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Tuesday 5 February 2008

Myths of the Movies

Much-namechecked mate Steve Laws tells me that as children, he and his brother once dismantled all their fireworks to create a movie-style gunpowder trail.

They lit the end of it, and... phfft. Instead of the combustion burning its way steadily and dramatically down the trail, the entire line of powder went up in the same instant.

I'm told that shooting dynamite in midair doesn't make it explode, either.

7 comments:

Lucy V said...

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

How can you, I repeat, HOW can you shatter my illusions like this?

Stephen Gallagher said...

Well, if it's any consolation, apparently there are two types of dynamite and the kind based on nitroglycerine can be detonated by impact.

So sez Wikipedia, which of course is never wrong.

Chris said...

Next, you'll be telling me that Mr T never actually made any of those contraptions out of old junk lying around...

Good Dog said...

More importantly, once it was lit, did they run away in slow motion?

Stephen Gallagher said...

I'm sure they must have, with a dive to the ground as it went up behind them.

Stan said...

As a sort of reverse, when I was a school-boy we used to fire small rockets through lengths of scaffold pipe as a makeshift bazooka. I wouldn't recommend it to kids now (and I'm really quite horrified that we used to do this)but at the time it did resemble the sort of effect you'd see in war films...

Jon said...

On the other hand Gelignite can be safely left on a fire or dropped. My Dad saw this proved while working on a bypass. If it's 'sweating', though... less good!