The Scariest Chart in Electrical Engineering

- This is the scariest chart in electrical engineering. - Puts the fear of God into all undergraduate students.

- First time that you ever laid eyes on this chart, what was your first impression? - Holy.... - It's like terrifying.

- It looks almost like a wormhole in some sci-fi movie. - I mean, on many versions, it literally says Black Magic.

But for all the fear, it's everywhere. Millions of copies have been printed, and it's built into the most advanced software we have today. That's because this chart solves one of the most paradoxical problems in electrical engineering.

So we put it to the test. - This is crazy. - We're getting way more power transfer, even though we've cut the line.

How does that make any sense? (both laughing) There've been some great YouTube videos explaining how to use it, like one from my friend Zach Star, but I always felt like they were missing something essential.

You also, you wanna know why this chart looks the way it does. - Yes. But then I need to know the physics.

I would wanna know what the circles are and what I'm looking at at first. - Because even once you know how to use this chart, you're still left wondering how it pulls off its strangest bit of witchcraft: trapping infinity inside a finite circle.

Well, to understand that, we have to go back 100 years to the origins of this chart. In 1928, Philip H. Smith, fresh out of electrical engineering school, got his first job at Bell Labs.

The telephone industry was booming. Americans were placing more than 65 million calls a day. But because telephone calls had to go through copper cables, every call had a limit: the coast.

At the time, no telephone cables crossed the Atlantic, so the only way to call across continents was by using radio waves.

Smith began work on a mission to send radio signals from New Jersey to receiving stations thousands of kilometers away, one in England and one in Argentina.