In today's video,
we're going to be playing with sulfur hexafluoride,
and see if it can be used to put out 1,000 burning candles at once.
[Music]
Hey guys, I'm Nate.
And I'm Calli.
This stuff is weird.
Oh no.
This is as high as I can make my voice go right now.
In his video, Nick Uhas tried to put out
three hundred candles with sulfur hexafluoride.
We're going to try a thousand.
Sulfur hexafluoride is
a really dense gas that doesn't burn,
and so, you can use it
to actually extinguished things that are burning.
We currently have this tub full of sulfur hexafluoride.
As demonstrated by this balloon,
which is just full of normal breath air,
which is now floating on the sulfur hexafluoride.
Sulfur hexafluoride is
between five and six times more dense than air,
so balloons will float on it,
and it should stay in this box.
We're going to play around with it for a little bit,
and then we're going to see if we can take what Nick did,
and scale it up a lot,
and put out a thousand tea light candles at once.
Here's the basic idea.
Sulfur hexafluoride is a heavy gas that displaces oxygen,
and doesn't burn.
So we think if we fill this container,
we might be able to pour it out,
and put out 1,000 burning candles all at once.
Now, this stuff is most famously known as deep breath gas,
because when you breathe it in,
because it's so much heavier than air,
it does make the sound coming
from your vocal chords sound much deeper.
I've no idea what you're talking about.
It can be a pretty drastic change.
This isn't a helium balloon.
In normal air,
it just falls to the ground or the table like normal.
Gets you a little bit lightheaded,
kind of like helium.
It displaces air, including air in your lungs.
It's so much heavier than normal air,
it won't push it out.
So you really have to breathe
in and out a lot to get it out of your body.
Otherwise, you're just going to start getting lightheaded.
So yeah, balloon just falls to the desk normally,
other than the fact that it's like got static electricity,
and sticking to my hand a little bit.
But once you really let go of it, it falls.
But you let go of it in the sulfur hexafluoride,
it's floating on the gas there.
This little foil scoop here,
and currently, it's just full of normal air.
Doesn't do anything to a candle.
But carefully scoop up some completely
invisible sulfur hexafluoride...
Puts it out immediately.
[Music]
That took nothing.
That worked great.
Oh, this is gonna be amazing.
[Music]
I mean, we do have several flamethrowers,
which hopefully will make it
so it doesn't take so long to light them all,
when we're ready to do the actual burn.
I've got my hair down,
so I'll let Nate handle the lighting.
And now, worry about organizing.
[Music]
Guys, we've now got one thousand candles
on the workbench.
I actually didn't think it was going to fit,
but they did.
>> We've got-- >> Should add more.
We've got 28 candles going this direction,
and we've got 35 going here.
That's the complete rows,
and then in our 36th row, we've got another 20.
So we've got 980 in the grid,
plus 20 more, it's a thousand total candles.
So before we light them,
what we're going to do is add a barrier.
We're going to take some foam core,
and just tape it to the sides
of the workbench so it goes up above the level of the candles,
and that way,
any sulfur hexafluoride pouring down won't just
like run off the table.
It should stay contained,
make sure everything gets put out the way it should.
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[Music]
I think it's time to start lighting some candles.
It's gonna take a while.
We can do it.
[Music]
You just stay on the--
Ah, there's so many going out.
It's okay.
I'm light-- I'm gonna keep lighting.
You start pouring.
Try the blow torch.
Oh my gosh.
It's like a furnace putting my arm over it.
Just trying to light the ones in the middle.
There's, there's like more out than lit now.
Go, go, go!
You're blowing these out.
You're actually just blowing them out.
We don't have a back-up plan.
This was the backup plan.
Let's just pour it on.
3, 2, 1.
[Music]
All right, a couple things have gone wrong here.
Oh my gosh, I can't breathe.
Well, it didn't go the way we planned,
but there's more few more things that we can try
that should make it pretty cool.
There was a lot of heat coming off of those candles.
Enough that the candles
in the middle just completely liquefied,
and when that happened, a lot of the wicks started to curl over,
and they actually got submerged in the wax,
and stop burning.
Doesn't matter how many times you try and pull those out,
there's enough heat radiating off of this
that we could fix it all fast enough.
And combine the wicks being partially submerged,
even like that, they may be able to burn.
Like this one here is fairly exposed.
So I might be able to light that wick right now,
and maybe it will stay burning,
but we had so much
like of a draft from that many candles
that there wasn't,
you know, all of the air was just getting disturbed,
and so nothing was staying still,
and so we just had so many that wouldn't stay lit.
So we did for the sulfur hexafluoride on probably 600
of them still burning?
But we want a thousand.
So as I said, the problem is
that the wicks were getting submerged in the liquid wax.
So what we're doing now is just going to cut
some little strips of paper towel,
and dip those into the candles,
and have them sticking out over the edge
so they can't be submerged,
and then we'll try lighting that,
and paper towels should work to wick the wax up pretty well,
and hopefully, keep everything burning.
[Music]
Okay, we-- We lit the table on fire.
So now, this is a matter of we really need this to work.
3, 2, 1.
[Music]
It's really close!
And now, go outside.
Outside!
It worked,
except I'm worried about my co-workers.
Come on.
We got most of the candles lit,
and the ones that went out, we actually took pieces
of paper towel like Nate was saying.
We dipped them into the melted wax,
and we are able to relight them.
So for any gaps that you might have seen,
we had two or three weeks going in other candles
to make sure we still had a thousand lit,
and then the table lit on fire.
So it actually worked out,
and now, we're just airing out the room.
We'll be able to see the results in a minute.
It's very smoky.
[Music]
This is actually amazing.
But you can actually see areas
where we had a lot of overheating problems,
and we set the table on fire.
Yeah.
Yeah, there was a lot of heat.
Yeah, the--
We did--
I would say you just avoid doing that.
Yeah, maybe stick of the 300 tea lights.
Three hundred and space them out quite a bit more.
It was really fun.
We actually managed to get it to work.
Most of the sulfur hexafluoride
did blow out most of the candles,
which was really cool.
But then the smoke alarms went off.
Yeah.
Thanks for the idea, Nick.
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