Speaker 1: Welcome to brain stuff from how stuff works? A brain
Speaker 1: stuff it's Christian Sager. If you like art, permanence or
Speaker 1: shallow wounds, you may have a tattoo or I don't
Speaker 1: know seven and you're not alone. A Harris pull from
Speaker 1: indicates that here in the US almost fort of adults
Speaker 1: under the age of forty have at least one tattoo.
Speaker 1: So our question for the day is how do tattoo
Speaker 1: machines work? And yes, the preferred industry term is tattoo machines,
Speaker 1: not tattoo guns. As it turns out, the technology used
Speaker 1: to apply tattoos hasn't changed all that much since the
Speaker 1: eighteen nineties. Before then, tattoos were given by tapping or
Speaker 1: just poking needles into the skin by hand. But at
Speaker 1: the turn of the twentie century, two groundbreaking patents were filed.
Speaker 1: Each is basically a motorized array of solid needles connected
Speaker 1: to an ink reservoir. When the needles pierce the skin,
Speaker 1: the tips pull ink from the reservoir into the skin
Speaker 1: and deposit it there. This happens because of surface tension
Speaker 1: and capillary action, you know, the way that water will
Speaker 1: stick a little bit higher up to the sides of
Speaker 1: a glass than its level in the middle. The close
Speaker 1: set needles of a tattooing device act the same way,
Speaker 1: pulling the ink down. Some of it gets trapped in
Speaker 1: the skin and eventually forms the tattoo. But let's look
Speaker 1: at these two different machines, which we should note probably
Speaker 1: weren't the first of their kind ever used, just the
Speaker 1: first to be patented. First, we've got New York City
Speaker 1: tattoo artist Samuel O'Reilly's rotary machine, patented on December eight
Speaker 1: He based the design on an electric pen patented by
Speaker 1: Thomas Edison in eighteen seventy six. The pen would punch
Speaker 1: through paper to create a stencil of your writing, and
Speaker 1: O'Reilly realized it could just as easily punch through skin
Speaker 1: to create a tattoo. O'Reilly's motor is a rotary type,
Speaker 1: meaning that when electricity is applied, a flywheel spins a
Speaker 1: cam which pushes a follower to convert the spinning motion
Speaker 1: into a reciprocating linear motion of the needles. Basically, the
Speaker 1: needles move up and down. It's called reciprocating motion because
Speaker 1: every push down rotates the flywheel with enough force that
Speaker 1: it will keep spinning just enough to pull the needles
Speaker 1: back up to their starting position, ready to be pushed
Speaker 1: down again. This lets the needles move up and down
Speaker 1: very smoothly and rapidly, applying the tattoo more easily than
Speaker 1: most artists could manage via the traditional poking method. However,
Speaker 1: this machine probably isn't what you think of when you
Speaker 1: think of tattooing. Imagine the soundscape of a tattoo parlor
Speaker 1: in your mind's ear. Do you hear a deep piercing buzz. Well,
Speaker 1: that's the noise made by a coil tattoo machine. The
Speaker 1: second design we're going to discuss today. The first patent
Speaker 1: for it was granted on August twenty three, nineteen o four,
Speaker 1: to Charles Wagner. He was another New York City tattoo
Speaker 1: artist who based his device on an Edison electric pen,
Speaker 1: this one driven by electromagnetic coils. These coil designs lean
Speaker 1: heavily on other machines from the eighteen sixties and seventies, telegraphs, doorbells,
Speaker 1: and dental pluggers, which were used to push gold into cavities.
Speaker 1: Believe it or not, the idea is simple. You attach
Speaker 1: a group of needles perpendicular to an armature bar. That
Speaker 1: bar is spring loaded so that it can vibrate up
Speaker 1: and down. When it's in its up position, it completes
Speaker 1: a circuit in the machine that sends electricity through dual
Speaker 1: electromagnetic coils, and that creates an electromagnetic field that pulls
Speaker 1: the bar down, which breaks the circuit and releases the
Speaker 1: bar back to its up position, starting the cycle over again.
Speaker 1: Since the tattoo needles are attached to the bar, the
Speaker 1: vibrations push and pull them up and down. Lots of
Speaker 1: innovators have built on these concepts, making tattoo machines safer,
Speaker 1: more precise, and less painful for both the client and
Speaker 1: the operator, and artists use a few other mechanical designs too.
Speaker 1: Rotaries and coils are just the most common. Check out
Speaker 1: the brainstuff channel on YouTube, and for more on this
Speaker 1: and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.