it's still there.

What? - [Jeremy] Yeah!

- [Destin] What?

Okay, so this one's full aluminum, right?

- [Jeremy] Yes.

- [Destin] Oh, that one's plastic!

- [Jeremy] No! - [Destin] Yeah!

- Oh man, okay. - Okay.

- Well now we know.

- Oh dude, are we done?

We're done. - I think we're done.

I gotta check that bearing before I spin it up again.

- Oh dude, we're done.

We have a home run bat though,

let's go see the home run bat.

Before we find the bat, let's look at a couple camera angles

and see how it got there.

(machine whirs) (bat snaps)

In this particular angle,

you can see that the bat and the shadow

go flying by in just a couple of frames

and it's clear in this shot that my attempt to duck

comes well after the bat was gone.

And as you can see here,

the imbalance of only having one bat left on the shaft

really mangled the machine.

Holy moly, okay.

Look at that.

It's a home run bat.

Like, I don't think we could,

that's as far as I could throw it.

I can't even make it back to the fence, that's crazy.

How far did the bat go?

- [Jeremy] 581 feet. - [Destin] Are you serious?

- [Jeremy] Yes.

- That's like, okay Babe Ruth hit,

was it 575? - 575.

Yes, that's all.

- So we just threw the bat

further than the major league ball record.

- Yes. - Okay, nice.

Okay, now let's get a ball there.

Now truth be told, there's a tension break here.

I should have learned this lesson with Mark Rober

when we did the rocket powered golf club, but I didn't.

(machine whirring)

Where's the club? (laughter)

- Like I'm laughing, but that could have been bad.

- The next thing we're gonna attempt here,

we have this other bat

and it actually has an aluminum handle.

You can tell by filing off here,

you can see that that's actually metal.

The question is,

how is the attachment point between here and here?

I assume it's welded,

but we're gonna see if we can fix this thing

and give it another shot, maybe ramp up 50%, 75%,

and see if we can get a homer before we go crazy with it.

So for day two, we made a bunch of repairs

and added an important feature, a wobble switch.

Spinning it up.

So if you shake it?

So any acceleration like that switches the relay off

so that it kills it. - You got it.

- This time we drilled the handles themselves

and put a pin in there

to try to keep the bat from flying off the shaft

and once again,

I feel like I need to upgrade the safety precautions.

I feel protected now.

Okay, everybody's behind steel, here we go.

Pretty much right out of the gate, at 50% power,

we hit a dinger that went right over the fence.

Dinger!

Okay, that definitely was not a home run record,