Air Date: October 10, 2003
A bricklayer could be injured repeatedly while hoisting a barrel full of bricks from the top of a building.
busted
Only by deliberately weakening the barrel and dropping it on a sharp edge were they able to get the barrel to drop its bricks.
Urinating on the electric third rail of a train track can cause electrocution.
busted
Although it is possible to electrocute yourself by urinating on a third rail, you would have to stand unrealistically close to the rail to do it. In most instances, a urine stream would break into droplets before making contact with the rail.
(This concept was tested with an electric fence in episode 14 and that version of the myth was confirmed. Distance is the key.)
Using an electric eel-skin wallet will cause a static charge that will cause the magnetic strip on your credit cards to fail.
busted
Most eel-skin wallets are not made from electric eels, but rather from a fish called a hagfish which does not produce an electric charge. Data written to a set of test cards was not affected in any way.
Newer: Episode 4: "Penny Drop, Deadly Microwaves, Radio Tooth Fillings"
Older: Episode 2: "Cell Phone Destruction, Silicone Breasts, CD-ROM Shattering"
[...] Mythbusters episode dealing with the topic in question. [...]
July 2, 2007 at 2:30 PM
They used a really strong barrel in this episode. I live in Maine where some of the small farmers still employ people to pick potatoes by hand. The barrels they use are nowhere near as strong as the one used by Mythbusters. I have personally seen a barrel full of potatoes bust when it smacked into the side of the truck while being lifted.
July 4, 2007 at 10:12 PMGot a question about the credit cards being destroyed in eel-skin wallets. The primary variation on this myth is that the cards were damaged after having been placed in a wallet with the magnetic strips touching each other. While the episode did investigate and bust this variation as well I believe that a minor point was overlooked. I suspect this myth may have originated shortly after the introduction of magnetic strips on credit cards. In that case, the construction of the cards back then may have been inferior to that which is being used today. I think the team should investigate the history of credit card construction to determine if perhaps early cards might have been more easily damaged by lower magnetic field levels. It is possible that this myth may at one time have been true, but due to improvements in card construction is no longer true. The team might also investigate whether physical stress on the magnetic strip caused by flexing the card repeatedly might put fine cracks in the strip material which could cause read errors as a result of altering the physical spacing between encoded bits of data. While this is technically a different myth, the average person (who is responsible for generating all these myths to begin with) wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between the real cause of the problem and the mythological cause.
August 16, 2007 at 4:27 PMCan you please tell if a magnetic clasp on a wallet is strong enough to demagnitize a credit card?
November 13, 2007 at 7:23 AM