[954] in Humor
HUMOR (Dave): Rocket Science Meets the BBQ
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Andrew A. Bennett)
Mon Jul 3 09:56:17 1995
To: humor@MIT.EDU
Date: Mon, 03 Jul 1995 09:50:11 EDT
From: "Andrew A. Bennett" <abennett@MIT.EDU>
Date: Sat, 01 Jul 1995 00:31:08 +0000 (GMT)
From: Espacionaute Spiff domine! <MATOSSIAN@aries.colorado.edu>
Date: Tue, 27 Jun 1995 13:05:01 -0400
From: bostic@CS.Berkeley.EDU (Keith Bostic)
Subject: Dave Barry, George Goble, and the World Wide Web.
Nuclear Picnic
by Dave Barry
The Boston Globe Magazine
June 25, 1995
Today's culinary topic is: how to light a charcoal fire. Everybody
loves a backyard barbecue. For some reason, food just seems to taste
better when it has been cooked outdoors, where flies can lay eggs on
it. But there's nothing worse than trying to set fire to a pile of
balky charcoal.
The average back-yard chef, wishing to cook hamburgers, tries to ignite
the charcoal via the squirt, light, and wait method, wherein you squirt
lighter fluid on a pile of briquettes, light the pile, then wait until
they have turned a uniform gray color. When I say "they have turned a
uniform gray color," I am referring to the hamburgers. The briquettes
will remain as cold and lifeless as Leonard Nimoy. The backyard chef
will keep this up - squirting, lighting, waiting; squirting, lighting,
waiting - until the bacterial level in the side dishes has reached the
point where the potato salad rises up from its bowl, Bloblike, and
attempts to mate with the corn. This is the signal that it's time to
order Chinese food.
The problem is that modern charcoal, manufactured under strict consum-
er-safety guidelines, is one of the lease-flammable substances on
Earth. On more than one occasion, quick-thinking individuals have ex-
tinguished a raging house fire by throwing charcoal on it. Your back-
yard chef would be just as successful trying to ignite a pile of rocks.
Is there a solution? Yes. There happens to be a technique that is
guaranteed to get your charcoal burning very, very quickly, although
you should not attempt this technique unless you meet the following
criterion: You are a complete idiot.
I found out about this technique from alert reader George Rasko, who
sent me a letter describing something he came across on the World Wide
Web, a computer network that you should definitely learn more about,
because as you read these words, your 11-year-old is downloading
pornography from it.
By hooking into the World Wide Web, you can look at a variety of
electronic "pages," consisting of documents, pictures, and videos
created by people all over the world. One of these is a guy named
(really) George Goble, a computer person in the Purdue University
engineering department. Each year, Goble 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 charcoal-lighting 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 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. But in the world
of competitive charcoal-lighting, "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's 295
degrees below zero and 600 times as dense as regular oxygen. In terms
of releasing energy, pouring liquid oxygen on charcoal is the equiva-
lent of throwing a live squirrel into a room containing 50 million
Labrador retrievers. On Gobel'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 vapor-
ized," 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 be 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,
every now and then glancing in the direction of West Lafayette, Indiana,
looking for a mushroom cloud.
