This is the weirdest thing I have read in a while:
An Australian man built up a 40,000-volt charge of static electricity in his clothes as he walked, leaving a trail of scorched carpet and molten plastic and forcing firefighters to evacuate a building.
Frank Clewer, who was wearing a woollen shirt and a synthetic nylon jacket, was oblivious to the growing electrical current that was building up as his clothes rubbed together.
When he walked into a building in the country town of Warrnambool in the southern state of Victoria on Thursday, the electrical charge ignited the carpet…
Firefighters cut electricity to the building thinking the burns might have been caused by a power surge.
Clewer, who after leaving the building discovered he had scorched a piece of plastic on the floor of his car, returned to seek help from the firefighters.
“We tested his clothes with a static electricity field metre and measured a current of 40,000 volts, which is one step shy of spontaneous combustion, where his clothes would have self-ignited,” Barton said.
Strange enough for you?
Krista
That is definitely the weirdest thing I’ve read in awhile. And I’ve read some weird things (mostly on this blog). :)
Mr Furious
I don’t buy it. I know your link seems legit and all, but I think I’ll file that somewhere between Darwin Awards and Urban Legends.
EZSmirkzz
Put him in charge!
vinc
This is happens you get when you have reporters, and editors, and I suppose bloggers, who don’t know anything about science.
Angry Engineer
Wow, I’ve heard of ESD problems before, but this one takes the cake.
Sounds like that building needs a good humidifier.
Jody
Not as strange as measuring a current in volts…
goonie bird
Put him in PIPLEYS BELEIVE IT OR NOT it sounds weird and strange some right out of a movie
Sherard
You got it Jody. Nobody with half a brain that would be using a “static electricity field metre” would say they “measured a current of 40,000 volts.”
Bogus. Your general 40,000 volt capable capacity is the size of a softball and designed to charge and hold 40,000 volts. Sorry, but you cannot do the same job with an impromptu outfit including a wool sweater and nylon jacket.
Sherard
Meant to say “40,000 volt capable capacitor.
capelza
I believe it. But them I’m the one who pulls the clothes out of the dryer…that wonderful snapping, popping, hair-raising and electrifying experience of pulling the boxer shorts and socks away from whatever they have attached them to.
CadillaqJaq
Shocking!
vinc
There are so many things wrong with this story. Most important, however, should be personal experience. Do YOU think you could set yourself on fire by walking around with a nylon jacket? Of course not. So the logical question should be, “why is this guy different”? The reporter never bothers to ask that.
The reporter, even if he knew *nothing* about science, should have at least been suspicious about the reactions from the people involved. When you get a static shock from touching a doorknob or something, it hurts. You notice it. Yet we’re supposed to believe that some guy was walking around and setting things on fire and didn’t even realize what was happening?
There’s the bogus use of meaningless numbers. The report says that the fire officials measured a “current of 40,000 Volts.” The reporter should have asked himself, “how big is that?” and maybe compared to current drawn by other household items, like a light bulb. If he had bothered to do this, he would have found that current is measured in Amperes, not Volts, and that the phrase “current of 40,000 Volts” is meaningless. It’s like saying “a car weighing 40,000 inches.”
I could go on (and on, and on), but you get the point. Reporters and editors, it seems, are willing to just turn off their critical thinking skills when it comes to science stories.
The above comment was crossposted
vinc
whoops, crossposted here, along with a little bit of additional commentary. (I apologize for the shameless self-promotion.)
David St. Hubbins
I don’t see what the big deal is. People spontaneously combust all the time — its just not that widely reported.
Krista
capelza man…use some fabric softener, would you?
TallDave
I’m skeptical.
Mr Furious
Tall Dave and I agree!!!
JWeidner
I’d put myself in the skeptical column, but I’m not going to write it off just because there’s some discrepancies in terminology. Stranger things than this have happened and science can’t always answer for every little oddity.
But if anyone cares…here’s the ORIGINAL article out of the local paper for Warrnambool, not a Reuters interpretation (which is what the article above is). No reference to the current of volts…Nor any quote from anyone named “Barton”…
Slartibartfast
Whoops, 40kV isn’t all that unusually large of a static charge. I’ve had a million or so volts applied to me by a Van de Graaf generator, and no carpet was ignited; no plastic melted.
The current measured in volts thing is also stupid, but others hit that one already. Let’s just say that if they measured a current while the guy was still, they did it by bleeding the charge off of him. Because that’s what static is: a charge separation. Static discharge can punch small holes in a sheet of paper, but it generally doesn’t ignite things.
Slartibartfast
Again, 30kV isn’t a big deal. You can probably generate that by rubbing a balloon across your head.
Slartibartfast
I’m waiting for Snopes to address this one.
M. Scott Eiland
Yep–let Snopes take a crack at it.
Geoff Weil
Add me to the skeptic column. I’m an engineer, I’ve spent most of my career developing ESD simulators and measuring instruments, and I was director of R&D at one of the major manufacturers of ESD equipment. I think I know what I’m talking about…
I’ve designed ESD simulators that operated to 30 kV, and I’ve done experiments up to 50 kV. I’ve given myself some painful zaps but I’ve never managed to set anything on fire. A human body charged to 40 kV stores about 1/10 of a joule. That’s just not a lot of energy. Enough to give a painful jolt, not enough to start a fire, unless maybe if you were standing a cloud of ignitable gas, in which case it would trigger an explosion, not a fire.
Also, ESD is a one shot type of thing, you walk across the carpet, you get charged, you touch someting grounded, you discharge. Back to zero, you have to repeat the entire process to build up a charge again. The description in the quoted piece sounds like he was continuously discharging.
Furthermore, it’s hard to get a human body to hold a charge above about 30 kV in anything like normal circumstances, vinyl jacket or not. The body tends to leak off charge via corona at higher voltages.
Sounds like Snopes material to me, too.
http://www.geoffweil.com
Slartibartfast
Good info, Geoff. Even though I’m an EE, it’s been a couple of decades since I had Emag, and even then we didn’t dwell for long (ok, not at all) on human capacitance and other relevant things. I’ve been hit with static discharges on the close order of a quarter of a million volts, and they were about as painful as having your hand whacked with a ruler. Certainly they never left a detectable burn.
JPS
I just have to throw this out there–anyone else remember the car chase on the El tracks in “Running Scared?”
Billy Crystal: “Try not to scrape the third rail, OK? There’s about six hundred volts in there.”
Gregory Hines: “It’s not the voltage that gets you–it’s the amps.”
Terrified nun in back: “How many amps are there?”
Hines: “Enough to push a train–and SHUT UP!”
Com Con
I’ve heard about this kind of thing before. If you scuff your feet on the rug long enough you can bulid up quite a charge. And, maybe I’m wrong about this, but I think electricity builds up differently in the southern hemisphere. That could have something to do with it.
Cobble
Geoff: The body tends to leak off charge via corona at higher voltages.
Agreed, although I prefer Guinness.
CC: And, maybe I’m wrong about this, but I think electricity builds up differently in the southern hemisphere.
No, it just discharges clockwise instead of counterclockwise.
Com Con
That could have some kind of effect, no?
tzs
Right, it’s all due to the Coriolis effect. This is why if you build up charge at the equator, it’ll never discharge. And this is why water never goes down the drain at the equator, either.
….smarter monkeys, please…
=0=
No, silly. The equator gets ball lightning.
And last time I was down there, the water did seem more polluted…