If you’ve got aaaaaall the stuff you need to start a fire with a lemon, you’ve already got matches, fer cripessake!
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A real survivor uses their body as the salt bridge.
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Yah, I kinda noticed that the wires he’s holding may or may not be connected to the lemon. There’s always a portion of both hidden by hand/sleeve.
And now we can’t bring lemons on planes.
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Paging cave johnson…
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Go to hardware store to buy copper brads, zinc nails and wire.
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Take money you would have spent on brads and nails, and buy a cheap disposable lighter.
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Use lighter to start fire.
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Well now, that procedure has way too many fiddly little steps in it. Instead of sorting through my survival toolbox for copper and zinc nails and bits of wire and steel wool, I’d just drive a potassium nail into the lemon. Pfft, there’s your fire, right there. You probably might want to wear goggles and do it under the fume hood, though.
Hey Shaddack, you got some potassium nails I can borrow?
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Add to carbonate compound. Funnel resulting carbon dioxide through turbine. Use turbine to strike a flint against a piece of iron cause spark. Introduce spark to black powder use burning black powder to light tinder. After that it’s up to you.
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Ah, alchemy…
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I enyoyed this!
That accent is totally fake.
In principle, it doesn’t work, since the plate area is unusually small, and no ‘depolarizer’ is used as with commercial batteries.
Max output for lemon/nails battery: about a milliamp. Typically less. It will dimly light a single LED. Can’t even light a flashlight bulb. Almost certainly won’t start fires (e.g. an alkaline 9V batt can supply TWENTY AMPERES when shorted, while this lemon batt puts out about 10,000x smaller current.) Scientist disclaimer: I could be wrong, since experiment always trounces theory. Need to actually try this.
However, Youtube is rife with hoaxes, and AMAZING FRUIT-BATTERY claims are a classic. Charge your iphone with an onion! Nope, hoax. Light a flashlight bulb with a lemon! Nope, needs over twenty lemons in series/parallel array, and that’s for a few-milliamps 1.5V pilot lamp type #48.
Start fires with a lemon? Don’t be surprised if it’s just another stupid hoax. They hide 9V batteries inside their setup, and prey on non-experts. When it comes to batteries, even most chemists and engineers are non-experts, and haven’t delved into short-circuit current-density issues of zinc-chemistry cells.
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The real question: HOW MANY LEMONS does it take to ignite steel wool?
Ten thousand lemon-cells should definitely work. But maybe fifty lemons is way too few. Gotta try it with a bench supply, find the minimum short-circuit current required.
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that’s likely the most flammable component of a lemon
I’ve seen lemons make some pretty inflammatory statements about minorities and certain larger citirus fruits.
Don’t be such a sourpuss.
Some people just want to watch the fruit burn.
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Anybody got a spare tank of O2?
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Make sure that your lemon is prepared for the ordeal.
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the lemons are often cached by other idiots, you need a lemon finder app. !
not to mention that if you’ve got large steel nails, you could presumably find some rocks and do the old “flint and steel” method of getting a spark…
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