Air Date: November 3, 2004
Ping-pong balls can be used to raise a sunken ship.
plausible
Even though it took an impractically large number of ping-pong balls (27,000), when enough of them were piped into the Mythtanic II, the boat rose to the surface.
A 4 year old child can be lifted by a bunch of party balloons.
plausible
It would require such a large number of balloons (3,500) to lift an average 4 year old girl just a few feet off the ground that there is no way the myth could have happened unintentionally.
[...] don’t know what method they’ll be using for the salvage operation. But I remember an episode of Mythbusters that I saw not long ago, where they raised a sunken boat by piping in pingpong balls. You better [...]
July 3, 2008 at 11:15 AM
One wonders what the ping-pong ball limit is. That is, how deep do you have to go before the pressure crushes the balls before they can help raise the ship?
July 7, 2007 at 2:45 PMGood question - spheres are really strong structures but I guess water pressure can be really strong too.
July 8, 2007 at 5:13 AMevery 30 feet is about 15 psi, i can’t remember the pressure at which the balls gave way, so i can’t tell you how deep, but if you remember then just do the math.
July 16, 2007 at 7:11 PMAwww. Too bad you didn’t get to blow anything up. That was a pretty boring episode, I must say o.o
PS: Do you think taht using Hydrogen baloons will make the ballon requirement decrease? Hydrogen IS lighter than Helium…
July 21, 2007 at 1:51 PMhydrogen is small enough to leak through the balloons, so it wouldn’t work for long, if they could fill them fast enough in the first place.
July 22, 2007 at 2:04 PMYeah, hydrogen would leak…not to mention, you know, the fact that if one balloon caught fire, it would create quite a big explosion…(maybe the explosion could lift a person off the ground? =P)
August 14, 2007 at 3:41 PMhow would one find out a) how to get that many ping ping balls b) how much it would cost….and c) how many would it take to fill an acura?
September 9, 2007 at 7:50 PMI just saw this episode, and I remembered a book I read when I was a kid. The book was a collection of strange but true news stories. I was able to remember enough from the book to dig up this:
http://www.starch.dk/isi/kroyer/donald2.htm
Check it out.
October 7, 2007 at 5:30 PMPardon me please I have a fashion question. Where can I buy that skirt that Kari is wearing on the “balloon Lift” episode. This is important! I would sew one if I could see a clip of the episode to get a better look. Anyone have any ideas or is everything always about engineering.Thanks
December 12, 2007 at 6:59 PM