America Revealed

When the American steel industry collapsed in the 1980s, it cost over three-hundred thousand jobs. Yul visits a steel company in Decatur, Alabama who looked for other avenues to continue production. Nucorp Steel bought up scrap metal yards and focussed their business entirely on recycling. Yul finds out how they were about to make steel out of junk.

On Yul's journey he has been surprised to find that America is still making things and is still the leader in many of its fields of expertise. Americans are continuously innovating, Google, Intel, Facebook, some of the largest companies in the world all started in America. The fact is, we manufacture more now than we ever have in our history.

Each dot in this data visualization represents one thousand factory workers. In this video we see the change in the number of manufacturing jobs there are today compared to the number there were twenty years ago.

Yul travels to Nazareth, Pennsylvania, to meet the people who work at Martin Guitars. The company lies in the state's Lehigh Valley, which has seen many businesses close over the years, but Martin Guitars has remained open.

Re-evaluate your perceptions of the American manufacturing machine as host Yul Kwon introduces you to the men and women who are changing the system. 5/2/2012

Yul meets Dennis Cueno, he is a site selector, and it is his job to help companies find locations for their factories. Together, they travel to Chattanooga, Tennessee to visit America's newest auto plant. This auto plant is owned by Volkswagen and is indicative of a current trend for automobile production in America.

Over the years manufacturing has seen a great revolution. Robots are now doing many of the jobs that used to be done by people. The use of robots has enabled work to be carried faster and more safely, but it has meant fewer jobs for people.

Yul travels to Silicon Valley in California and arrives at the offices of Facebook. He meets Mike Schroepfer, who runs the engineering department at Facebook to find out more about a new kind of manufacturing. Virtual manufacturing - You can't touch it, or hold it, but Facebook makes a product and delivers it to its customers, it has created thousands of new companies and jobs as well as billions

Ten Sleep, Wyoming is one of the most isolated places in America. Yul meets Rod Collingwood, he supervises the laying of fibre optic cable in this area. Fiber optic cable carries signals for our phones, television and the internet. Rod explains how fibre optic cable has become the new highway; it enables places even as remote as Ten Sleep to communicate with the world.

Yul takes part in a training session at the Volkswagen training center in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Led by master trainer, Albert Graser, the teaching is a little different from what you might expect at an automotive training facility. New employees are taught about efficiency and being part of a production line by playing a game.

Understand the intricacies, vulnerabilities and remarkable ingenuity required to keep up America's modern electric power grid up and running. 4/25/2012

Yul travels to Medford, New Jersey to meet Vinnie Carchia and Ryan Hill to learn more about their jobs as cable repair guys. Because it would cause too much disruption to turn them off, Vinnie and Ryan carry out work on the cables whilst the power lines are still live. Yul joins them on one of their regular maintenance trips to find out how theydo this without being electrocuted.