"May help" reads as though they're making it up on the spot
"might clean your chimney or something idk lol"
113"Idk lol" one of my favorite laissez faire responses of all time, especially after some heinous shirlt like burning batteries. "It hasn't been reported to hurt anyone yet but idk lol"
60How would they have known, really? This was a real tip in the very early 1900s iirc, and back then everything gave you cancer or rotted one or more of your organs. We put asbestos, lead, and radium in literally everything.
It’s kind of a wonder that within 100 years, we managed to identify what things caused which cancer. Like at the time, your jaw would start rotting off and, looking for a cause, you could gesture broadly at everything.
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Styropyro has several videos on this kind of "tips" from way back, he found in a compilation book from that period, filled with tips and tricks like this.
This is nowhere near the wildest stuff in there and many of the tips in there scare even styropyro.
And if you know what he does on his youtube channel, you know that's a feat.
66Got a link?
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I like to entertain the kids with a good old fashioned battery fire. Sometimes we breakout the mercury for a little hands on fun!
57Obviously a bad idea but is there any truth to it?
29yeah the colors are pretty cool
82I can't imagine that the relatively tiny amount of zinc in a flashlight battery would have any affect on the soot from a fireplace. As for the colors, it will totally do that, although you can also buy the little packs they make to throw in campfires if you want to avoid giving yourself cancer.
50The first flashlight batteries were entirely zinc casings because it was the negative electrode.
They had a carbon rod (anode) and manganese oxide wrapper and were filled with ammonium chloride electrolyte.
Burning the ammonium chloride might have been the most dangerous part, not sure if that could release chlorine gas or not, but probably not with most fires.
Zinc fumes alone are pretty terrible to breath though. Welders can get sick for a couple days if they weld galvanized steel without cleaning it well. Supposedly drinking milk helps the symptoms, but I’ve avoided it so far.
10I don’t know much about batteries, but by a relatively tiny amount, are you talking about today’s batteries or those from 100+ years ago when this tip was published?
Those would have been D batteries, most likely. I also don’t know how much zinc was in those, how much zinc is too much to burn, or if the composition of batteries was the same then as now. Rather curious about all this. Also I was taught batteries can explode in fire – was that a myth? Any battery experts in the chat?
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now that i'm thinking about it: not zinc, but maybe manganese. if you add a little of ferrocene to diesel, it'll burn (ie on a wick) without soot. ferrocene here works as a source of small amounts of very fine iron oxide particles, which catalyze burning of soot. manganese could work like this, but this works only if you provide enough air in the first place
the fact that this also works for rocket fuels made ferrocene a highly watched substance in cold war (alternative is very fine iron oxide - but you need more of it. this is used in space shuttle solid fuel)
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