Click Here to see the latest posts! Ask any questions related to business / entrepreneurship / money-making / life NO BLATANT ADS PLEASE
Stay up to date! Get email notifications or |
|
|
Thread Tools | Search this Thread | Display Modes |
#1
|
|||
|
|||
FREE PUBLICITY ! ! ! These Folks Sure KNOW How To Get FREE Publicity !
Gordon, Dien, and All,
Going through some old files looking for recipes, I came upon this old email. Copy below. I tried several links, and they STILL are O.K. A thunder storm forced me to shut down early. Be SURE TO CHECK THE PURDUE URL AT THE END of all this. Lots of interesting links. ENJOY. Mary P.S. I found a recipe for Maple Wine and Honey Wine. I haven't tried to make either, but if anyone is interested, I could send you the recipes. Mary ------------------- The URL is authentic, but you must wait for the bottom of the page to come through before you can access either the picture or the video... | ----------------------------- | Our subject today is lighting charcoal grills. One of | our favorite charcoal grill lighters is a guy named | George Goble, a computer person in the Purdue University | engineering department. | | Each year, Goble and a bunch of other engineers hold a | picnic in West Lafayette, Indiana, at which they cook | hamburgers on a big grill. Being engineers, they began | looking for practical ways to speed up the | charcoal-lighting process. | | "We started by blowing the charcoal with a hair dryer," | Goble told me in a telephone interview. "Then we | figured out that it would light faster if we used a | vacuum cleaner." | | If you know anything about (1) engineers and (2) guys in | general, you know what happened: The purpose of the | charcoal-lighting shifted from cooking hamburgers to | seeing how fast they could light the charcoal. | | >From the vacuum cleaner, they escalated to using a | propane torch, then an acetylene torch. Then Goble | started using compressed pure oxygen, which caused the | charcoal to burn much faster, because as you recall from | chemistry class, fire is essentially the rapid | combination of oxygen with a reducing agent (the | charcoal). We discovered that a long time ago, | somewhere in the valley between the Tigris and Euphrates | rivers (or something along those lines). | | By this point, Goble was getting pretty good times. But | in the world of competitive charcoal-lighting, "pretty | good" does not cut the mustard. | | Thus, Goble hit upon the idea of using --- get ready --- | liquid oxygen. This is oxygen. In terms of releasing | energy, pouring liquid oxygen on charcoal is the | equivalent of throwing a live squirrel into a room | containing 50 million Labrador retrievers. | | On Goble's World Wide Web page (the address is | http://ghg.ecn.purdue.edu/), you can see actual | photographs and a video of Goble using a bucket attached | to a 10-foot-long wooden handle to dump 3 gallons of | liquid oxygen (not sold in stores) onto a grill | containing 60 pounds of charcoal and a lit cigarette for | ignition. | | What follows is the most impressive charcoal-lighting I | have ever seen, featuring a large fireball that | according to Goble, reached 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. | The charcoal was ready for cooking in --- this has to be | a world record --- 3 seconds. | | There's also a photo of what happened when Goble used | the same technique on a flimsy $2.88 discount-store | grill. All that's left is a circle of charcoal with a | few shreds of metal in it. "Basically, the grill | vaporized," said Goble. "We were thinking of returning | it to the store for a refund." | | Looking at Goble's video and photos, I became, as an | American, all choked up with gratitude at the fact that | I do not live anywhere near the engineers' picnic site. | But also, I was proud of my country for producing guys | who can be ready to barbecue in less time than it take | for guys in less-advanced nations, such as France, to | spit. | | Will the 3-second barrier ever be broken? Will | engineers come up with a new, more powerful | charcoal-lighting technology? It's something or all of | us to ponder this summer as we sit outside, chewing our | hamburgers, every now and then glancing in the direction | of West Lafayette, Indiana, looking for a mushroom | cloud. | | Do _not_ miss the web site at | | http://ghg.ecn.purdue.edu/ |
Thread Tools | Search this Thread |
Display Modes | |
|
|
Other recent posts on the forum...
Get the report on Harvey Brody's Answers to a Question-Oriented-Person