Here’s one of my most distinct childhood memories: I’m maybe eleven years old? And I’m with my uncle Douglas, driving on a highway in his Ford Bronco. I believe it was a Bronco II, and for the sake of specificity this memory takes place in Northern California. My family visited him often while he was living in Palo Alto, and I enjoyed those visits. I felt a strong affinity for him and my aunt, Julie, and it strikes me now that our relationships remained remarkably close after they moved to the west coast from Southampton, New York, where both he and I grew up and where he, my uncle, worked with my dad when I was young. Those were a chaotic couple of years: changing schools when I was ten, my mom diagnosed with brain cancer when I was eleven and dying of said brain cancer when I was thirteen. Our yearly trips to California (my mom was from San Francisco, and in my memory we visited the Bay Area basically every single summer of my life) got a little weird during those years, but then again all of life was weird during those years — including, notably, me. The nice thing was that Douglas was weird too, and so the portions of these trips that I spent with him felt like a reconnection, a time when weird was normal, and I could relax about it. To wit this memory, in which we’re flying down some ravine in the Sierras in a boxy little SUV, with Eric Clapton’s MTV Unplugged on the tape deck, and instead of singing the actual lyrics we’re chanting “milli micro nano pico,” the metric prefixes for small units, because, I suppose, Douglas thought that knowing the metric prefixes for small units might help young Spencer make just a little better sense of the world.
I’m not sure how the metric prefixes for small units came up on this particular trip, but I know that similarly weird topics have “come up” in conversations I’ve had with my own kids. I, too, hope that these things will help my kids make sense of the world. Recently, while I was shuttling them from my in-laws’ home to the house where I grew up, I found myself attempting to explain terrestrial radio and how the car’s antenna could “hear” the signal even though our ears couldn’t. The explanation started to feel a little shaky around the time that I offhandedly mentioned that radio waves were more similar to things we can see than things we can hear. My kids know about infrared light, and they know about ultraviolet, and I was attempting to describe how each of those things, along with radio waves and also all the light that they can see, is really just vibration (“wiggles” was the word I chose) in the electromagnetic field. It was all a little bit obtuse but I persevered; the point of the explanation was that I couldn’t put on P!nk’s “Just Give Me a Reason,” because we were listening to the radio rather than to a streaming service. They eventually accepted this idea, though I’m not certain whether they followed my explanation — or, if they did, if it actually helped them make sense of the world.
I enjoy explaining big things to my kids, whether or not they follow my explanations. I’m aware of my intellectual weaknesses, the traps I tend to fall into, the analogies that only make sense to me, and it’s fun and challenging to see which explanations work for them and which don’t. For particularly provocative topics, like the electromagnetic field and our perception of it, I sometimes practice my explanations beforehand. Earlier this year I spent a few hours writing down an explanation of what we mean by vision, noting that during human fetal development the retinas “basically extrude themselves out of our brains and open up into tiny electromagnetic-spectrum-detecting antennas.” Of the visible spectrum I wrote that “There is nothing intrinsically visible about it; it’s just some of the possible frequencies that the electromagnetic field can vibrate on.” I think that my kids already understand this point, and if they do then they’re roughly a decade ahead of where I was at their age.
For these reasons, it’s kind of exciting to see my kids interact with my uncle. Which they did, last weekend, right after I finished my explanation of terrestrial radio and the way that it “wiggles” the electromagnetic field. Because there Douglas was when we got out of the car: outside the workshop, chatting with my dad.
I asked them, later, if they could remember anything that they talked about with Douglas. They could not, and all I could recall was a conversation about whether a very old package of marshmallows was safe (probably) and good (probably not) to eat. This is, perhaps, evidence of tact on Douglas’ part: Especially as my kids’ interest in Calvin and Hobbes has deepened, so too has their resistance to any line of inquiry which has the appearance of being educational or character-enhancing. If one wants to educate them, or build their character, it sometimes helps to appear as if you’re not explaining anything to them at all.
A day or two passed, and we were preparing to take the train back into the city, and I found myself picking up kids’ toys around the house. Douglas was still bustling around my dad’s workshop, preparing the wooden dinghy they co-own for its first sail of the season, and in a moment of diversion he gave me the writing assignment which I have now been working towards for a thousand words. What Douglas wanted to know, and what he wanted me to write about, was how they got the flamingoes inside the beach balls.
The beach balls had been strewn about the lawn all week. They were roughly the size of basketballs, and their outer surfaces were clear, with bouba-shaped lime green splashes on their bottoms. Enclosed inside them were pink flamingoes, which stood (or hung upside-down, depending on the ball’s orientation) in the middle of those lime green splashes. The flamingoes had their own inflation valves on the undersides of their feet, which I believe needed to be blown up before the balls themselves were inflated. I inspected one. Its only marking, not counting some legalese concerning how it could and couldn’t be used, was its country of origin, “MADE IN CHINA,” embossed on each of its two inflation valves.
I have a vague sense that a lot of the cheap, soft, pliable plastic around me is polyvinyl chloride. I also have the vague sense that polyvinyl chloride — which is also known as PVC and is used in a wide variety of products including extension cords, yoga mats, and all sorts of inflatable entertainment — is really nasty stuff. If forced to guess how they got the flamingoes inside the beach balls, I might say something like “under objectionable labor conditions and with appalling environmental consequences.”
I spent way too long trying to find video footage of people putting flamingoes inside of beach balls. The closest I got was the YouTube account of Ningbo Wonderful Plastic Industry And Trade Co., Ltd., a manufacturer of all sorts of inflatable toys, floats, and furniture. Flamingoes do not appear in their videos, but they do apparently make blow-up toys that are plumbed internally with water sprinkler tubing, and it seems from their production videos that their whole operation is underpinned by screen and digital printing, high frequency welding, and a ton of rather tedious manual labor.
So, the flamingoes probably look like flamingoes because of the screen printing. And they probably get the flamingoes inside of the beach balls with high frequency welding and a ton of tedious manual labor.
This is a start.
There are a lot of ways to weld things, and a lot of things that you can weld. When I was a kid, I would scrape a solidified drip of wax off the dining room table and wave it back over the candle from which it had fallen. Wanting to see the drip melt again, I would soften one end and then smush it back against the crenelated rim of the candle, fusing it in place such that it leaned gently into the flame. If I had wanted to strengthen my leaning tower, I might have tried to drip more wax onto its base, reinforcing it and building up a small fillet there. But I didn’t learn this technique until much later, and even when welding exotic metals you often don’t need to add additional material to the joint; simply heating the two pieces and smushing them together is sufficient to create a strong bond.
People seem to have been welding with flames for at least three thousand years. Welding flames typically radiate both visible light (which we see as red, yellow, white, and blue) and infrared light (which we can feel). The fact that this happens at all is pretty weird: Beeswax, when heated and combined with oxygen, can make the electromagnetic field vibrate. Bees go out into the world and suck nectar out of flowers. Nectar contains sucrose, which enzymes in bees’ bodies convert into glucose and fructose. Once its water content has been reduced, some of the glucose and fructose ends up as honey — but to store their honey, worker bees metabolize some of it into wax. People harvest the wax-encapsulated honey, spin it in a centrifuge to separate the honey from the wax, and melt the wax down into a candle. Then I burn the candle, and as the hydrocarbons in it are broken down and combined with oxygen, they create oscillations in the electromagnetic field — some of which I perceive with the electromagnetic-spectrum-detecting antennas in my eyes.
Polyvinyl chloride has a melting point between 100°C and 260°C, depending on which additives (i.e. toxins) it has been blended with. This is a bit hotter than the melting temperatures of both beeswax and paraffin, but certainly low enough to be reached with a flame. Melting PVC with a flame, though, is not advised: When burned — which it is frequently, whether as part of a cottage recycling operation, a train derailment, or a house fire — PVC has the undesirable tendency to release phosgene, hydrogen chloride gas, and dioxins. Of the three of these, hydrogen chloride is the most chill, so long as it occurs at concentrations of less than five parts per million; above that it can cause coughing, chemical burns, and circulatory system failure. Phosgene is a bit more extreme: First synthesized in 1812 by combining carbon monoxide and chlorine and exposing the mixture to sunlight, its name derives from the Greek phos- (for light) and gennáo (to give birth). But phosgene gas gives death, and was used to do just that during World War I (by the French) and the Second Sino-Japanese War (by the Japanese); today it is classified as a Schedule 3 substance by the Chemical Weapons Convention. From a public health perspective, about the best thing you could say about phosgene is that it doesn’t appear to be carcinogenic — though this point would be moot in any conversation about burning PVC, as at least some of the dioxins released by burning PVC have been shown to cause cancer.
So, let’s not melt our PVC with flames.
The visible and infrared frequencies emitted by my candle have a lot of energy. Move down the electromagnetic spectrum to radio, and maybe we can control the melting process a little more easily. This is how PVC welding goes: When pieces of soft plastic film are loaded into a tool at Ningbo Wonderful Plastic Industry and Trade Co., Ltd., the “high frequency” tools used to hold them there are actually big radio antennas, which generate electromagnetic oscillations around twenty-seven-million times per second (this is far lower than the infrared and visible radiation emitted by a burning candle; “high frequency” is relative to the just the radio portion of the electromagnetic spectrum). These radio waves — wiggles in the electromagnetic field, imperceptible to our retinas but nevertheless more similar to visible light than to the audio waves we can hear with our ears — pass through the PVC sheeting. As they do, they excite some of the PVC molecules they pass through. These molecules, in turn, begin to physically vibrate, creating intermolecular friction and eventually heat.
I am unsatisfied with the videos produced by Ningbo Wonderful Plastic Industry And Trade Co., Ltd. I am not their target audience; they want to sell pool toys to buyers at American-multinational megastores, and the extent to which they describe their manufacturing processes is limited by the curiosity and attention span of their target audience. So I turn to a YouTube page whose content is more vocational: Millennium Skills, which appears to be based in Mumbai and which publishes videos with titles like “The Most Amazing Process of Retreading Old Tire,” and “How A Old Talented Man Keeps India's Handmade Shuttlecock Industry Alive,” and “Most Incredible Hammer Forging Process Without Any Safety Gear.” This last phrase is mostly superfluous: One does see the occasional dust mask and pair of gloves in Millennium Skills’ feed, but safety gear is not exactly common at the factories, workshops, and alleyways that Millennium Skills frequents.
In mainland China and Taiwan I’ve visited factories that look a lot like Ningbo Wonderful Plastic Industry And Trade Co., Ltd. But I’ve never been to India, and I’ve never visited a shop like the one at which Millennium Skills shows inflatable PVC toys being made. This, and my inexperience with the process of inflatable PVC toy assembly, make it difficult for me to assess it. The seemingly small space is cluttered with scraps, and with in-progress toys, and with its workers’ sandals (as in many of Millennium Skills’ videos, workers are often shown working barefoot). We don’t see the outside of the shop, but we do hear scooters honking over the shop’s clicks and clacks and Millennium Skills’ oft-used acoustic guitar soundtrack. Most of the workers we see are shot from their torsos to their knees. Some are shown sitting on stools or chairs; a few stand or stoop; many squat or sit cross-legged on the floor. They work briskly and repetitively, pausing only occasionally to show the camera the assembly they’re working on.
The product they’re producing is a bird of some kind, let’s call it a swan, made of a seemingly random selection of day-glow PVC sheeting. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of swans in progress. They are made entirely of flat shapes, a little simpler than our flamingo-containing beach balls, and are assembled like so:
- A top body sheet is cut. This is not shown in the video; we simply see a squarish sheet with four holes punched in it.
- The top body sheet has what appears to be a rubber grommet and a piece of pink PVC sheeting welded to one of the holes. As in all the welding processes in this video, the tool in question is a “high frequency,” or radio frequency, or “RF” welding machine.
- The wings are cut using a formed copper tool on an RF welding machine. Six wings are cut from a single strip of sheeting; after they’re all welded, the excess material is weeded off by hand. One imagines that this process might leave a little lip of partially melted plastic at each seam.
- The wings are installed onto an oval-shaped tool and RF welded to the top body sheet.
- The inflation valve is inserted into the top body sheet. The inflation valve is RF welded onto the top body sheet.
- Head and neck graphics are silk screened onto a large piece of PVC sheeting.
- The head sheeting is folded in half, and six heads are RF welded out of it. Excess material is weeded off by hand.
- The heads are installed onto round cylindrical tooling, and RF welded onto the top body sheet.
- The top body sheet is mated to a bottom body sheet and the two are welded together. Excess material is weeded off by hand.
- The finished swan is pressure tested. Or, at least, two swans are pressure tested in the video; I assume, perhaps generously, that they all are.
As a rough estimate, the total time required to make one of these swans is probably under two minutes. The entire video is only eight minutes long, during which time maybe a half dozen inflatable PVC swans are born. I don’t care enough to try to find this particular toy for sale on the internet, but judging from the competition there I cannot imagine that it would cost more than five dollars.
So that’s how they make an inflatable PVC swan. But how do they put the flamingoes inside of the beach balls?
There is remarkably little video evidence on the internet that beach balls are manufactured at all; repeated searching for terms like “beach ball factory” turned up mostly inflatable product overviews and, weirdly, lots and lots of tutorials about how to find beach balls in some Roblox game that I wasn’t previously aware of. But I did find this shaky fifteen-second video from a Chinese “inflatable anime pillow factory,” which only shows the end of the assembly process but rather conveniently shows beach balls which have been silk screened to look like the planet earth. The poles must have been assembled in some previous step; all we see is the last weld, which is on one of the globes’ meridians, after which some excess material is weeded off by hand.
Our flamingoes stand inside of their south poles, I think. Then I think that our flamingoes are probably welded to the south poles first, and then slipped into a partially-finished globe right before the last meridian is welded shut.
A week goes by, and I send Douglas a draft of this essay with a conclusion that compares the invisibility of labor to the invisibility of electromagnetic fields. But I haven’t stitched the answer to his question up well, and over the next few days I think more about the possible assembly steps, think of ways to explain it in writing, try to sharpen my thinking by sharpening the words in this draft. I imagine a peony blooming in reverse, starting with its petals spread out flat and ending as a spheroid, its disc and stamens trapped inside—it’s too obscure. I search again for videos on the internet—nothing. I think about how the panels of the globe might be cut, stretched, and welded—too non-Euclidian. Then we all end up at my parents’ house over the weekend, and I find the flamingo ball again, and the kids ask me what I’m doing and I tell them that I’m writing about it, I want to understand it, here look at it from this angle, from the bottom of the flamingo, and tell me what you see. Look at these seams, are any of them different from the others? This one is, they tell me, it pokes out a little more than the others. I ask why, and they tell me that it was made the same way as a pillow. You stitch it together inside-out and then invert it, stuff it, and then try to finish that last seam as nicely as you can.
Exactly, I say. That’s how they put the flamingoes in the beach balls.
Thanks as always to Scope of Work’s Members and Supporters for making this newsletter possible. Thanks also to Douglas for both the writing assignment and some degree of tact in explaining things to my kids. Thanks to TW, James, and Natasha for reading an early draft of this essay, and thanks to Nick and Mike for some very useful technical & experiential perspective on PVC RF welding.
