In Punisher Max #53 the Punisher tortures a villain by attaching cables to him connected to a car battery and turning the key in the ignition over and over.
Is this exact method realistic or fantasy?
If you connect somebody to a car battery and the battery is loaded and functional I see no need to turn the ignition key. The victim will probably die anyway. There are many A and Ah in a good battery. A short contact will be painful. Connecting, like in attaching the victim to the plus and minus poles firmly? You won’t enjoy the torture for long.
One could easily touch both terminals and not feel anything, even holding jumper cables in the same hand won’t do anything (if it did they wouldn’t be so exposed). I don’t know how close the terminals have to be to do anything noticeable. If the skin was broken and close enough I assume a significant current could flow and cause the fluids to even boil. The ignition switch would do nothing.
A standard car battery has a voltage of around 12.6 V when the car isn’t running, and somewhere between 13.2 V and 14.2 V when the car is running. When a car is started, the battery voltage dips below 12.6 V.
None of those voltages are lethal. In fact, unless the skin is broken, a person wouldn’t feel anything. (And if the skin were broken, less current would flow through them when the key is turned.)
If the Punisher used the HT leads on the car it would work.
My dad used to fix his own motorbikes as a student, but… He was working on the lawnmower and wanted to see if the spark plug was flashing. He had me hold the plug against the engine as he pulled the starter cord. Boy did I get a shock!
I would think 12V doesn’t do much, but the screenwriters had probably vaguely heard about the high voltage for the spark plug ignition being painful, and somewhere along the way this got turned into less explicit “wires from the vehicle”. Not sure if the same applies to electronic ignition as with the old time coil ignition, but I don’t see why not. Jumper cables are more theatrical than showing someone having to hook up connectors from a shielded spark plug cable and the engine ground.
Whether or not the car battery inflicts pain it is worth noting more broadly that torture does not work as a means to get information (except in some narrow circumstances like getting the code to a safe that you are in front of at the time and can try the combos given on the spot).
The whole torture for info thing is a movie/book fantasy.
just for clarification - spak-plug-cables don’t transport 12V … they transport 100s or 1000s of V (needed to create a spark), - there are electronics (coils!!!) in between the battery and the cable that up the voltage by the factor 10-100.
And yes, having people hold spark-plugs is an old mechanics-joke … you get a good jolt but given that it is just a split second - there is no real harm.
back on topic: NO, 12 v wont hurt you (or torture you) - just grab both terminals and see for yourself
I very much beg to differ. If you’ve ever been in circuit with a 12 volt car or marine battery you will definitely feel it if you have any moisture on your hands or it arcs onto jewellery, and you will likely receive 3rd degree burns. The direct current voltage isn’t the determinant of injury or pain; it is the cold cranking amperage (CCA), who for a typical car and truck battery will be between 200 and 1,000, delivering an instantaneous power of between 2.4 and 12 kW.
Whether that would kill or not depends on a number of factors including how the victim is grounded, where the leads are attached and main path of the current, and how health the victim was prior to being electrocuted but it would certainly be painful. By comparison, a 240 VAC 40 amp service circuit in your house is perfectly capable of killing an unwary DIY-er, and that is delivering around 7 kW instantaneously.
Stranger
Anyone who’s tested 9V batteries with their tongue knows the difference a bit of wet can make.
AFAIK, it was mostly intended to punish the recipient and deter others.
What are HT leads?
High Tension. They are the leads that take very high voltage to the spark plugs. Think Tazer and you would be in the right ballpark.
Oh, thats ridiculous.
I find that most of your posts are well-researched, but this is just a howler.
To get 12kW out of a 12v battery would require a resistance of .012Ω (P = v^2/R. if P = 12,000W, and V = 12V, R = .012Ω).
A piece of standard 14ga copper wire, the kind that is used in household circuits, has a resistance of 2.525Ω / 1000’. That means that .012Ω is equal to 4.75’.
Are you trying to tell us that the human body is a better conductor than copper? That touching the terminals of a 12V with bare (even wet) hands is somehow going to present a resistance in the milliOhm range? Maybe they should start wiring houses with body parts…
The movie scene is clearly just an incorrect version of using the ignition circuit to generate a painful jolt. It would work perfectly for purpose if the victim were connected to a spark-plug lead and grounded. But across the battery, they won’t be feeling a thing.
When it comes to actually dangerous situations, things are more messy. 12 volts will tingle under some circumstances - like wet skin. Heck, who hasn’t put a 9 volt battery on their tongue. More than a tingle, but illustrates the point. Electric shocks cause pain by directly stimulating nerves. You need very little current to do that, but you do need to breach the skin to do so. Wet skin is a good start. Actually inside the body, even very small voltages can pump enough current to cause serious problems. Operating tables and equipment need special care in design and setup to a void situations where only millivolts can be dangerous.
A car battery can source ridiculous current. Enough to vaporise or melt metal objects that get in the way. So rings, jewellery, watches are all potential hazards. Get a ring across a car battery and you will be picking your finger off the ground. Luckily it is hard to find a point where you can do this, but they exist. In days of yore computer power supplies were a source danger, and I do know of one computer service guy who did lose a finger to a vaporising wedding ring. But as a torture device, this is a very different scenario.
I’m not sure, but I think Stranger is referring to the danger of shorting out a car battery. Which is, well, pretty obvious. Metal jewelry can cause a short. If the metal ring on your finger causes a short, for example, it won’t feel good.
So yea, make sure you don’t short a car battery.
When it comes to voltage, there’s no magical threshold where it suddenly becomes “dangerous.” But in my line of work (electrical stuff), anything under 40 V is generally considered benign.
A complication for the entire movie premise is that in a modern car you may be hard pressed to find an ignition lead. Many engines built now have a per sparkplug ignition module that is powered by 12 volts and incorporates a dedicated ignition coil into its structure. The entire thing lives in the gap from the top of the rocker cover to the sparkplug, and the HT output is connected directly to the plug. Perhaps if you removed the entire unit and coupled up a lead to the the bottom you could get a useful zap. Having recently changed the plugs on my car, I can attest that this is not something to be done on a whim. Not a single plug could be accessed without removing other parts, some, a lot of other parts. It isn’t just a matter of pulling off a lead.
There is a way to toucher someone with 12 volts DC. Wrap a bare wire around a part of the body. Then connect one end to the positive and the other to the negative terminal. It is not electrical shock that will hurt. The wire will begin to get hotter and hotter depending on the gauge and length.
Turning the key on and off will do nothing.
12 volts from one wet finger to another we finger of the same hand you may be able to feel. Depending on how far apart the connection points I doubt if you will fee; much.
And I have gotten 24 volts between hand and do not remember feeling anything. I have also gotten 120 VDC and that will get your atttention.
If you are explicitly talking about shorting out the battery by accident, then yeah. That can deliver a hell of a burn.
But the human body has high resistance, and just because a battery can deliver X amps does not mean it will. If you short the battery, then the only thing limiting the current flow is internal resistance in the battery and its capacity. But if you aren’t shorting the battery but just attaching it to something (your body) then the amount of current flowing will be determined by Ohm’s law.
Skin contact resistance is typically between 1,000 and 100,000 ohms, obviously depending on how much you are sweating, size of the contact patch, etc. So current would be 12 uA to 12mA. That doesn’t mean any or all of it will go through your heart and kill you - it may travel a different path depending on exactly how you are getting shocked.
This is why higher voltages are more dangerous. You could have a 12V source powered by a nuclear plant that could theoretically deliver a million amps, but it will still deliver only 12 uA through a 100,000 ohm load. Change then voltage to 100,000 volts and the same load (the body) will absorb 1A.
The only time I have ever felt 12 volts was when i was working on a horn circuit and got buzzed. The horn has a big coil that turns on and off to vibrate a diaphragm. Somehow it can shock you also. Perhaps the collapsing field is more then 12 volts?