Adam Savage here in my cave with the show-and-tell that it's also a little
bit of a tooltip there you go you're getting two for one today as you could
imagine people give me stuff it happens all the time and a bunch of years ago at
this point probably more than ten years ago I had some folks from Google come by
and we were talking about a project that we were working on and they knowing that
they were coming to the cave they were kind of excited about it
and they brought me a gift and the gift was this flashlight the RG / - this is
the result I'm gonna tell you the story of this flashlight I have no idea how
accurate this story is I heard it from one person at Google so please if you're
part of this project I'm getting something wrong my caveat is I really
apologize I'm going by memory of what I heard but I got given this flashlight
and I got told that it is crazy bright and that it might be the brightest
flashlight at that point ever built it uses four giant LEDs in the front that
each of them is a cluster of four LEDs yet these things are super bright when
you have it set at its full brightness
I've bet I'm trying to think about how to reveal the details of this story
right because as a storyteller I'd like to leave the best for last but I just
want to talk about for a second how ridiculously powerful and bright this
flashlight is actually I'm gonna do this I'm gonna actually put batteries by the
way so this was developed as an internal project at at the Google and it never
saw the light of day as a retail product for reasons that are part of the story I
heard it is a beautiful bit of kit as I'm unscrewing it I got to tell you the
anodizing and the the machining on the threading it's just one of those things
where you can really tell that something was labored over and somebody carefully
over all the details so this takes four of these big lithium-ion batteries you
want to be gentle about how you load them you don't want to just drop them
all the way down and then it's it's operation is exceedingly simple this is
literally rat a machined chunk of anodized aluminum with the spring on the
end there's no switch in here it's literally that when this touches the
side it becomes operable so I'm gonna I'm gonna get it assembled here a little
ring at the bottom that's lovely okay so here's how bright
this thing is wait let's see if I can get this washer do you see that does my
hand just disappear oh my god it totally does this thing is so bright that if I
look at my hand like this it's like there is a trace you do not want to ever
do this to a person I mean not I hope I didn't hurt my iPhone's camera with that
this thing is insanely bright holy cow is it bright apparently and I haven't
said on its full brightness which means that on those four lithium ion batteries
it'll run four again this is what I heard nine minutes at nine minutes total
that's how much power it's drawing to power that much light yeah and
apparently this heatsink here is not decorative it's necessary that's how
much it takes to pump electrons into these quad clusters of LED bulbs to get
them to do this incredible amount of light you're looking behind me yeah in
broad daylight you can see the beam of this flashlight moving behind me and
it's not dim in this shop it's the middle of the day got a lot of light
coming through this skylight yeah apparently during the New York blackout
Google employees were using these flashlights to light entire
intersections of Manhattan in the pitch-black
in order to help drivers navigate through yeah this is a beast of a
flashlight and I am proud to be its steward it is gorgeous it is it feels
great and holy hell if I ever really need that much light this is my go to
two things I heard that the reason it never became a retail product is because
it's soap right it might not be legal look that I don't know what statutes
exist for the brightness of flashlights I'm not sure it sounds like a great
story and it certainly lands well at parties I'm not I can't vouch for its
veracity the second thing and the final thing I'll tell you is years ago a
friend of Mythbusters the wonderful actress and science science nut Sophia
Bush came to the set for her second time to dress for us as Princess Lea in the
Star Wars Episode we did and Jamie held on to her as they swung across the chasm
Jamie dressed as Luke was a great day Sophia
super science enthusiast terrific actress totally amazing human being
super delightful to work with and she brought a friend who worked at Google
and I told him that I owned one of these and he said oh you own a fire sword and
that's what I learned that the apparently internal name of this
flashlight at Google is the fire sword a better name I cannot imagine that just
pleases me so greatly and it was super delightful at the end of this long
journey of owning this thing to find out that it had an internal name so behold
my fire sword yeah I love this thing alright let's just show you a little bit
more help bright Oh actually didn't cut on this thanks everyone for joining see
you next time