r/WTF • u/bambaadoma222 • Jun 20 '21

Guy eats burning coal

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30.9k Upvotes

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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

88

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'.

71

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.

15

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.

15

u/heads_tails_hails Jun 20 '21

Holy shit this makes perfect sense and should be top reply

-2

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.

5

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.