MythBusters Pilot 2: "Vacuum Toilet, Biscuit Bazooka, Leaping Lawyer"
Air Date: January 23, 2003
An obese person can get stuck on an airline vacuum toilet.
busted
It is impossible to get a perfect seal on a modern airplane toilet, and even if it is possible a properly working toilet provides suction for only a few seconds. Even then, the suction (3 psi) is not beyond human ability to overcome.
A woman was struck in the head with an exploding tin of biscuit (scone) dough, believing that she was in fact struck by a bullet.
plausible
The dough can blow out of many types of biscuit cans at a car’s internal temperature of 150 °F (60 °) with enough force to potentially strike the driver of the car in the back of the head. However, no one can actually verify the incident actually occurred.
A lawyer accidentally killed himself by running through the plate-glass window of the 24th floor of his office building.
confirmed
At a run speed of 4.7 mph (7.52 km/h), a 160 lb (64 kg) subject was able to smash through a pressurized plate glass window. The incident was confirmed by a journalist to have actually occurred in Toronto.
I do not dispute the “confirmed” status of the lawyer through window myth. But, every time I have seen the footage of the Mythbusters test, it appears to me that the wooden base of the sliding rig contacted the window pane first. (Before the blue part on the top) This wood part of the rig has a different hardness than anything the lawyer would have been wearing. I would like to see the rig set up again in such a way that there was no possibility of the wood rig contacting the window pane.
October 7, 2007 at 2:38 PMCraig is totally correct, confirmed is busted, the base broke the glass..oops guys. I play racquetball and wiegh qbout 225 and have hit the glass very hard many a time. One guy at the club did break one once–it was a very big section of glass too.
October 30, 2007 at 11:54 PMPerson running through a plate glass window can do it and not be injured. I watched my brother run through a sliding patio glass door at a home construction site….not a scratch, this was in 1962 before safety glass requirements.
January 13, 2008 at 1:13 PMYou had one program where your people said that a radar could not cook food. Well having worked in the military as a radar maintance man I can tell you that yes indeed you can cook food with a radar system. Well if your people actually used a high powered radar system rather a small unit like radar for an airport. I worked on a fps60 would produce 8 mega watts and the idiots placed a frozen duck in a plastic bag in front of the wave guide horn and it was cooked to well done at half power in 20 min’s. They tried to get me to clean off the duck fat off the radar and I refused. They cooked it they had to clean it. This was one of the dummer stunts one guy almost fell off the the radar support arm.
August 7, 2008 at 6:45 PMThats it.
ok left a can of peper spray in my truck while gone for a week 7-19-08 to 7-27-08 an dit exploded, temps outside the car hit 105 and higher so to say it cannot happend is a lie
August 9, 2008 at 1:30 AMOkay, just saw the ep on the obese person on the vacuum toilet and must say that you missed an important bit of data.
You see, my father was a mechanic for UAL at the time (early 60’s) this acutally occurred. The lady in question was obese, the toilet was on an electra-jet and the mechanics were (more or less) sworn to secrecy about the entire episode. They managed to break the suction by inserting a straw between her thighs and she was given free first-class tickets for life.
I think you were using modern airplane toilets, but what you need is a toilet from an electra-jet to get a reliable check on this myth.
October 19, 2008 at 12:22 PMI’m glad to see they marked the biscuit myth plausible. I spent my high school years in a rough neighborhood; I saw people get shot on my front lawn. When I pitched an expired can of Pillsbury biscuits into the trash and turned back to do dishes, the can of refridgerated biscuit dough burst, and more than one of the biscuits hit me in the back. With the noise and the impact, I wondered for a few (very long) seconds if I had been shot. To this day, I shake like a leaf when trying to open these stupid cans, dreading the popping noise they’ll make.
November 29, 2008 at 4:15 PM