Jamie Hyneman


James Franklin Hyneman is an American special effects expert who is best known as the co-host of the television series MythBusters alongside Adam Savage. He is also the owner of M5 Industries, the special effects workshop where MythBusters was filmed. He is known among Robot Wars devotees for his robot entry Blendo, which was deemed too dangerous for entry in the competition. He is the inventor of the Sentry, an unmanned firefighting robotic vehicle. He is also one of the designers of the aerial cable robotic camera system Wavecam used in sports and entertainment events.

Early life

Hyneman was born in Marshall, Michigan and raised in Columbus, Indiana. He said, "I was a problematic kid, to be sure. I left home when I was 14 and hitchhiked all over the country."

Academic life

He earned a degree in Russian linguistics from Indiana University.

Honorary degrees

He received an honorary Doctor of Engineering degree from Villanova University in May 16, 2010,. On November 25, 2011, Hyneman was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Twente for his role in the popularization of science and technology. In February 2017 he was named one of the 14 new Honorary Doctors of technology by Lappeenranta University of Technology, Finland. He received the doctorate in June 2017.

Career

Hyneman has worked as a boat captain, certified dive master, wilderness survival expert, linguist, pet store owner at age 15, animal wrangler, machinist, concrete inspector, and chef. His most notable work is the co-host of MythBusters.

Special effects work

Much of the experience that Hyneman used on MythBusters came from his time in the visual and special effects professions. He spent time as an animatronics technician for films such as Naked Lunch and Flubber, as well as doing work on the second and third installments of the Matrix Trilogy.
Hyneman owns the special effects company M5 Industries in San Francisco. Some of his achievements in commercials include the can-spitting vending machine seen in 7 Up commercials, and his patented two-wheeled football shoe from Nike Lab commercials.

Other appearances

Hyneman and Savage portray two army-junk sellers in the film The Darwin Awards. They appear during the story of the rocket-car, which they partially reproduced in the MythBusters series' pilot episode and retested twice more.
meets with Hyneman and Adam Savage in the White House library on July 27, 2010
Hyneman made a cameo appearance along with Savage on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation on the May 1, 2008 episode "The Theory of Everything", where they play inspectors giving thumbs-up after seeing a shirt soaked in pepper spray catch fire when shot by a taser. They tested this myth on MythBusters and declared it confirmed with certain types of pepper spray.
He and Savage appear as judges on the game show Unchained Reaction, which premiered in March 2012. The two also voiced characters on The Simpsons episode "The Daughter Also Rises" as a parody of themselves, the "MythCrackers", which prompts Bart and Milhouse to experiment in a similar fashion. Both Hyneman and Savage also voiced stormtroopers in the Phineas and Ferb Star Wars special.

Personal life

In 1984, Hyneman met science teacher Eileen Walsh when he owned a sailboat diving charter business in the Virgin Islands. Hyneman and Walsh married in 1989. Hyneman is a skeptic and an atheist.