[1872] in Humor
HUMOR: The billion-watt bulb
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (abennett@MIT.EDU)
Wed Feb 5 14:32:27 1997
From: <abennett@MIT.EDU>
To: humor@MIT.EDU
Date: Wed, 05 Feb 1997 14:10:44 EST
Makes yo wonder who'll win - Darwin or Murphy..:)
-Drew
Date: Wed, 05 Feb 1997 18:51:54 +0000 (GMT)
From: Espacionaute Spiff domine! <MATOSSIAN@aries.colorado.edu>
From: Richard Johnson <rjj@medialab.com>
[ Forwards Removed ]
- ------- Begin Item -------
Subject: The billion watt light bulb, or how I nearly got Darwined.
From: "Keith F. Lynch" <kfl@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>
Date: Fri, 10 Jan 1997 18:55:06 -0500
Message-ID: <199701102355.SAA22638@access5.digex.net>
Newsgroups: .mlist. DARWIN DARWIN@yorku.ca
A billion years ago, I got to work with a fourteen watt light bulb.
No, wait. That's not quite right. Let me start over...
Fourteen years ago, I got to work with a billion watt light bulb.
It wasn't a bulb, exactly. It was more of a candle. Except that
instead of wax, it burned aluminum dust, which is sold in ton lots
as a paint base. And instead of burning it in air, it was mixed
with liquid oxygen in a supersonic jet.
I forget how many tons of aluminum and oxygen it used per second,
but it never ran for more than ten seconds at a time.
The nozzle was about half a foot wide, and was made of some kind
of durable high-temperature ceramic, perhaps fused lime. The flame
that came out of it was much wider, and gave off slightly more than
a billion watts of pure white light.
We used it in the New Mexico desert, about fifty miles west of
Albuquerque, in a five foot deep concrete-lined trench, which is in a
natural depression. The area is completely desolate, and looks just
like the Viking pictures of Mars. It's completely silent there when
the wind isn't blowing. There is no sign of mankind, or any other
life whatsoever.
Nevertheless, calls were made to 911 from up to a hundred miles away
whenever the thing was used. Panicky reports were made of UFOs,
exploding substations, crashing jets, and nuclear explosions.
Attempts to photograph it usually result in the destruction of the
camera. One person managed to do it, by using something like f22 and
1/1000th of a second through welders goggles. But that photo makes it
look like it's being set off at midnight, with nothing but darkness at
any distance from the immense irregular white flame, and with a pitch
black sky. In fact, it was taken at about noon on a sunny day.
I've calculated that it ought to be easily visible from the moon.
Better yet, arrays of them could be set up on the moon, and used
to spell out advertising slogans. Obnoxious? Sure. But less so
than unsolicited commercial e-mail. Give Spamford Wallace the
moon, if he'll promise to leave our mailboxes alone.
About ten feet away were our test samples -- heavily instrumented
sheet metal covered with various types of "fireproof" paint, to see
which ones would best stand up to nearby nuclear explosions. I ran
the computer equipment that collected and analyzed the data, in a
portable metal shed about a hundred feet away. The shed had a narrow
window which faced away from the light source.
When the light turned on, the patch of desert visible through the
narrow window lit up as if it had been turned into the stuff the sun
is made of. At the same time, there was a noise and vibration like a
jet taking off nearby, only much louder.
One of the people who ran the thing for us mentioned that he had
gone outside during some tests. Darwin whispered a suggestion into
my ear at that point, so I didn't hear the part about how far away
he was at the time, or how he protected himself.
I took Darwin's suggestion and stepped outside during the next test,
about two seconds after I had pressed the ENTER key on the LeCroy
3500 microcomputer, and two seconds before the light came on.
I then took several steps forward to get a better view.
The light came on. I felt like I had stepped into a blast furnace.
I couldn't see anything but *bright* -- as if someone had stuck a
flashbulb in each eye and then somehow set them off in such a way
that they stayed on instead of instantly going out again. On another
Darwinian occasion, I had looked directly into a laser. This was
incomparably brighter.
I immediately turned tail and ran back into the shed. I have no
idea how I found the door.
When I could see again, I discovered that I was sunburned everywhere
my skin was exposed, that all the tiny hairs on my hands and arms
had gone up in smoke, and that my clothes were partially melted.
I was strongly berated for my "suicidal" stunt, and told that I was
lucky I had a programmer's complexion. If I had been black, or even
had a tan, I would have made an ash out of myself.
I had been about 70 feet away from the light. A trashbag inadvertantly
left next to the shed 100 feet away from the light had burst into
flames.
The results of the experiment? All kinds of fireproof paint burn really
well, when you give them a good start. Some of them explosively so.
Sheet metal burns even better. Conclusion: If a nuclear bomb ever goes
off nearby, be somewhere else at the time. Somewhere else very far
away.
Like on another continent.
I've been left with no permanent effects from my short visit with
Charles. I do have a permanent ringing in my ears, but I suspect
that's due to earlier risk taking. Perhaps it's from the time I
manufactured some high explosive and set it off so close to me that
it tore my clothes off. On the other hand, it may be from the time
I unrolled a capacitor, used the resulting long thin foil as a kite
string, and flew it across some high tension lines.
