hey everybody adam savage here in my cave with a mythbusters show and tell that frankly i can't
believe i haven't shown and told about before um one very good reason why i haven't done this
show-and-tell is because the thing that i am going to show and tell you about was touring around
the country for the last 10 years. if you were lucky enough the museum exhibition mythbusters
the explosive exhibition might have come to a city near you and you might have gone to see it.
it is an exhibit that jamie and i did in conjunction with a wonderful team led by a
man named geoffrey curley and we are exceedingly proud of the mythbusters explosive exhibition.
amazingly it came up at a time that we were in a very contentious contract negotiation
with discovery and yet we were able to have a really important amount of
creative input to it and that was i mean it was just great it like it was a potentially
tough experience it became really excellent because of the team we got to work with um
my friends adam colbin adam tobin and carl willett represented jamie and i
on the creative team and pushed some of our ideas through including running in the rain.
having a museum exhibit in which people were like drenched in the museum setting is not something
that people did very much and maybe they still don't for very good reasons but like we really
push the interactivity and again i'm proud of what what the mythbusters explosive exhibition achieved
but it's done now. COVID sent it packing and that stuff is well there are some plans for the stuff
from the exhibition. i kept a few pieces that were personal of mine and i'm going to be showing you a
few of these over the next few weeks but the first one is one of my ... so we get asked all the time
what our favorite builds are and i always forget about this particular build but the stuff that i'm
really like the stuff that i get excited about are the things that we did that no one ever did before
that's the kind of thing that i get excited about like concrete airplane lead balloon
we did those things in ways that they hadn't been achieved before and i feel like it's rare that you
feel pretty confident that you were the first to do something in a really specific way that's
that's a lovely bit of exploration right humans are explorers we like to do that um and the
particular kind of exploration that i dig is the impossible right the impossible lead balloon is
it impossible let's let's try and make one see if it is so when i was a kid there was a famous
joke in which a man is i don't know i think he is tasked with asking a genie or uh omnipotent power
something impossible and the punchline of the joke is he says catch my fart and paint it green
now that's supposed to be impossible and then something that's extra impossible so catching
the farts supposed to be impossible painting a green extra impossible
i have no idea about painting it green but ladies and gentlemen i have captured
a fart and this is the device that i use to do it this is the flatus containment device
oh yeah this is i mean look i know it's it's not necessarily something to be proud of and yet
and yet reader i am proud of this let me walk you through
how this thing worked we knew we wanted to we knew we wanted to investigate the components of
farts by the way we weren't even allowed to say right so let me explain that way back in
the early days of mythbusters we did a myth that they really didn't want us to do uh and
the myth is specifically about a civil war era soldier who was shot through one of his testicles
by a bullet which then continued on its journey after piercing his testicle it went on its journey
and another 50 feet impregna oops sorry excuse me uh embedded itself in the stomach of a woman
and apparently impregnated her this is a famous ridiculous story there's no way it's possible but
mythbusters tackled it
in a family-friendly way amazingly well the name of the episode is one of my all-time favorites
son of a gun yeah uh and when we tackled it in a safe way gina mccarthy was the gm of discovery
at that point really just a terrific gm we really liked working with her uh she reached out and was
like our hats are off to you guys you did this in the most family-friendly way are there other
other episodes that we may have rejected in the past which we might revisit and we said yes we
want to do an entire episode devoted to farts and they were like sure but you can't say the
word fart so we had to say flatus we couldn't even say my second favorite which is chanel no. two.
yeah it's a good joke but it's a brand name at any rate during the course of this episode we wanted
to find not everyone produces flammable farts some people don't some people produce parts with other
gases than methane in them it all depends on your gut bacteria uh we wanted to investigate whether i
produced methane laden farts before i lit them on fire and this is the device that i built to
actually capture them so to walk you through how this works the funnel goes beneath the water level
of the bath while the entire thing is completely full of water uh and the most important part is
that the top of this tube is full of water higher than this catching device the flight is catcher
so what happens is you fart into the funnel that said air pocket rises to the top of this
graduated cylinder you can see i put these little gradations on it that are milliliters i believe
once that was there we need to get it from here into here and we do that with a little bit of
pressure and that pressure is provided by the head in this tube so what happens is we open this valve
and it provides a little bit of extra head pressure under here
to go up we allow that head pressure to be activated by opening this valve this valve
and this valve and now we've got throughput and the pressure here pushes the flatus pocket
in through this tube up into the catcher close these off pull this out and lo you have captured
the fart yeah now that being said i will tell you that it is difficult to go to work
and fart on cue no matter what you're eating is not easy and like many people i'm a high
producer in the morning and a lower producer later on in the day thus we were having trouble
just not even testing this device but getting it to a point where we could test it
so i captured i think two farts uh over a couple of days and it was like kind of kicking our butt
and that's when and i think she'd be okay with me telling this story that's when my producer alice
decided to uh pony up and take one for the team she said everybody out of the room
she cleared jamie's shop and then we gave her like three of these things and an hour later
she came back with three yeah uh and it turned out that we produced different types of uh different
types of gases it was an excellent and excellent test and the way for the producer to like really
bring it on home um four the bacteriologists among you yes you are correct water is far from
a sterile atmosphere and when one wants to test the organic components of a gas
filtering it through water is not always the best idea i fully i agree with you i get that yes
and still we we caught a fart i mean like we caught a fart yes uh i just love that this was
in a museum exhibition for 10 years it remains one of my all-time favorite builds i actually built
this display just to have in my office i didn't build it for the exhibition it's just that when
it came time for the exhibition they were like can we put a plexiglas box around that and put
it up on the wall and i was like yes you can yes you can like i said this is not the last piece of
mythbusters ephemera that i'm looking forward to showing you guys but um it is indicative of
the kind of builds that really thrilled us that were super weird and strange and awesome thank
you guys for joining me for this show and tell as always i will see you next time stay
safe