Introducing the New! Improved! Magneto-Turboencabulator
You’ve likely seen the infamous Turbo-Encabulator film from the 1970s (based on a 1944 article in a British engineering journal). In it, industrial film narrator, Bud Haggert, created a hilarious send-up of jargon-laden technical presentations by announcing and describing a new device, the Turbo-Encabulator. The technical nonsense word-salad that spews from his mouth is hysterical.
“For a number of years now, work has been proceeding in order to bring perfection to the crudely conceived idea of a transmission that would not only supply inverse reactive current for use in unilateral phase detractors, but would also be capable of automatically synchronizing cardinal grammeters. Such an instrument is the turbo encabulator…”
This engineer’s inside joke has persisted for over 75 years.
Over the years there have been a number of videos of different versions of the Turbo-Encabulator presentation, with many of them appearing on April 1st. Such was the case this year with Brian Haidet’s video introducing the Magneto-Turboencabulator.
The particularly cool thing about Brian’s version is that, while being no less buried in technical verbiage and obfuscatory language, what he’s saying is actually describing the device he’s demonstrating.
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