oh sorry one slate there you go
adam savage in my cave and i am taking questions today from tested patrons about mythbusters
and i'm answering them here in this forum hi uh today's question comes from jeffrey mccullough
who says uh his favorite myth is lead balloon mine too it's my favorite well i can't even say
favorite you can't name you can't say which one of your kids is your favorite this is it's it's it's
the myths are like my kids i can't choose one as a favorite i'm glad led bloon is your favorite it's
a really important myth for me but what jeffrey says is i've heard you talk about it before but
the other day you mentioned the problems you had with the suppliers equipment failing the day you
were to get the materials this is true um so to just give you oh and jeffrey wants to know
are there other stories about that about uh lead balloon in so many ways lead balloon is a
is a super important part of the biography of mythbusters uh the myth is that a lead
balloon is something that's impossible hence the name of the band led zeppelin who were told
when they embarked upon their uh uh band that it would go over like a lead balloon right like
like a concrete airplane a lead balloon is supposed to be impossible this is a perfectly
testable proposition so the question is not can you make a balloon out of lead well that is the
first question then the question is how big do you want to make it um so when we started to look at
when we started to look at lead i'm trying to work through the how we built the narrative
ah the first the first thing we need is for the balloon to be airborne
yeah that's i can make a bag out of almost any sheet material and i can fill that bag
with air but when you say balloon when you say lead balloon
i think the average person thinks of a balloon as something that's floating
not a not a bit of latex with some air captured in it it is literally got some helium in it
so we were really clear that whatever balloon we made out of lead had to float
and that meant that we started doing this math of like you get uh you get increased returns the
bigger you get because you are encompassing more air more volume in uh the relationship between
the surface area and the volume gets better and better and better for buoyancy the larger you go
the difficulty is lead is literally the material consistency or has the tensile strength of
wet or damp toilet paper i'm not joking it is it is one of the most volatile
delicate materials i have ever worked with so we started doing math uh how big can the balloon be
uh then we also started discussing like what was our balloon gonna look like and jamie was
like well we could just make a long bag and i pointed out but that's like sure you could
make a bag but can we can we try and make it as round as possible and jamie admitted yeah
that should be round is better than a long tube sure um that led to this whole how do you make
oh man how do you use a material that does not want to be touched or handled very much at all
and make a sphere in order to hold helium uh and it turns out a little bit of air um
we settled on building a cube and we had to build a methodology to make that cube flat uh so where
we laid each piece one at a time and taped only the oh man there was so much planning into this
but you asked for stories that i hadn't told before and one of them is that jamie
jamie hated this story he both loved this story and he hated this story
part of the reason he hated it was because he knew how volatile and difficult rolled lead is
to work with and in the beginning we were looking at the standard thickness you can get lead in
not the standard thickness but the thinnest that is like regularly available is i think about
three or four or five thousandths of an inch thick yeah um not much thinner than that's used
for shielding and other stuff other other types of processes but three or four thousandths of
an inch thick was actually way too thick for us our balloon was going to have to be like
20 feet in diameter and that was never ever ever gonna work um that's just too much to encompass
so then we started reaching out to companies to find out how thin they could make the lead
and our spec was we could make a i think a 12 foot diameter balloon that was a cube with its edges
like puffed out um using lead that was 0.001 1000 of an inch thick about 40 uh
about
so sorry about 5 000 of an inch thick which is roughly an eighth of a millimeter
there you go that's the translation i was doing in my head and we had a company that promised
to deliver us this stuff and yeah their equipment broke as they were trying to make it so we showed
up on a tuesday ready to shoot the story and it was like the lead's not here because the
equipment broke we're gonna have to wait several months um or find another company to do it um
and then even then as we were going we were playing with the thicker lead and it was so
awful and seemed so impossible that jamie kind of wiped the story from his head he was like
i don't want to do this story and then when the equipment broke jamie took it on himself to call
around and he found a company in germany called epstein foils and epstein foyles made our lead
in record time and they beat our mark we wanted one thousandth of an inch thick
they went 30 percent thinner than that the lead they delivered to us was point
0.007 of an inch thick yeah seven ten thousandths
of an inch yeah seven tenths of one thousandth of an inch it was crazy crazy thin and then when we
got that stuff in and i started playing with it that's when jamie got that i think i do remember
this specific point where i was like jamie jamie look this is totally possible and there was no
inertia with his ability to change his mind heinemann was one of my favorite things about the
man he looked at and was like oh yeah no we can do this but we're gonna have to be really careful and
i'm like i know and that led to what felt like a week of staring into the future each of us trying
to figure out all the ways in which building this balloon could go wrong and circumventing them
and in the end we we built up a set of of of contingencies for keeping this balloon from
failing that we used every single contingency and the balloon did not fail it successfully flew with
helium in fact it was big enough where we needed to add some air because it was too buoyant yeah
ah and the reason it's such an important story for mythbusters is because well
every time we outline a story we're gonna film it and then it's gonna go to the editors
and as you can imagine the editors like to know what they're going to get so they would be across
our outline and they would see our outline of our story and they would make a rough plan and think
okay this is going to be a b story the a story was always the big episode story the b story was
the slightly smaller um the time split we had 42 minutes so it's usually like the a story was like
a 25 minute story and the b story was a 15 minute story those ratios changed but that was roughly it
so we submitted the outline to the editorial team about lead balloon and they were like great this
is going to be a nice b story and then their first cut came in of just that story at 55 minutes long
but it was supposed to be like 15 minutes long uh we cut it down they cut it down they did
a beautiful job the narration i can't remember who was producing that one um
it might have been dan tapster could have been chris williams hard to say but in the end that
was the a story of the episode that we filmed and what it told us was that we could build
thrilling narratives doing pointless absurd things there's no explosions there's no fire lead balloon
is literally uh 30 minutes of storytelling about two dudes trying to just like do something that's
really hard to do and succeeding at it and that's a great story it also was great because we were
both super involved in the in the execution and that change you know that some stories
one of us or the other wasn't completely plugged into that happened a lot um you can't expect us
to consider every story a home run but that one was a home run for both jamie and i and i submit
that that's also what made the narrative really exciting to watch because you could tell that we
were involved we were thrilled and that is another thing that we realized was we can tell really cool
stories about stuff that's pointless and absurd as long as we're totally into it because it's
one of the most important takeaways i have from 15 actually now 18 years of television production
is that the best stories are the one in which the person that story is happening
to is really involved in the story it sounds ridiculously simple when you say it like that
but think about your favorite reality hosts
your favorite reality hosts are plugged right in man richard hammond yeah phil keegan right these
these are legends they they watching them go is exciting almost no matter what they're saying
i aspire to to that kind of presentation i've quoted this line from raymond chandler a whole
bunch in talking about this but he says an adventure story would be no adventure if it
did not happen to a person fit for adventure and that i submit is that one of the things we learned
on lead balloon is we learned that the kind of adventures that we found thrilling and
thus could tell thrilling stories about were weirder and stranger than what seemed obvious
at first glance and that allowed us to go looking for weirder and more fun stories that's how we did
good god that's why we did square wheels smooth ride it's why we did the golf ball car
both of those stories driven solely by interest from jamie or i um yeah absolutely
the best stories to watch are going to be the ones in which the people they're happening to
are actually interested in what's going on yeah i again i know that sounds ridiculously simply
stupidly obvious but if you watch a lot of reality television you might not see as much of that
as you think you're seeing yeah so lead balloon was people ask a lot about what
our favorite stories are favorite myths and the most excelsior this the worst that and
it's impossible to choose for all those years of making the show any specific moments but there are
episodes or occurrences like lead balloon penny from the empire state building stories like that
which altered forever the way i saw how to make the show and change the way i thought about making
the show those are the moments i remember those are the moments that stick with me thank you for
that terrific question uh jeffrey i appreciate it tested patrons please keep submitting your
questions and i will continue to answer them stay safe and i will see you guys next time