Mythbusters Recap: 22,000 Foot Fall

22,000 Foot Fall. This myth originates in World War II, and states that a bomber pilot falls from his perch below a plane, dropping twenty-two thousand feet, and is spared when a 1000-pound bomb goes off in a train station below. The force of the bomb apparently provides some lift, which cushions the fall, allowing him to land, if not gently, at least not hard enough to kill him. The story is true - he did fall, and he did survive. The question is whether or not the blast in the train station is what helped him to survive.

There are multiple pieces to test here, and it starts off with Kari and Tory testing things on a small scale. They drop a lead weight from a small height to see what sort of forces can be stopped by exploding a small bomb (technically an airbag from a car). After a lot of trial and error - mostly error - the answer is that it doesn't seem like much of anything has happened. With the need to proceed with the full-scale testing, and without much success anyway, the real build starts to take shape.

Along with the help of Myth-tern Jess, Adam and Jamie build a mock train station. It's actually quite nice, with metal and glass that just about anyone would want to decorate their place, though you may not want to fall into it as it could be rather painful - but it's just what you would need to replicate this sort of myth.

Next up is to recreate the bomb, and for that, they need a rather large metal housing. Sure enough, there's one of those too. This 500-pound steel monster began life as the Sharammer (from the Jaws Special), morphed into the X-MB (in the Exploding Hair Cream segment of Escape Slide Parachute) and most recently was the Steam Cannon (from Steam Cannon, Breakfast Cereal). Now it's time to take the remains and blow it up by adding 500 pounds of explosives to the container.

The final piece of the puzzle is to drop somebody onto the faux train station. Unfortunately, 20,000 feet is a bit high to get anything like an accurate result, so Adam uses his calculating skills to determine that they really only need to get someone up to terminal velocity, which means they need about 500 feet. That's doable. Normally Buster would take over here, but to test the result on a more life-like body, they press Ted into duty.

Ted is made of ballistics gel, so they'll be able to see what it would do to a body. They'll raise him with some weather balloons to a height of 500 feet, then drop him along a guide wire so that he hits the right spot, and see what happens.

Unfortunately, the balloons don't cooperate. By the time they get things fixed, it's too hot, so they have to postpone for the next day. The next day, however, it looks like everything is on schedule, so they raise Ted to the prescribed height and get ready for the drop. The largest explosion in Mythbusters history goes off without a hitch - but Ted didn't go down the right way, and missed entirely.

Luckily, some conclusions can be drawn. A tree that was quite a ways from the explosion has a metal tube wrapped entirely around it. This leads Adam to proclaim that even if the shock wave somehow buffeted the falling person enough to land them safely, the shrapnel from the blast would easily kill them. This doesn't mean it's not true - they guy obviously survived. It just probably isn't due to a bomb going off in the train station. Busted.

Lights On or Off? Since Jamie has an annoying tendency to follow people around the shop and turn the lights off after they leave, everyone wants to know if that's really worth it. Is he really saving money by doing that? Is it worth turning the light off every time you leave the room, or are you causing unnecessary wear-and-tear on the light bulb?

First up is getting a bunch of light bulbs, and that's just what Grant, Kari and Tory do. They then set the bulbs up and test to see how much power they are actually using during one hour. Then they test to see how much they use when you turn them on. It turns out that they don't use much at all. In fact, they use so little power when you turn them on, it is virtually impossible for you to save money by leaving them on when you leave the room.

Compact fluorescent bulbs (swirls) are so efficient that it only takes .01 seconds of running to recoup the money "spent" during startup. So if it takes you longer than a tenth of a second to leave the room and get a cup of coffee, turn it off! A standard incandescent bulb takes about two-and-a-half times that, but it's still a lot less time than it takes most of us. The longest payback is for a fluorescent tube, but even then it's only 23 seconds. Generally speaking, if you're not in the room, turn it off and you'll save money. Leaving a light on simply does not save electricity (or, more importantly, money). Busted.

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