The Loony Bin
(
loonies@bloodaxe.demon.co.uk
)
Wed, 1 Jan 1997 20:15:19 +0000
Hiya Folks...
Here's another one from Alan...I don't know if the site is still up, but
it certainly was there a couple of months ago when I last looked...I
don't know who gets the credit for the article unfortunately...
Wishes & Dreams...
- ANDREA
xx
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*******************Internet Goddess********************
**********************ANDROMEDA************************
------- Forwarded foolishness follows -------
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 equivalent of throwing
a live squirrel into a room containing 50 million 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 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.