Tesla’s Earthquake Machine. Nikola Tesla was a bit of a crackpot. In his latter years he claimed such inventions as mind control, a death ray and even the ability to split the earth in two with strategically-placed explosives. We’ll never know about most of those. But he also claimed to have created an earthquake machine.
This hand-held oscillating device is allegedly so powerful that when Tesla bolted it to a girder in his lab, the building began to shake and pandemonium ensued. The fire and police departments were there and only a hammer to the device stopped the shaking.
The idea is simple, and one that has been visited before, notably in the Break Step Bridge episode. There, the synchronous marching footsteps of a platoon of soldiers is rumored to set the harmonic frequency of a bridge into wild gyrations that cannot be stopped, which in turns destroys the bridge.
This was seen in spectacular fashion in 1940 when the Tacoma Narrows Bridge got caught in a wind storm before collapsing into the river below – but it’s never been known to happen due to something like a set of footsteps – including in the Break Step Bridge segment.
In this case, Tesla’s oscillator can be tuned to the frequency of the structure and induce the shaking, which in turn creates the destruction. At first, Adam and Jamie use a mechanical jack hammer, but they rapidly find out that the springs break. Funny, Tesla’s patent mentions that.
So they go back to the drawing board, but don’t have much luck. Then Grant produces a magnetic assembly that does just what they need – he just happened to have it lying around for another project he was working on. Imagine that.
When they take this and tune it to the frequency of the pieces they are testing with, they amazingly start to see some results. It’s time to step up the scale. They attach their six-pound assembly to a rather large (25-ton) bridge and… nothing happens. Only then they start to tweak it, and they realize that while the bridge isn’t falling apart, they do detect a faint rumbling.
So they tweak some more and suddenly it’s like a rather large truck is rolling across the bridge. While it doesn’t collapse, it’s impressive that a 6-pound weight can affect a 25-ton bridge in that way. Busted – but definitely a bit spooky.
Exploding Lava Lamp. This is another one of those myths that isn’t so much a myth as a test. The thing is that there was an article in the paper that tells the build team that the lava lamp exploded. So they know it can happen. In fact, they know it did happen. It killed someone, in fact, and they want to know what caused it to happen. So it’s time to make something (some things, actually) explode.
First, they determine what’s inside the lava lamp, and the results are not all that surprising. Grant gets online and figures out that they contain mostly flammable liquids – alcohol, mineral oils, wax, that sort of thing. This probably means that it will be easy to blow one up.
While Tory picks up some lava lamps, Kari builds a ballistics gel torso (complete with ribs and a blood-filled balloon) so they can tell if a shard of glass penetrates to a deadly depth when the thing explodes. Then they set up a fake kitchen with a burner and place a lava lamp on the burner, without the approved warming device. Don’t try this at home.
As it turns out, the standard cap seems to fail, which sends a spout of super-heated liquid out the top. That would hurt, but it’s probably not going to be fatal. Once the liquid shoots out, however, the now-empty glass cracks easily, but it doesn’t so much explode. This doesn’t mean it will always do this, only that the cap failed first here, so to make it explode, the team crimps a bottle cap on the lamp, and that makes it explode nicely – glass shards even fly about the room. Confirmed.
Once it’s been confirmed that a lamp can indeed explode in this fashion, it’s only responsible reporting to determine what else can explode. Beans with a pop-top jump out of the can, but not in an explosive fashion. A larger can without the pop-top explodes wonderfully. Potted meat fizzles, as does bottled milk. Generally speaking, don’t sit something in a can or bottle on the stove. You probably also don’t want to place a glass baking dish on the stove.
