A Peek Inside of Everyday Devices

Open Circuits: The Inner Beauty of Electronic Components is the ultimate coffee table book

We use HDMI cables whenever we turn on the TV or plug a laptop into a monitor. It’s just a featureless black tube of PVC, but did you ever wonder what’s inside of it? Slice through the outer jacket and you’ll see something surprisingly beautiful—dozens of braided bunches of wire in casings that resemble rainbow-hued Twizzlers.

I recently discovered the coffee table book Open Circuits: The Inner Beauty of Electronic Components, released a few years ago by No Starch Press, and I'm kind of obsessed with it. It takes you inside of the doodads that make our everyday devices work—capacitors, fuses, potentiometers, switches, conductors, jacks, chips, diodes, inductors, transformers, and more

.What the book uncovers is a revelation: the cross-sections and cutaways, all perfectly polished and exquisitely photographed, are complex, surprising, and gorgeous

It’s not like those gizmos were built with aesthetics in mind—they were designed to meet specific technical needs as efficiently as possible. The electronic innards are unintentionally exquisite; the authors call it “the emergent aesthetics of things you were never expected to see.”

​Here is the book’s official site if you want to check it out. Let me know in the comments if you were one of the kids who used to take gadgets apart to see what was inside, and then scramble to reassemble them before your parents came home.