Explosions are awesome, we all love to have a little gander
at explosive carnage, whether it's on a movie screen or in real life.
I've been lucky enough to get to film a bunch of controlled explosions and I can
tell you blowing random stuff up never gets old.
But i wanted to ask why is that, why do we get such a thrill
out of something so destructive and potentially deadly.
The first explosive to be invented was black powder and it's believed that that
was invented in China around the 10th century
and at the time black powder was only used for fireworks which is awesome.
Within a few hundred years this explosive was found all around the world
and then of course it didn't take very long for it to become weaponized, which
is not so awesome. Black powder is still used in a lot of fuse-wise day
and it remained the explosive standard until the 1800s when Alfred Nobel
developed dynamite. Nobel wanted to find a way to make the
notoriously volatile nitroglycerin a profitable commercial product.
Nitroglycerin is extremely sensitive to heat and shock. Nobel was unlucky enough
to get treated to a display of this deadly power, when his factory
exploded in 1864 killing several including one of his brothers.
Whereas this probably would have put most people off,
Nobel carried on tinkering until he found a type of porous earth called
kaiselger, or kieselger, or klegelger i'm not too sure i think it's a German word.
This porous rock absorbs nitroglycerin and can be shaped
into sticks. So in 1867 we got dynamite, a much more
stable form of nitroglycerin explosive. And yes alfred nobel is that guy who
created the nobel peace prize, which seems a bit odd considering he
spent his entire life developing explosives and munitions. That leads us
on to the question, why do we like explosions so much when we know
they're so dangerous. So apparently the simple answer is that they're scary,
when we're scared we go into fight or flight mode which dumps a bunch of
endorphins and dopamine into our body which we usually use for either smashing
someone up or running for it, but if we're seeing something scary but
we know we're safe, like a controlled explosion from a distance,
those chemicals swirl around their body and create an
opioid-like sense of euphoria. Also surviving an anxiety-racking experience
can leave you with an incredible feeling of self-satisfaction.
This is what leads people to seek out extreme thrills.
New Zealander AJ Hackett popularized bungee jumping
by illegally diving off the eiffel tower in 1987,
he got arrested for that of course, but can you imagine his first
jump. He was only the second person to develop bungee jumping properly and he
was an amateur and he made his own chord, he couldn't have known for sure that it
was going to be safe. But i'm glad he did that first jump,
because I've bungee jumped and it is amazing. As I jumped from the platform I
tried to scream but the air caught in my throat,
the grassy ground rushed up towards me to smash me into oblivion
and then the bungie caught me and i was safe and
the exhilaration i felt was incredible. So that's why we find explosions
exciting but that's kind of the problem, because
explosions and explosives are never 100 safe and of course they've been
weaponized a tiny bit. So I wanted to know what actually
happens to your body if you're unlucky enough to be standing too close to an
explosion. And first off i think we need to
understand what explosion actually is. It's often a solid, turning to a gas
extremely quickly and massively expanding in volume.
In the case of black powder you've got saltpeter, which is potassium nitrate,
charcoal and sulfur. When you light it the sulfur catches first having the
lowest ignition point, which then sets fire to the charcoal and
potassium nitrate. The potassium nitrate is stuffed full of
oxygen which causes the fire to burn extremely quickly,
in a split second it turns into ash carbon dioxide and nitrogen gas
it takes an extremely small amount of energy to get this chemical reaction
going and once it does the gases expand to 200
times the size of the black powder, almost instantaneously. Meaning a pile of
black powder this big, will lead to an explosion this big.
And this is considered a low explosive. So to see what this ball of hot,
expanding gas can do to a person, i'm going to do a little experiment. So
here i have a charge strapped to my desk here
and i've got a piece of paper suspended i'm going to see what's going to happen
to that paper when i set this sucker off and i'm going
to run and hide in my house. So here we go.
I'm excited to see how this is going to turn out.
So let's go and see if that's done the damage.
Ah, let's have a look at this. Look at that!
It's blasting the hole straight through it. I can smell the sulphur
Imagine if that was like your eardrum. So you can see that the shockwave
absolutely decimated the paper and if you look
closely at the slow-mo, you can see that the energy from the explosion first of
all it surges forwards um and blasts through the paper and then
some of it is actually reflected back. And if you were standing close enough to
an explosion big enough, the pressure of the blast wave could
cause you some serious problems. It can rupture your eardrums or even
crush your chest to the point that it causes a pulmonary contusion.
You might survive the initial explosion only to die from the damage to your
lungs, but that isn't the most common cause of
death from explosions. So a bomb is an explosive placed inside
a hard shell, that's designed to shatter when the
charge goes off. So what i've done is I've taken one of my little charges
and I've put it in this box with box here
and I've got my glamorous test dummy here, who's going to be a replica human,
to see what happens to her when this bomb goes off.
And i'm actually really excited to see what happens, so here we go.
So let's see if this works.
Taking a close look at our crash test dummy, you can see there are burn marks
all over her clothes, so she was definitely struck by debris.
Now this bomb uh the shell was only made out of bolsa wood, you know I,
didn't really want to completely destroy my crash test dummy,
i'm not completely evil. But if this was a real bomb, the explosion would have
sent fragments of metal flying everywhere and
that's what makes bombs so deadly. This metal would have become
shrapnel, tiny projectiles which can really F**k a person up. Shrapnel can
break bones, shred organs and if it strikes you on
the head, it can shatter your skull and cause your brain to hemorrhage.
And that's why you should never play with fireworks, which is a lesson
that a family in Iowa discovered a little bit too late.
They decided to mix black powder with a gender reveal party. They placed
back powder in a tube, that was meant to fire blue
sparkles into the air, but instead they accidentally created a
pipe bomb and when it went off, a woman 15 meters away was killed by
a piece of flying metal and that piece of metal carried on flying for another
130 meters. So if you learn anything from this video
it's probably don't bring explosives to a family party.
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see the newest bad science videos first and if you have an idea for a topic for
me to cover, please comment below and until next time just don't blow
yourself up.