[1947] in Humor
HUMOR CLASSIC: The Ultimate BBQ
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (abennett@MIT.EDU)
Mon Mar 10 23:40:45 1997
From: <abennett@MIT.EDU>
To: humor@MIT.EDU
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 1997 23:38:47 EST
This is an old Dave Barry article. George got an ignobel prize in chemistry
for this in 1996.
-Drew
From: jdsylvan@MIT.EDU
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 1997 23:03:26 EST
Engineering and Barbecue
>
> "Don't try this at home"
>
>Each year, George Goble (really), a computer person in the Purdue University
>engineering department, and a bunch of other engineers hold a picnic in West
>Lafayette, Indiana, at which they cook hamburgers on a big grill. Being
>engineers, they began looking for practical ways to speed up the charcoal
>lighting process.
>
>"We started by blowing the charcoal with a hair dryer," Goble told me in a
>telephone interview. "Then we figured out that it would light faster if we
>used a vacuum cleaner."
>
>If you know anything about (1) engineers and (2) guys in general, you know
>what happened: The purpose of the picnic shifted from cooking hamburgers to
>seeing how fast they could light the charcoal.
>
>>From the vacuum cleaner, they escalated to using a propane torch, then an
>acetylene torch. Then Goble started using compressed pure oxygen, which
>caused the charcoal to burn much faster, because as you might recall from
>chemistry class, fire is essentially the rapid combination of oxygen with
>the cosine to form the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (or something along those
>lines).
>
>By this point, Goble was getting pretty good times. In the world of
>competitive charcoal-lighting, however, "pretty good" does not cut the
>mustard. Thus, Goble hit upon the idea of using -- get ready -- *liquid*
>oxygen. This is the form of oxygen used in rocket engines; it is 295 degrees
>below zero and 600 times as dense as regular oxygen. In terms of releasing
>energy, pouring liquid oxygen on charcoal is the equivalent of throwing a
>live squirrel into a room containing 50 million starving Labrador
>retrievers.
>
>On Goble's World Wide Web page (the address is http://ghg.ecn.purdue.edu/),
>you can see actual photographs and a video of Goble using a bucket attached
>to a 10-foot-long wooden handle to dump 3 gallons of liquid oxygen (not sold
>in stores) onto a grill containing 60 pounds of charcoal and a lit cigarette
>for ignition. What follows is the most impressive charcoal-lighting I have
>ever seen, featuring a large fireball that, according to Goble, reached
>10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The charcoal was ready for cooking in -- this
>has to be a world record -- 3 seconds.
>
>There's also a photo of what happened when Goble used the same technique on
>a flimsy $2.88 discount-store grill. All that's left is a circle of
>charcoal with a few shreds of metal in it. "Basically, the grill
>vaporized," said Goble. "We were thinking of returning it to the store for
>a refund."
>
>Looking at Goble's video and photos, I became, as an American, all choked up
>with gratitude at the fact that I do not live anywhere near the engineers'
>picnic site.. But also, I was proud of my country for producing guys who can
>have charcoal ready to barbecue in less time than it takes for guys in
>less-advanced nations, such as France, to spit.
>
>Will the 3-second barrier ever be broken? Will engineers come up with a
>new, more powerful charcoal-lighting technology? It's something for all of
>us to ponder this summer as we sit outside chewing our hamburgers and
>glancing in the direction of West Lafayette, Indiana looking for a mushroom
>cloud.
>
