Testing the Gunpowder "Proof" Legend

this episode of the modern rogue brought to you by raycon head on over to byracon.com rogue spell it right r-o-g-u-e and get 15 off your first order of earbuds oh what did you think they were whatever it was uh well you probably thought they were earbuds they're pretty clear about that okay i'm certainly going to mangle this but i remember the legend is something about gunpowder being mixed with alcohol and then you light it and if it lights on fire that is proof that's where the word proof comes from for alcohol listen you can set anything on fire if you really believe in yourself see this guy gets it but the saying is liquor than beer never fear beer gunpowder eat your nothing is louder you're now clam chowder was yours is better similar to when we tried to figure out whether or not booze lights on fire the way it does in the movies and this is booze that is meant to be consumed by humans theoretically oh oh it is burning that's the diabolical thing put your hand put your hand over it yeah this is why professional fire eaters don't use alcohol is number one it burns when it's not supposed to burn number two you can't even see the freaking flame i guess we're gonna walk through the legend of adding gunpowder to alcohol now we don't have actual gunpowder we have black powder what's the difference black powder is what they used to use in firearms it is primarily sulfur charcoal and potassium nitrate the bad thing about the traditional black powder is that it got really smoky which is bad when you're shooting a gun and trying to aim and so forth also when you're doing an episode of the modern room that's right so now the powder that they use in firearms and stuff like that is largely as i understand it could be wrong based on nitrocellulose and nitroglycerin way less smoke fancy 20th century talk is what i'm here and let's get back to the good old days now in the 15th century sailors in the british navy they were given rations of rum there are a number of different reasons why sailors and pirates of that era actually would mix the rum with the gunpowder my favorite is that blackbeard was in a tavern and he mixed gunpowder in with the rum and lit it and then drank it just to show off right he was the first animated gif of a flaming shot fail he was the first blue beard okay i suppose if we're gonna test this legend we got four different varieties of alcohol experience we got water we got black powder and we've got a lot of balls to try this without knowing what we're doing well first let's just try some black powder okay let's get the flamey things away so this will be our default first test and we want to keep the same amount of black powder every time right yeah we're actually going to measure something yeah what i don't know what's happened to us this is one teaspoon of black powder yep do you want to be the light men i do okay hold on let me be the fire extinguishing man okay naked black powder take one that's great so that's dry powder i guess that's why they say keep your powder dry yeah one of the other theories was that if your powder had gotten wet the water would possibly dissolve the potassium nitrate in your black powder and it wouldn't ignite so that sounds like another legend to test that's right same amount one teaspoon of black powder and i guess one teaspoon should i just wing it or should we you should probably just wing it i doubt they were that specific about it on a pirate ship put water on black powder there we go yeah just mix that around there so yeah if you put your rum in with your black powder and the black powder lit then that black powder was fine was proof yeah oh see now it's all spread around [Applause] kinda not really okay so you're heating up the foil which is drying up the water what if we tried soaking up this water do we have a sponge so even if your stuff has gotten wet let's try to leech out the water but obviously we're getting some of the black goo yeah let's try like a high-end test okay do your darndest to try to make as much of an explosion as you can yeah i don't think anything's gonna happen yeah [Music] i mean you're melting the foil before we actually get anything there nothing to it i wonder one more test with the water again we know what a a single teaspoon looks like what do you want to do just a little bit of water like we're just barely ruining it right because we've been putting it in this big thing what if instead we did this and then we just put a little bit of water right on top to see whether or not that's enough to ruin it okay now we're getting a little more science adjacent so we're taking one teaspoon and 20 ml is that 20 milliliters yeah i don't even know if i'm gonna do all of it yeah i wouldn't uh about ten about ten yeah okay that's probably good take a stick and we can mix that this is how scientists do it right so you could tell it really doesn't want to mix it looks almost like it's a bit hydrophobic and it's not until you get that capillary action there we go now you can kind of see in looking like black sludge like from the x-files i'm gonna guess that only the dry parts are gonna do anything i think you're right okay ready going keep going see what you can do yeah that's it man that's conclusive yeah water is not booze good episode yeah woo cause i'm a modern rogue yeah okay what's the next they didn't roll credits i guess we're still going we got to keep going now the prevailing theory wasn't that they were trying to test the efficacy of the black powder and if it was still good they were trying to test how much alcohol was in the rub right obviously if it reacted like that which is to say not much at all then it was mostly water like i would imagine beer would be roughly the same right exactly yeah merchants in order to avoid the taxes that came with higher alcohol content beverages would water it down sometimes they would put molasses in the rum or sugar or something like that so they would have to pay less tax on it and so the sailors and the pirates would get screwed by getting watered down sludge when they wanted the prime stuff they should really stick it to the man like become pirate there you go first on the docket we have artisanal rum plantation original dark allegedly 80 proof 40 alcohol by volume 80 proof because abv times 2 is a rough approximation of the proof yeah i'll go ahead and i'll put 20 milliliters here i suspect we'll only use 10 again and one teaspoon of the black powder okay going back to our setting fire to things if this gets warm enough it will burst into flame right as we pointed out take a match drop it in 40 proof and get nothing it's only when it's warmed up that it surpasses that flash point and actually ignites right so in this case in theories same thing should happen but maybe there's enough water i'm gonna let it soak okay what we don't want is it just dribbling all over the place right man this is starting to feel like science what's happening i know we're being patient in the whole nine yards okay i'm gonna say that's saturated right definitely yeah okay so a little over 10 ml i'm gonna move the molotov cocktail away we saw something happen with water so i assume something is gonna happen this time but we know what naked powder looks like yeah i don't think it's gonna be anything close to that okay ready ready holy cow yeah yeah just let it burn so at this point we've warmed it up it's past the flash point that's clearly the alcoholic vapor is burning yeah give it a high heat and see if we're able to ignite the it's just caramelizing it wow oh it almost you almost got somewhere keep on going see what happens we're going to melt the oil it'll melt the foil first yeah look at that the foil is red hot but i would i would say that that okay so we finally got there we finally got there wow i didn't expect that i didn't expect we would get there at all but eventually the heat i suppose much like the alcohol itself at some point you burn off all the water and then it poofs yeah yeah and i guess it gets the remaining uh potassium nitrate sulfur charcoal so i would say on the low end definitely did not ignite at the high end it did not ignite at the extremely high end eventually we got something to happen drastic difference between that and just raw powder obviously more pizzazz than water yeah you ready for step two yeah step two oh captain my captain i bring to you captain morgan what do we got on captain morgan 100 proof that'll be 50 so only a small step up from what we just did yeah so we like the idea of just doing just enough to saturate it right yeah i like that that's good so what do you think is going to happen on this one i think we're going to see a sliding scale i think that this is one of the few times that our intuitive understanding is pretty much on the nose i think the higher the proof the faster we get to that big flash how sciency you want to be adjacent should i put more in or stick to what we did what we did okay so this one we had nothing at zero we had nothing i don't know 10 it was like around 25 that we finally combusted oh you know what we did notice that the foil started to melt so i'm going to say that it's going to be the same thing the foil will start to melt before this thing actually poofs okay do you think it's going to go faster i do but okay luckily we'll be able to time it and find out okay so again that's the alcohol burning yep and you can see it evaporating go ahead and give it the high heat oh you can see it trying oh that was a weird one yeah that's a really weird one slow did not see that coming i wonder if that had something to do with the sugars that are in the captain morgan oh it did look a little bit like one of the sugar bombs that we made oh my god it's happening it's going to explode yes holy sh okay holy sh i didn't expect that holy [ __ ] just a guess yeah i could be wrong we don't know whether or not it's reacting with the aluminum foil or what also there's there had to be some difference in the amount of time that you were holding that on there from one to the other that's science talk yeah next up all right captain now we're into the real work here what you got 151 proof overproof diamond reserve rum still rum 150 that's 75 alcohol i'm gonna guess that we're gonna get very close to that yeah because now i assume that we're over that limit where it's like yeah i'll go have my gold doubloons i want this yeah because obviously at some point it works right yeah i think uh we're gonna get pretty close to the immediate flash yeah all right let's see 20 milliliters of 151 take this over by the way i always feel obligated as the author of the professional's guide to fire reading every horror story i've ever heard of anyone who burned up their face doing the fire blast always is using something with too low of a flash point they're always using 151 or bacardi yeah [Music] that's pretty well saturated right i think so i have a slight swerve to offer you we know that that map gas is a lot of heat and fast do you think we should try a pirate style and see if it goes with just set down a match on there we've got plenty of supplies i think that's a great idea okay [Music] okay so the flame is burning it's burning the alcohol this is the test we originally proposed it's got to be heating up past that that black powder flash point huh i just grabbed the map gas even that took a lot longer than i expected yeah a long sustained i thought it would have done a whole flashpot thing huh interesting there's only one stop left on this train well let's take it all right captain all the way to rocket fuel straight up ever clear 190 proof what 95 pure distilled ethanol yeah we've eventually gotten everything to burn now they didn't have map gas back in the day right i do think this one should work there's barely any water in there at this point there's very little to mess up the black powder it's almost pure ethanol that's saturated that's gotta go we'll try it twice we'll try once with a match i really want to believe it can make it happen oh there it is come on do the thing oh you can see it burning off all the fuel it's gotta be getting warm enough come on me hearties come on you bright ball of gas light my darkest hour yes it is now that is proof one more time with the map gas yes just so we can see we'll do one saturated one not go fact we'll connect the two with a line of black powder why not fancy sort of give me one teaspoon here there you go all right one teaspoon here yep and then now one miami rail from here to here let me get a credit card you know who's cool people who use their aaa card to form a rail a black powder on the internet which side should go first i assume the first side should be the clean side are we using any everclear at all on here yes what i figure we'll do dry powder which we already know makes a big foof yep and it should foof its way on down and then hopefully take a little bit longer and then proof gotcha if we are correct there will be a substantial difference you'll be able to tell the difference between this and this so it looks like the everclear has made it i'll add a little bit more until it's made it about halfway okay god this feels almost like science right all right it's now saturated to two-thirds i say go man [Music] [Music] yes yes dude exactly exactly science the legend is tested [Music] proof did you hire a guy to make it do that right when you said that the only reason i can imagine that you haven't heard of raycons by now is because you're living under a rock in which case i sincerely apologize it sounds like you've fallen on some very difficult times however that makes it more important than ever that you know the good word of rakons they're top quality earbuds that won't break the bank deep rich bass incredible sounds and they've got six hours of power extra bass and they come in a variety of colors and patterns supported by musicians from melissa etheridge to snoop dogg everybody's wearing raycons including me oh did you not even see them that's how low profile they are head on over to buyracon.comrogue that's r-o-g-u-e make sure you spell it right get 15 off your first purchase make us look good and you get some quality sounds in your ear face is that a thing it is now ear facing offer and link in the description below yeah so you light it yeah i gotcha in fact actually should we do like a trail of a little bit of a trail oh that seems dangerous yeah that doesn't mean we shouldn't do it i'm just gonna toss it in there yeah throwing things that seems more dangerous okay yeah yeah

Channel: The Modern Rogue

Views: 162,327

Keywords: modern rogue, brian brushwood, jason murphy

Id: x2zDReAHIJU

Length: 17min 12sec (1032 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 03 2021