---------- Forwarded Message ----------
RE: There Ought to be a Standard
Just had to send the following to people who enjoy the endless search for
useful knowledge.
THE 3 SECOND BARRIER
Our subject today is lighting charcoal grills. One of our favorite
charcoal grill lighters is a guy named George Goble, a computer person in the
Purdue University engineering department.
Each year, Goble and a bunch of other engineers hold a picnic in West
Lafayette, Indiana, at which they cook hamburgers on a big grill. Being
engineers, they began looking for practical ways to speed up the
charcoal-lighting process.
"We started by blowing the charcoal with a hair dryer," Goble told me in
a telephone interview. "Then we figured out that it would light faster if we
used a vacuum cleaner."
If you know anything about (1) engineers and (2) guys in general, you
know what happened: The purpose of the charcoal-lighting shifted from cooking
hamburgers to seeing how fast they could light the charcoal.
From the vacuum cleaner, they escalated to using a propane torch, then an
acetylene torch. Then Goble started using compressed pure oxygen, which
caused the charcoal to burn much faster, because as you recall from chemistry
class, fire is essentially the rapid combination of oxygen with a reducing
agent (the charcoal). We discovered that a long time ago, somewhere in the
valley between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (or something along those
lines).
By this point, Goble was getting pretty good times. But in the world of
competitive charcoal-lighting, "pretty good" does not cut the mustard.
Thus, Goble hit upon the idea of using --- get ready --- liquid oxygen.
This is oxygen. In terms of releasing energy, pouring liquid oxygen on
charcoal is the equivalent of throwing a live squirrel into a room containing
50 million Labrador retrievers.
On Gobel's World Wide Web page (the address is //ghg.ecn.purdue.edu/),
you can see actual photographs and a video of Goble using a bucket attached to
a 10-foot-long wooden handle to dump 3 gallons of liquid oxygen (not sold in
stores) onto a grill containing 60 pounds of charcoal and a lit cigarette for
ignition.
What follows is the most impressive charcoal-lighting I have ever seen,
featuring a large fireball that according to Goble, reached 10,000 degrees
Fahrenheit. The charcoal was ready for cooking in --- this has to be a world
record --- 3 seconds.
There's also a photo of what happened when Goble used the same technique
on a flimsy $2.88 discount-store grill. All that's left is a circle of
charcoal with a few shreds of metal in it. "Basically, the grill vaporized,"
said Goble. "We were thinking of returning it to the store for a refund."
Looking at Goble's video and photos, I became, as an American, all choked
up with gratitude at the fact that I do not live anywhere near the engineers'
picnic site. But also, I was proud of my country for producing guys who can
be ready to barbecue in less time than it take for guys in less-advanced
nations, such as France, to spit.
Will the 3-second barrier ever be broken? Will engineers come up with a
new, more powerful charcoal-lighting technology? It's something or all of us
to ponder this summer as we sit outside, chewing our hamburgers, every now and
then glancing in the direction of West Lafayette, Indiana, looking for a
mushroom cloud.
