Yeah, just like an ignition coil.
Pictures I have seen (obviously fake) show the CIA with a car/truck battery and a magneto operated by a hand crank. This is usually attached to the genital of the subject by a couple of curly wires and crocodile clips.
The torturer cranks the handle which can multiply the voltage by a factor of several thousand and that sends a powerful shock to the unfortunate recipient. I read somewhere that the French adapted field telephones for this purpose in Algeria and Vietnam.
“The ‘ge ́ge ́neurs’ of Algeria invented nothing. In the1930s, beneath the tropics, in the shelter of the French flag, all the de-grading methods existed just fine.”
Rejali, Darius. Torture and Democracy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Chooser
IIRC, when waterboarding was in the news, the character in Doonesbury explained that in the CIA everyone is given a taste of it, and everyone breaks under waterboard torture…
“Did you break under waterboarding?”
“Within 5 minutes. I gave up our entire plans for invading Canada…”
The silliness of this is that a magneto is generally self contained. It doesn’t multiply voltage. It is a very simple high-ish voltage generator. Unless it had field coils that needed power, which I have never seen.
A magneto is the basic spark generator used on simple engines that have no other electrical needs. Ubiquitous for chain saws, small outboard motors, bikes etc. They just depend on moving a permanent magnet through a coil. Hand cranked magnetos/generators - used on things like telephones of yore would deliver a good kick when run open circuit as well. No additional power source needed.
For science, I tried some experiments with a 12v power supply.
As expected, the resistance across dry skin is so high that even placing the electrodes as close as I could manage (pinched between my fingers and placed millimeters apart), the current stayed below the range that I could measure (under 1 mA).
With hands moistened with tap water, the result was the same. <1 mA current.
With a saturated salt water solution, the results were slightly better–I could manage up to about 5 mA, again pinched between fingers on one hand. Between both arms, however, the current was zero. Not even a tingle, either way. Very likely, the current was going entirely via the moisture.
Across the tongue, there was a significant tingle, and even with the electrodes fairly widely spaced I saw 5 mA. Not really painful, but I didn’t experiment further to see if I could increase the current by placing the electrodes closer. Most likely, the lack of a layer of dry, dead skin cells allowed the current to actually flow via the tissue, exciting the nerves. Perhaps saliva is a better electrolyte than salt water, too.
Of course, in none of these cases is there even a tiny danger. A fairly small current across the heart is dangerous–but the only way to achieve that would be to pierce the skin to get at the salty, wet tissue below. And even then, I’m not sure 12 volts would be enough. It’s hard to determine if there’s a continuous low-resistance path that intersects the heart. Not quite willing to run that experiment.
Putting jewelry or other accoutrements in the way is a different story. But then it’s not the electricity that’s the danger, but the burn hazard.
If the current runs through the heart, even a current as low as 1mA can be enough to induce fibrillation, so a 12V car battery could definitely be enough.
You usually need more (at least ~300 mA was what they told us in our Intro lab in the Long Before as enough current to lock up muscles - including cardiac muscles) if the path way was generally through the chest, which again a 12V car battery could do in the right conditions.
Mostly definitely I would not recommend anybody try such experiments personally.
Right. The question is whether it’s possible to actually induce that current across the heart in a realistic scenario. During open-heart surgery? Sure. But even in a case where electrodes have been deliberately placed under the skin, let alone an accidental case where the current somehow goes through a cut, I’m skeptical that it’s possible. And certainly not through undamaged skin.
Yeah, I’d agree with that.
While directly across the heart may be difficult, it should be possible to deliberately drive enough current using a car battery to lock up your heart but realistically only if you placed the electrodes under the skin on top of really cranking that battery.
Of course, general disclaimers about please not fooling around with car batteries or electricity without appropriate knowledge/precautions.
There’s no way to “really crank” a car battery–it’s at 12.6 V when charged due to the basic chemistry. The starter motor on a car will only lower that voltage. The voltage while the car is running might be around 14 V, due to the alternator–but that’s a very marginal increase.
You could cause some damage if you put a bunch of batteries in series. A dozen motorcycle batteries in series is a much greater danger than a single large one from a big truck.
I have a related story. I once worked as a contractor on a military base. The first set of jobs I had there involved groundskeeping. Mowing, trimming, edging, thatching, fertilizing, pulling weeds, you name it. Mostly for residential base housing but we had work at all parts of the base.
We carried these huge gas-powered trimmers (people sometimes call them weed-whackers). These were big industrial things you wore on a harness. The end of it has plastic twine that comes out of a spool, and spins around to cut up grass, weeds, anything. There was a kill switch but you could also, in a pinch, turn it off by yanking the cable out of the spark plug. (There was a rubber cover so you weren’t touching anything metal.)
One day I was with my crew doing a neighborhood and for some reason my trimmer would not turn off. The cutting head was spinning but not particularly fast. I could not get it to turn off. So I tried unplugging the spark plug.
OUCH!!!
It shocked me, my finger stung, and my arm was numb up to the elbow. It was extremely painful. Oh, did I mention that I was soaking wet because it was absolutely pouring down rain? (We worked in the rain all the time; you can’t just call of a day’s work because it was raining. You just did it anyway.)
I asked for help from the rest of my crew, because most of them were more experienced than I was. Surely someone had a way to turn the blasted thing off. But nobody knew what to do other than unplug the spark plug. And they didn’t even believe me that it was zapping me. So another person went to try… ZAP! And another. Then another. One by one we took turns trying to yank it and getting zapped over and over. We must have looked like a bunch of primates dealing with a piece of technology they couldn’t understand. Finally, someone had managed to get enough of a grip on the cable to the spark plug that they were able to pull it out before they had to drop it. And the trimmer shut off.
I don’t know that the trimmer was actually dangerous, but it sure hurt a lot. It was probably the worst that I’ve ever been zapped. (As an IT guy who sometimes has to crawl around under desks in cubicles that may or may not be assembled properly to plug and unplug things, I’ve been zapped a few times.)
It depends.
Put a metal ring on a finger on your left hand, and touch the ring to the car battery’s positive terminal. Put a metal ring on a finger on your right hand, and touch the ring to the car battery’s negative terminal. You will feel… nothing. That’s because the rings are in series with you.
Put a metal ring on a finger on your left hand. Use the ring to form a metal bridge between the car battery’s positive terminal and a metal part on your car. If the metal piece is “grounded” (i.e. electrically connected to the battery’s negative terminal, which is usually the case) you might lose your finger. Don’t try this at home.
Yep.
A hundred AAA batteries in series could kill you.
Especially dropped from a great height.
Or swallowed, or scattered on a wood staircase, etc…
When my dad zapped me with the lawnmower I was pretty sure I wasn’t touching the metal lead, just the rubber sheath, but my hand was against the metal engine block. Over the years I’ve wondered if my dad did that on purpose. He had a warped sense of humour, but he wasn’t even mildly sadistic - but as a guy who fixed his own old British motorbikes for years, he would have suspected that would happen.
Over the years I’ve heard of electricians on construction sites who think it’s hilarious to hold a live wire and grab the next guy passing by. And I have accidentally touched live prongs on an extension cord I was trying unplug in the dark - and experience I would not recommend. And I’ve felt the shock of an electric fence trying to go over into a cattle field. My rubber sole shoe touched the live wire along the inside of the fence and I certainly felt it.
However, I’ve never had the experience - fortunately - of one of the fellows in my dorm at university. He mentioned when he was visiting the family farm back in Holland as a kid, his cousins persuaded him to pee on the electric fence. They had an accomplice stationed down at the corner who turned off the electricity so they could demonstrate it was harmless, and then turned it back on when it was his turn.
I once managed a full jolt from an electric fence. Out hiking when a bit inexperienced. It was a cold wet day. Put my hand on the wire and with damp boots and ground got a really solid belt. My hand stung for about half an hour and my whole body felt warm for a time as well. I was disappointed when it wore off.
You learn to look for the insulators on the fence posts. Lack of barbs on the wire is a good clue as well. Never made the same mistake again.
a fast learner!
I’d imagine just clamping the jumper cables to the appropriate part of the anatomy might be enough. No battery needed.
Checking in, like others, to call shenanigans on this one. That is, unless Stranger is saying that the same piece of jewelry is touching both battery terminals, or positive and ground, but it doesn’t sound that way.
Seconding others who have said the magneto multiplies the battery voltage, or any other voltage. It delivers its own.
If somebody were about to torture me with a car battery, I’d be a bit nervous, because I’m not 100% sure how much I would feel if they dug the clamps into my flesh or otherwise created an unusually good connection. But just touching the conductors to the flesh doesn’t sound especially scary, unless it’s inside some small body opening. The 9 volt battery to the tongue would get pretty damn tiring if somebody held it there.