I took this one near my parents house. It was raining pretty hard.
Posted on 04/20/2016 4:41:31 PM PDT by Morgana
Authorities have identified a 15-year-old Ohio boy who they say was electrocuted while attempting to conduct an experiment he saw on YouTube.
An Erie County sheriff's deputy confirmed Wednesday that Morgan Wojciechowski's parents found him Tuesday in the garage of their Vermilion Township home. Chief Deputy Jared Oliver says authorities weren't sure whether the parents heard something or just went to check on their son.
Emergency crews were called and took the boy to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
(Excerpt) Read more at tristateupdate.com ...
And to think that i used to climb phone poles with battery clamps and a volt meter so we could get a band to play on a hay wagon in a field....
How horrible.
I have seen some youtube videos where young people film themselves doing some incredibly dangerous “experiments” without a thought as to even basic safety precautions.
I’m surprised more tragedies like this don’t happen.
I had a rule when experimenting with electricity and electronics as a kid.
Nothing over what a 9V battery could put out. Never use power from the wall, even on the other side of a power brick.
Too bad. If the kid was interested enough to actually build a Jacobs ladder, he probably had some potential.
But you don’t often get a second chance with high voltage if the current is there.
A lot of us are lucky we didn’t end up like this boy. Me included.
Sad
I’ve read where a 9volt battery can kill you by interfering with heart rhythms, one finger of your left hand on one button and one finger of your right hand on the other. The electricity passes from your left through your heart to the right.
Yep, current is the killer.
Kids have been doing incredibly stupid things since long before Algore invented the interweb.
When I was a kid in the early 1970s, my friends and I made both nitroglycerin and ammonium nitrate using instructions that had been zeroxed from a copy of the Anarchist’s Cookbook. We mixed them out in a field and then detonated our concoctions by shooting at them with a 30-06 rifle.
I never should have survived to adulthood.
Your skin has too much resistance for this; the current would not penetrate the epidermis. When you check a battery with your tongue the shock is from the short across the conducting outer wet, salty surface. If you used conducting needles through the dermis on both terminals and there was a path through the heart it might approach the threshold to trigger an arrhythmia (~50-100 mA I think), but very unlikely.
If you made nitroglycerine on your own you are correct.
That is an exothermic reaction that can easily get away from you with explosive consequences.
I saw this on an old Navy safety film.
When I was a kid, there was a “young adult” science project book in the grade/middle school library. The projects were absolutely, seriously dangerous. Some of them I remember (or DID), for example:
1. Make a “salt-water rheostat” using direct line current for other experiments (!)
2. Using (1), make a carbon-arc lamp using the carbon rods from old-fashioned carbon-zinc batteries (!!)
I seriously wonder if that book still exists in there...the library and school do.
When I was in high school, I made a rather high-powered carbon-dioxide infrared laser, that was so dangerous I took it apart in 1/2 hour and would not let my friends rebuild it. It was based on a Scientific American article (back when Scientific American was scientific, and The Amateur Scientist was a scientist). That thing wouldn’t just take your eye out, it would catch the back of your head on fire. And it was invisible!
Have to admit that is not something I’ve had heard before.
But I suppose there would have been a warning on the Duracell if it was a immediate danger, but I’m going to have to remember to be a bit more careful around those now.
As I mentioned I saw this on an old Navy safety film.
...that is, the BEAM was invisible. But it could crack glass.
You are correct - 100 mA can stop your heart and kill you. But most deaths are not caused from the shock - they result from the impact with the ground when you fall off the ladder.
“Don’t try this at home”
These kids need a mentor or classes to apply their enthusiasm more safely. Note the more safely part, as working on high voltage DC or AC requires a buddy system just as in professional diving.
A Jacob’s Ladder needs enough voltage to carry an arc with several inches of separation before re-striking lower upon the “V” formed by the conductors. It will happily jump through a person to reach grounding through concrete.
“Nothing over what a 9V battery could put out. Never use power from the wall, even on the other side of a power brick.”
To this day, I am not in favor of working with anything over 24 volts. I’ve replaced a few picture tubes in TV’s, but I wasn’t enthused about it. I hate shocks.
I took this one near my parents house. It was raining pretty hard.
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