Dave Barry

Nuclear Picnic        June 25, 1995

Today's culinary topic is:  how to light a charcoal fire.
Everybody loves a backyard barbecue.  For some reason, food just
seems to taste better when it has been cooked outdoors, where
flies can lay eggs on it.  But there's nothing worse than trying
to set fire to a pile of balky charcoal.

The average back-yard chef, wishing to cook hamburgers, tries to
ignite the charcoal via the squirt, light, and wait method,
wherein you squirt lighter fluid on a pile of briquettes, light
the pile, then wait until they have turned a uniform gray color.
When I say "they have turned a uniform gray color," I am
referring to the hamburgers.  The briquettes will remain as cold
and lifeless as Leonard Nimoy.  The backyard chef will keep this
up - squirting, lighting, waiting; squirting, lighting, waiting -
until the bacterial level in the side dishes has reached the
point where the potato salad rises up from its bowl, Bloblike,
and attempts to mate with the corn.  This is the signal that it's
time to order Chinese food.

The problem is that modern charcoal, manufactured under strict
consumer-safety guidelines, is one of the least-flammable
substances on Earth.  On more than one occasion, quick-thinking
individuals have extinguished a raging house fire by throwing
charcoal on it.  Your back- yard chef would be just as successful
trying to ignite a pile of rocks.

s there a solution?  Yes.  There happens to be a technique that
is guaranteed to get your charcoal burning very, very quickly,
although you should not attempt this technique unless you meet
the following criterion:  You are a complete idiot.

I found out about this technique from alert reader George Rasko,
who sent me a letter describing something he came across on the
World Wide Web, a computer network that you should definitely
learn more about, because as you read these words, your
11-year-old is downloading pornography from it.

By hooking into the World Wide Web, you can look at a variety of
electronic "pages," consisting of documents, pictures, and videos
created by people all over the world.  One of these is a guy
named (really) George Goble, a computer person in the Purdue
University engineering department.  Each year, Goble and a bunch
of other engineers hold a picnic in West Lafayette, Indiana, at
which they cook hamburgers on a big grill.  Being engineers, they
began looking for practical ways to speed up the
charcoal-lighting process.

We started by blowing the charcoal with a hair dryer," Goble
told me in a telephone interview.  "Then we figured out that it
would light faster if we used a vacuum cleaner."

If you know anything about (1) engineers and (2) guys in
general, you know what happened:  The purpose of the
charcoal-lighting shifted from cooking hamburgers to seeing how
fast they could light the charcoal.

From the vacuum cleaner, they escalated to using a propane
torch, then an acetylene torch.  Then Goble started using
compressed pure oxygen, which caused the charcoal to burn much
faster, because as you recall from chemistry class, fire is
essentially the rapid combination of oxygen with the cosine to
form the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (or something along those
lines).

By this point, Goble was getting pretty good times.  But in the
world of competitive charcoal-lighting, "pretty good" does not
cut the mustard.  Thus, Goble hit upon the idea of using - get
ready - liquid oxygen.  This is the form of oxygen used in rocket
engines; it's 295 degrees below zero and 600 times as dense as
regular oxygen.  In terms of releasing energy, pouring liquid
oxygen on charcoal is the equivalent  of throwing a live
squirrel into a room containing 50 million Labrador retrievers.
On Gobel's World Wide Web page (the address is
http://ghg.ecn.purdue.edu/), you can see actual photographs and
a video of Goble using a bucket attached to a 10-foot-long wooden
handle to dump 3 gallons of liquid oxygen (not sold in stores)
onto a grill containing 60 pounds of charcoal and a lit cigarette
for ignition. What follows is the most impressive
charcoal-lighting I have ever seen, featuring a large fireball
that, according to Goble, reached 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit.  The
charcoal was ready for cooking in - this has to be a world record
- 3 seconds.

There's also a photo of what happened when Goble used the same
technique on a flimsy $2.88 discount-store grill.  All that's
left is a circle of charcoal with a few shreds of metal in it.
"Basically, the grill vaporized," said Goble.  "We were
thinking of returning it to the store for a refund."

Looking at Goble's video and photos, I became, as an American,
all choked up with gratitude at the fact that I do not live
anywhere near the engineers' picnic site.  But also, I was proud
of my country for producing guys who can be ready to barbecue in
less time than it takes for guys in less-advanced nations, such
as France, to spit.

Will the 3-second barrier ever be broken?  Will engineers come
up with a new, more powerful charcoal-lighting technology?  It's
something for all of us to ponder this summer as we sit outside,
chewing our hamburgers, every now and then glancing in the
direction of West Lafayette, Indiana, looking for a mushroom
cloud.

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