Withstanding a million volts
View(s):The human body wasn’t designed to withstand being battered by a million volts of electricity but magician David Blaine knows a specially designed suit will help him survive it. He’s less certain that he’ll be able to stay awake in his three day stunt which began on Friday, or keep his balance atop his 20foot pillar or even resist the urge to scratch his face if he begins to hallucinate.
“I don’t think I’ll ever, ever top this,” he told journalists at a press conference announcing his latest stunt: ‘Electrified: One Million Volts Always On.’
David Blaine offers a glimpse of what’s in store for his stunt. AFP
It says a lot when the man we’re talking about has been spotted hanging without a net high over New York’s Central Park for 60 hours, has held his breath underwater for 17 minutes and 4 seconds, was buried alive for a week in a see-through coffin and was encased in a block of ice for 63 hours. The suit that will allow Blaine to pull off his latest stunt is an adaptation of a clever idea that’s been around for a while: the steel chain-mail body suit which includes chain-mail socks and a wire helmet is named the Faraday suit after Michael Faraday, the 19th-century pioneer in electricity.
It will allow the electricity to “dance across his body” without actually making contact. Perched on top of a 20-foot column, Blaine is surrounded by seven metallic orbs called tesla coils that will stream the electricity. Putting himself in the hands of his public – as part of the free spectacle, his sponsor Intel has provided Ultrabook laptops that run controls for the Tesla coils. These will be around not only at the Manhattan site but in Beijing, London, Sydney and Tokyo as well. For the first time, the performance is being streamed live online at www.youtube.com/electrified. Blaine’s team has been working out all eventualities. The magician is taking every precaution. If he does electrocute himself, the team will quickly cut power and he’s expected to survive. He’ll be tethered so that if he collapses or is thrown by an electric shock he won’t fall off the column. A ventilation system has been put in place to cope with the potentially harmful ozone and nitrogen dioxide created when electricity ionizes air.
Blaine’s doctor for the project, Stuart Weiss, said the main concerns were making sure the metal suit remains intact, protecting Blaine’s eyes, and checking his mental condition. “Nobody’s ever been in the middle of a lightning storm for 72 hours, so it’s hard to predict what’s going to happen,” Paul Hoffman, the president of the Liberty Science Centre told journalists. Physicists approached by the press have returned the unanimous verdict that Blaine’s Faraday suit is actually quite safe.
Blaine’s has chosen to make much of the voltage of the electrodes he’ll be standing between – but it’s the amperage of the current that is actually the key factor according to John Belcher, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Belcher told Life’s Little Mysteries that the amount of current coursing through an electric field (measured in amperes, or amps) combined with the resistance possessed by the materials Blaine is wearing is what will decide his chances of being electrocuted. “I would have no fear of having 1 million volts between my head and the soles of my shoes as long as I made sure my shoes had a really, really high resistance,” said Belcher.
Blaine himself seems to enjoy inspiring all the discussion about science. For him, the thrill of the stunt is not just about the endurance he must muster, but “it’s also a kid who had a love for math, science, logic, magic, wonder – that’s my motivation.”
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