Acknowledgement

Robert Murray-Smith, 1963 to 2025.

Between roughly 2013 and September 2025 a retired physics teacher in England published two thousand four hundred and forty bench experiments on a YouTube channel called Thinking and Tinkering, numbered them, and gave them away. Supercapacitors. Graphene he made himself. Wind turbines of shapes nobody else was building. Electrostatic motors. Heat engines. High voltage from junk.

He measured things. That is the part that matters and the part that is rare. He would build something, put a meter on it, tell you the number he got, and tell you when the number was disappointing. He published his failures at the same rate as his successes, which is a harder discipline than it sounds and the only one that makes a body of work trustworthy.

He posted video 2440, titled My Last Video, on 26 September 2025. He died shortly after, at sixty-two.

This volume cites him several times, by his own video numbers, because his archive is now closed and those numbers are permanent. Chapter 7 in particular rests on an experiment of his: video 1435, in which he drives an electrostatic generator with a flame, and in doing so joins the conducting candle of Chapter 1 to the reversible machine of Chapter 7 in one build that anyone can repeat on a kitchen table for very little money.

The reason he belongs at the front of this book rather than in a footnote at the back is that he is the argument the series is making. There is no accreditation in those 2,440 videos. There is no institution behind them, no funding, no laboratory, no peer review. There is a shed, a multimeter, a man who understood the physics, and the patience to do it two thousand four hundred and forty times in public where anyone could check him.

That is a bench degree. He had one, and he spent a decade handing them out.

Where this book points you at one of his experiments, go and watch him do it. Then build it yourself and see whether you get his number.

Bench Degree

Get the degree without the diploma.

Learn the material, not how to pass the exam.