How-To: Get Emergency Light from a Pencil
Why carry an flashlight in your emergency car kit, when you have a pencil and some speaker wire? If you haven’t already caught this how-to floating around the ‘net, check it out. It’ll show you how to convert common graphite pencil lead into up to twenty minutes of light.
Cute hack, but not terribly practical IMO. You can only work one-handed now, otherwise you’ll burn something or short out the battery (ooh pretty sparks and burning wire!)
I would think that if you HAVE a working car battery and wire, you can probably find something more practical, like say oh a light bulb! just twist one out of a socket and you’re good to go, because if you have enough light to actually split a pencil, then you have enough light to find a bulb….dont you think?
I agree that it’s somewhere between silly and moronic to use a pencil lead in this situation, when you can probably get your hands on a perfectly good interior-light bulb without even unbuckling your seat belt :-).
Speaker wire will also get hot if it’s feeding a white-hot normal-thickness pencil lead.
I think this is also less likely to work for long with common hard pencils, since they have a higher ratio of clay to graphite in their leads.
I’ve only ever made about ten glowing pencils in my life so far, though (plus a larger number of propelling-pencil leads…), so I can’t say I’ve done an exhaustive survey :-).
it a great demostration of what you can do in a pinch. good reference.
this method is used in a large scale for melting steel and other metals.
great idea and use on a small scale.
thanks
well I just carry a 9 volt battery and steel wool. Short the steel wool on the battery and then i put it in the fuel cell then there is all kinds of light.