Oh my goodness
Hey, what's up guys welcome back to the lab today
We're filming this video in the dark because we're doing something a little bit different
I had a comment pop-up from Jacob Militello
Who said try to get a plasma globe and break the glass and turn it on and see what happens so Jacob
I went on Amazon. I picked this thing up. This is a $500 plasma globe
It's about the biggest one I could find and just arrived the other day, so I got my trusty sledgehammer
We got this globe powered up
Let's go ahead and smash the glass and see if we can answer your question
Now before we actually smash this thing open
I thought it'd be fun to play with it and kind of explore the properties of a plasma globe
What is it? How does it work? What's it made of now?
I have to admit when this thing first arrived
I picked it up and kind of thought it was fake because it's
Extremely extremely light I would have thought that this dome was made of glass. I'm feeling it it almost feels like it's made of plastic
Although when I look at it. I can actually see Ridge lines in there, so the question
I want to answer first is this actually glass or is it plastic because we try smashing it with our hammer
I actually want it to crack
and I want it to just you know do a little seam line and
Destroy the whole thing so I'm guessing this is glass
But I'm not 100% sure. Now if we take a look at the back of the power adapter here
You can see how much power is going in and how much is being converted
It's pulling house power and converting it to 12 volts at about 3 amps if you look inside the globe
You'll see this little center tower, and that's essentially a tesla coil
And it steps that 12 volts up to somewhere in the thousands of volts
Now it could be two thousand volts or it could be twenty thousand volts at this point
I don't really have any way of knowing because there's no markings anywhere on the unit itself
Now if you remember my thank-you video where we passed seven million
subscribers
I went to the science center and found a giant plasma globe like this and here's a piece of aluminum foil to actually draw the
Arc outside of the globe we're going to see if we can do that with this one as well
All we have to do is take a piece of aluminum foil and put it down on top of the glass and this builds up
A capacitive charge and if we take something like a piece of metal and touch it with our fingers we can actually get close to
The metal and get those sparks to jump out
You can see the spark is quite a bit smaller than the one that we had at the science Center
That's because the power pumping through this thing is
Substantially less and even though we can use it to burn holes in a piece of paper
It's not quite enough to actually light the paper off now the next question
I have in my mind is this dome made of plastic
Or is it actually glass. My question comes because it's extremely lightweight
which makes it hard to this is glass.
But, we should be able to tell pretty easily by taking the tip of a screwdriver and giving it a gentle tap
Okay, so it's got a very sharp ting and you can actually hear it resonate on the inside. If you look really closely you can
see the ridges and the swirls where it looks like the glasses blown expanded so I am confident
this is glass which means it should shatter under the weight of our hammer.
All right, so good news guys
It looks like our globe is glass we've got
thousands of volts of electricity pumping here, the question is what happens now if we take our hammer
And we smash the glass while this thing is running
Is the electricity going to jump out is it going to kill me is there going to be any safety concern at all?
We don't know that's what we're here to find out let's get to it
Now I'm putting on my glasses for safety,
But it really would be better to have some kind of a full face shield
Because we don't exactly know what's inside of this globe is it under vacuum pressure?
Or is it filled with some kind of inert gas like argon, or nitrogen?
We're not exactly sure
But we have seen from previous experience with vacuum chambers that when it smashes it implodes and basically falls straight down
So that is a risk I'm willing to take for you however. I'm going to put on some heavier duty gloves first
The other thing that I noticed is if I pulled my hand on the globe here
And I accidentally touch any exposed skin to the aluminum trim around my workbench. It gives me a little bite
I can actually feel the electricity jumping through my body
Cool makes you smell like burning hair or burning flesh
I wonder if I should like tilt this and actually hold it in my hand as I smash it
It's super cool. You can see the way my fingers glow in the back of the globe
Yeah, I think I'm going to do it
I'm actually just going to hold this while I smash it because that seems like the unsafe thing to do, doesn't it?
Okay, this where I start getting a little bit nervous guys, so we're going to do it here we going three two one
Ohhh
my goodness
Holy heck I could not have predicted that
That did not implode that exploded that like shot glass out everywhere all over my workbench
It didn't cut me though and look here the electricity doesn't appear to actually be shooting anymore
I'm not sure if it turned off
That was amazing. We got to look at the replay on that look at all this glass look at all the Shards oh
My goodness that was incredible okay, so watching this on a slow-mo replay. Here's the windup
Hammers coming down
makes contact and
Interesting like the top of the dome kind of flew upwards and then everything underneath is kind of like imploded and fell down
So that was really interesting guys so I can't tell if it exploded or imploded
It was kind of like sheared in half the top popped off and everything else just fell down
All I can say is there's a tremendous amount of force, and that was a lot louder than I was expecting
All I can say is I feel really lucky. I have no cuts no damage. I'm no worse for wear
Look at this
This is the glass and what what's really interesting about this is if you look at this side of the glass it's extremely thin
But then you look at this side
And it's substantially thicker so like obviously the glass changes thicknesses as well
That's pretty bizarre. I wouldn't have expected that and because that popped off so dramatically. I'm wondering if whatever gas was inside
There was actually pressurized like this might have actually been under pressure if it were a vacuum
It would have sucked in but I'm pretty sure that was a pop that was like an explosion Outward
So maybe pressurized argon or pressurized nitrogen is in there now. This is crazy guys the dome is gone
You don't see any more arcs flailing around. I don't feel any charge in the atmosphere
I don't see any electricity, but if I touch it
You can actually hear it buzzing you can hear it hissing and if I take the tip of a screwdriver and touch it
You can see a little arc start flying there not nearly as dramatic as the long
Octopus arms that were inside the dome because I think there's only a couple thousand volts of electricity there
Because we're in the standard atmosphere now with nitrogen oxygen
It just doesn't have the same effect, so yeah
Basically if you pay $500 for a plasma globe of your own don't smash it open
It looks a lot cooler if you just leave it on your table and let it roll. Oh
and if you look really closely you can actually see a purple glow around my fingers you see that it gets really hot so
It's that heats up really fast
You know the crazy thing about this is you can see the arcs line near the tip of the screwdriver and my finger is right
beside it making contact
But I feel absolutely nothing
Oh, what the heck just happened there? Oh
Are we melting the glass?
Something weird is happening
It can actually draw this art out
substantially
and wonder what change to make that happen can we actually crack the glass do we burn a hole through it, maybe
Interesting that it's travelling upwards probably cuz the key to the flame is rising
Well there you have it guys. We made an epic mess glass everywhere
I'm going to have to get busy cleaning this up
But we did this for you jacob to help answer that burning question you had and so what happens if you smash the glass on
A plasma globe and turn it on you can go check your youtube inbox Jacob. I'm sending a twenty five bucks
Hey, thanks for joining us for this experiment. We'll be looking for you next one. Talk to you then
Clean-up on aisle three I'm saying that a lot to use this oh
Dang it
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