Now, stick your fingers in a 220V outlet and see what happens. DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME!!!!!! It is only to be done by professionals.....!
Incredibly this happened to me about 20yrs ago.I had a thinner type 18K bracelet around my wrist and it made contact with the positive terminal and the battery box and it gave me a nasty burn...It was bizarre as I could feel a burning sensation but it took a few seconds to realise what had happened.I had a light scar for many years but it has since faded
Definitely dropping it on one's head from several feet above can do it I have only enough medical background to merely speculate ---- perhaps one of our several Physician-members will fill in the details for us??? ---- but, there are any number of a variety of physical conditions (ailments and disabilities) which can be vulnerable (even mortally) to even mild electrical exposure. If this particular person had such a condition pre-existing.....death could be a possibility.....though rather unlikely statistically.
A car battery will produce more than enough amps to kill you. I've melted a screwdriver by accidentally shorting the hot lead of a battery to the chassis. (Lesson learned: disconnect ground first, connect ground last.) The issue is Ohm's Law: V=I*R. (Or I = V/R) The human body is a poor enough conductor that 12 volts typically won't drive enough amps through it. And the human body isn't one uniform material. When in contact with electrical leads, most current will pass along the skin, and even with enough current to burn your skin, you might not reach a critical current through deeper tissues. It only takes a few milliamps across the heart to kill you, but it's hard to get that current there from outside. But the human body is also a variable material, when combined with other materials. Accidental electrocution does happen, from time to time. So it pays to be careful with electricity. Of course, there are other ways a car battery can harm you. A car battery under charge -- from a charger, from the alternator, or from jumper cables -- releases hydrogen. Hydrogen flash fires is a fairly common cause of injury when using jumper cables, due to the high risk of producing a spark near a charging, deeply depleted battery. (Recommended practice: connect ground lead last, disconnect first -- and connect the ground lead to the chassis, away from the battery.) Lead-acid car batteries are made of health issue materials -- lead dioxide and sulfuric acid. ("Johnny was a little boy - but Johnny is no more - For what he thought was H2O - was H2SO4.") And, for somebody in poor shape, even the strain of trying to lift a car battery at arm's length can be a sudden cardio stress. The news story is incomplete. If he was found with "just a car battery and jumper cables", then what was he jumping the car battery *to*?
How far did the battery fall from? Seriously it's the amps that kill you. I get shocks all the time off house current while replacing receptacles and switches. Two days ago I got a shock while fixing the fog light on my truck. It burned my finger and hurt way worse than any house shock well except that time I got nailed with 220. I was laying on a freshly mopped floor unplugging a stove. Yeah that one hurt. Most spectacular shock I have ever seen someone get and live was a guy who touched a 400amp buss bar with a screwdriver. It set his hair on fire. LOL now but at the time I was ****ting in my pants. I took him to the ER. When working on electricity never have unneeded tools in your hands! It's way to easy to drop them into a disaster.
Ways a car battery can kill you: 1. Your mirthful son thinks it would be funny to drop a car battery off a second floor roof on your head. 2. You connect the red terminal last holding you face over the battery in a cloud of hydrogen gas; ensuing explosion causes pulmonary burns, edema in the lungs and what was once called "DaNang lung". 3. You place the battery on the floor of your garage during a battery exchange, trip over it and not only spill your Coors Lite but break your neck in the process. 4. You take your battery to Pep Boys for an exchange, and veer into oncoming traffic due to an alcoholic on a moped making a sudden dash into your lane. 5. Your battery makes a small arc that ignites the cloud of gasoline vapors that a constantly drifting out of a set of juicy Webers. Up in flames , you in your stuck seatbelt and your Ferrari.
Pure urban legend! Ferraris with Webers have the battery at the opposite end of the car from the hydrocarbon sprayers!
Well, I survived... "A word of warning..." (a.k.a. "NeuroBeaker's Electrical Adventure") ...as did the car, after extensive repairs. Come to think of it, that might have been my very first post on FerrariChat. Edit: Actually... 6th post. All the best, Andrew.
Did this happen at a Renaissance Fair? Was he wearing a suit of armor or chain mail while working on the car? Inquisitive minds want to know these things.
I've heard of one incident that at least seemed plausible. When I was in high school, I was told that during the 70's the physics teachers used car batteries for the electric circuit labs. During these labs, students would attach alligator clips to the battery posts and make simple circuits with resistors, capacitors, etc and take reading with multimeters. According to my teacher at the time, they had to switch to power supplies instead of batteries when a student tried to pick up one of the batteries by the terminals. The alligator clips had created burs in the posts, which pricked his thumbs, sent a shock through his arms, and interrupted the rhythm of his heart. As others have said, a car battery has more than enough Power to kill you. If you think of it in simple terms of force, if it has enough power to turn over an engine, it certainly has enough power to stop your heart muscle, nearly that of circuit in your home: Home outlet in US: 110V x 15A = 1,650W* Car battery: 12V x 85A = 1,020W The tricky part is getting that much power to a part of your body that could kill you. Electric current will generally only travel across the surface of an object unless there is enough voltage for it to overcome the resistance of an object and arc/pass through it. You could certainly be burned by a car battery, but to be killed by it, you'd probably need to create a circuit with your bloodstream somehow.. or have it fall on your head (which is also plausible if you have ever tried to wrestle a battery into the back of a 348). * Yes, yes, I know that's A/C.
Good day All, Indeed, what DSG is saying is true. To be more precise it is the current density that can cause the heart to go in fibrillation (abnormal heart rhythm causing heart pumping function to diminish dramatically). Dry outer skin tissue has high resistance on most people and so the actual current density sub surface is very, very small (your outer skin is what saves you). Secondly, the current path is almost a factor for heart issues. Thirdly, the shock and timing have to be such that it causes abnormal heart rhythms (fibrillation)... which can only be stopped if the heart is stopped momentarily (which also stops the fibrillation). That being said, microamps of current sub-surface can cause the heart to go into fibrillation. In the operating rooms a lot of electrical precautions are taken to prevent errant current paths from occurring...even a static electrical discharge across an exposed heart wall can cause issues! In fact, there was one case I will always remember, as I was gowned up and was an OR observer in my early Biomed Engineering days, where the Surgeon actually induced a fibrillation (on purpose) in order to ensure that the newly installed defib pacemaker was working correctly. When the pacemaker stopped the heart (to stop the fibrillation) I almost crapped when the patient (fully under a General Anaesthesia) almost jumped off the table when his heart restarted...I was the one that was shocked (please forgive the pun) The moral of the story... Treat electricity with respect and do not always assume that getting a shock is without consequence. There could be one time where your skin resistance is low, the current path is just right, the current density just high enough, and the shock occurs at the right heart interval, where you could cause your heart to go into fibrillation... Cheers, Sam
Anyone find that news story link??? The last electrical fatal I had to deal with was 15,000 volts AC...........it went down the boom of a concrete pump, to where a crew was standing on rebar......
It's not voltage that kills you... its the amps. There's plenty of them in a car battery. I have a few screwdrivers and ratchet handles that are proof of that. But you are right, one in a million - but there are enough of us on the planet that even at those odds there are a few more destined for this stupid death... Darwin award candidates. Rick
There are (2) ways a human can succumb to electricity ---- 1) The voltage (or) current disrupts the normal bio-electric systems of the heart or the CNS (central nervous system) ---- there are many folks out there who were victims of lightning strikes who did not die, did not have a cardiac event, and did not even suffer any serious burns ---- but, they did end up with permanent and profound dysfunction in brain / CNS activity (i.e., they literally got their brains / nervous systems "scrambled"). 2) The power (power = voltage x current) that passes through their body was high enough to literally "cook" various tissue structures (and not limited to just the skin). The power generated across a resistance (such as the human body) is equal to the (current^2 x resistance) and this power is dissipated as heat, which often is high enough to critically burn , even "melt", tissue and essentially "boil" body fluids (blood, lymph, serous, cerebral-spinal, etc.).
It was a sad day......right in the middle of my Cheese Enchilada Dinner too..... There was a whole crew in the pour zone, it could have been worse. The concrete pump operator was also thrown clear of the shock front.
I remembered this story from Darwinawards dot com http://darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1999-50.html A US Navy safety publication describes injuries incurred while doing don't's. One page described the fate of a sailor playing with a multimeter in an unauthorized manner. He was curious about the resistance level of the human body. He had a Simpson 260 multimeter, a small unit powered by a 9-volt battery. That may not seem powerful enough to be dangerous but it can be deadly in the wrong hands. The sailor took a probe in each hand to measure his bodily resistance from thumb to thumb. But the probes had sharp tips, and in his excitement he pressed his thumbs hard enough against the probes to break the skin. Once the salty conducting fluid known as blood was available, the current from the multimeter travelled right across the sailor's heart, disrupting the electrical regulation of his heartbeat. He died before he could record his Ohms. The lesson? The Navy issues very few objects which are designed to be stuck into the human body. August 2000 Dan Wilson elaborates: I'm a former Navy petty officer, enlisted for six years as an electrician aboard a US Submarine. I got a lot of training. This story was used frequently during my training in the US Navy as an example of what can happen when procedures and safety measures are not followed. I considered the story an urban legend until I found the incident report referenced in the official Navy electrical safety guidelines. I now know it is true. The actual event is slightly different than described above, and even more deserving of a Darwin award. This sailor stuck the sharpened ends of the probes through his thumbs intentionally. You see, he had just taken a course that taught a critical concept called "internal resistance." Internal resistance is resistance to electrical power flow that exists inside any power source. It causes the terminal voltage to drop when load (current) increases. You can demonstrate this concept, if you're careful, by monitoring your car battery's terminal voltage, while someone starts up the engine. The reading will be ~13 volts while the engine is off, but during the period where the starter is cranking it will drop to 8-9 volts. The voltage drop is due to the internal resistance of the battery. This sailor, like all other electricians in training, had already been through a safety class in which one of the excercises is to measure your body's resistance by simply holding the probes between your fingertips. (Most people read 500Kohms to 2Mohms.) Evidently, adding information from the internal resistance class, this sailor wanted to determine his own body's "internal resistance.". So he intentionally pushed the sharpened probe tips through the skin to elimate the rather high skin resistance and get only the "internal resistance". This, of course, caused his death. How, you might ask, with only a 9V battery? Easy. One of the "rules of thumb" that the Navy teaches is the 1-10-100 rule of current. This rule states that 1mA of current through the human body can be felt, 10mA of current is sufficient to make muscles contract to the point where you cannot let go of a power source, and 100mA is sufficient to stop the heart. Let's look at Ohm's law. Ohm's law (for DC systems - I will not discuss AC here) is written as E=IR, where E is voltage in volts, I is current in Amps, and R is resistance in Ohms. When we did the experiment in the electrical safety class to determine our body's resistance, we found a resistance of 500K Ohms. Using 9V and 500K Ohms in the equation, we come up with a current of 18 microAmps, below the "feel" threshold of 1mA. However, removing the insulation of skin from our curious sailor here, the resistance through the very good conducting electrolytes of the body is sharply lower. Around 100 ohms, in fact, resulting in a current of 90mA - sufficient to stop our sailor's heart and kill him. As my electrical safety instructor said, "The reason we now have to teach the electrical safety course to all electricians at least twice per year is because some joe was bright enough to be the one person in the world who could figure out how to kill himself with a 9V battery."
