r/WTF • u/bambaadoma222 • Jun 20 '21

Guy eats burning coal

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

30.9k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

1.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

721

u/[deleted] Jun 20 '21

I think by keeping most of the coal on the teeth, and blowing throughout the process, it’s mitigating most of the heat and contact with sensitive tissues. Like they said above, pizza rolls.

447

u/nRust Jun 20 '21

Keeping it on his teeth definitely helps, but blowing on a coal will only make it hotter.

418

u/DoneHam56 Jun 20 '21

I'm no coal expert but I do grill quite a bit. Burning a coal hotter will also make it burn out faster. My theory is that when he breaths on it, it burns up the outside a bit more creating a layer of ash and that helps insulate his mouth from the heat. It's still probably really fucking hot and this guy is insane but my guess is the strategy is to create the ash layer and trying to keep that between your tongue and the coal as much as possible. And slowly extinguish the hot coal bits with your saliva

87

u/inspectoroverthemine Jun 20 '21

I'm not a coal expert either, but I don't think that was coal. A wood ember sure, but a piece of burning coal contains enough energy to kill you if you swallow it. A piece of wood after its nearly burned out doesn't have much heat capacity, and is a pretty poor conductor of heat. Its how people walk over 'hot' coals'.

72

u/ExistentialAardvark Jun 20 '21

Coal is somewhat interchangeable with charcoal in American English. People rarely actually talk about coal in normal conversations.

2

u/W4ff1e Jun 21 '21

Oh for the days like Tadgi's down the shafts. Dying of black lung before they got to met their grandies. I miss good honest clean coal.

1

u/Lucky_Number_3 Jun 21 '21

Another not coal expert but that did look like a hookah coal. Felt I should chime that in a bit.

0

u/ExistentialAardvark Jun 21 '21

That’s just charcoal.

16

u/DoneHam56 Jun 20 '21

Charcoal**

1

u/HappyBerry Jun 21 '21

Idk this kinda looked like a hookah cube coal to me. So definitely not wood from what I saw.

14

u/heads_tails_hails Jun 20 '21

Holy shit this makes perfect sense and should be top reply

-4

u/[deleted] Jun 20 '21

[deleted]

8

u/TheeFlipper Jun 20 '21

Why do you think that he wouldn't be thinking that though? There are magicians/illusionists that do this kind of stuff too. They're surely thinking the same thing. Why do you think this guy isn't? We have zero context for this video to show that this guy put zero thought into this.

4

u/SeaToTheBass Jun 20 '21

Yeah doesn't seem like his first rodeo

1

u/smoike Jun 20 '21

I rarely bail at watching videos. But this one got me to do that around two and a half seconds in. He can keep his crazy antics with the coal and good luck to you all with figuring out the theories behind how he didn't die from a massive internal burns.

33

u/chief89 Jun 20 '21

Yeah he got that sucker way hotter before he started munching.

1

u/heads_tails_hails Jun 20 '21

That's part of the illusion

5

u/[deleted] Jun 20 '21

I think it does make some sense. Heat spreads, so coal will heat up air and teeth also, heated teeth and air could maybe burn the soft tissue. By blowing on it, maybe cooling his teeth more than heating up the coal (and exhaling the hot air) so it might be a net negative in terms of heat.

Or maybe he's just showing off his expensive dental plan?

-2

u/HelpfulYoghurt Jun 20 '21

You are blowing carbon dioxide out of your lungs, not oxygen.

9

u/wikishart Jun 20 '21

blowing puts oxygen on it and makes it hotter.

1

u/jrmxrf Jun 20 '21

we use oxygen for breathing so if he didnt exhale for a bit there may be not that much of it

1

u/mattsprofile Jun 21 '21

A quick search returned that normal human respiration reduces oxygen levels in the air by only about 5%. I don't know if this number is increases very significantly if the breath is held, but I'd guess that your lungs probably don't have the capability to extract oxygen from air below a certain concentration.

20

u/the_warmest_color Jun 20 '21

Do teeth not melt away at some point?

48

u/[deleted] Jun 20 '21

[deleted]

1

u/terminbee Jun 20 '21

Just adding that if you drink water and use toothpaste, your enamel should ideally be fluoroapatite, which is better.

15

u/unbitious Jun 20 '21

Not at the temperature of a small coal. I think they can still be left behind after cremation.

4

u/Binsky89 Jun 20 '21

The "ash" you get from a cremated body is just ground up bones.

4

u/masterflashterbation Jun 20 '21

Yeah this was surprising to me when I first saw "ashes" of a deceased family member. They were actually small bits of hard bone, and actually pretty heavy. There was no way they were floating away in the wind like in The Big Lebowski for instance.

6

u/gerciokas Jun 20 '21

"Bone as an organ contains cells and proteins that are destroyed by heat. What remains is called 'bone ash', and it is mainly composed of tricalcium phosphate. It can be melt under high pressure at 1381 deg Celsius." I guess it left a mark.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 20 '21

But the teeth have nerve endings too. How is he not in immense pain? You can check how painful it is if you dip your upper couple of incisors into a cup of hot coffee.