Bacon: the Other White Heat
You know bacon is delicious, but did you know it contains enough energy to melt metal?
By Theodore Gray Posted 04.15.2009 at 8:57 am
You know bacon is delicious, but did you know it contains enough energy to melt metal?
By Theodore Gray Posted 04.15.2009 at 8:57 am
Popsci wrote:
I recently committed myself to the goal, before the weekend was out, of creating a device entirely from bacon and using it to cut a steel pan in half. My initial attempts were failures, but I knew success was within reach when I was able to ignite and melt the pan using seven beef sticks and a cucumber.
No, seriously. The device I built was a form of thermal lance. A thermal lance, typically made of iron instead of bacon, is used to cut up scrap metal and rescue people from collapsed buildings. It works by blowing pure oxygen gas through a pipe packed with iron and magnesium rods. These metals are surprisingly flammable in pure oxygen, releasing a huge amount of heat as they are consumed. The result is a jet of superheated iron plasma coming out of the end of the pipe. For sheer destructive force, few tools match a thermal lance. But iron isn't the only thing that's flammable in a stream of pure oxygen.
