On this epic episode of MythBusters...
Go, baby!
...Adam and Jamie go Newton's cradle crazy...
Even these two and a half inch balls are making me giggle.
...as they find out if this viral video
is wrecking ball baloney.
From big beginnings
to a colossal conclusion.
It looks beautiful!
But will their mother of all Newton's cradles really work?
We are just like Newton's cradles.
In three, two, one!
Also toying big machines
are Kari, Grant and Tory,
as they test a cliff hanger of a myth.
I got nightmares like this.
If your car is teetering over a gorge...
With even a breeze that car is gonna go over.
...can a bird, landing on the hood,
really cause you to totter over the edge?
Don't make any sudden move.
Who are the MythBusters?
Adam Savage...
It's delicious memory.
...and Jamie Hyneman.
When you doubt, C4.
Between them, more than 30 years of special effects experience.
Together with Tory Belleci...
My name is science.
...Grant Imahara,
and Kari Byron.
This should be fun.
They don't just tell the myth,
they put them to the test.
MythBusters 9x14 - Newton's Crane Cradle Original air date October 5, 2011
Sync by YYeTs.net, corrected by atrn97g www.addic7ed.com
What are you doing?
An equation.
Go on.
Does one of these plus one of these
equal this?
It's a simple equation taken from this viral video.
Take five cranes and five wrecking balls
and you have got a desktop toy taken to the max.
But is it really possible to supersize a Newton's cradle?
Haha, a wrecking ball size Newton's cradle.
That's fantastic.
Ain't it sweet? That is my favorite.
How do you want to proceed?
Well, we all know where this is gonna end up,
and it is going to be with full size wrecking balls.
And that's going to be a huge build.
Well, since this is about scaling the Newton's cradle effect,
there is no need to go stampeding towards the full run wrecking balls.
Why don't we do it gradually.
You mean incrementally bumping up the size for our Newton's cradles.
Exactly, and see if we can tease out any kind of problems,
dealing with the increase in scale.
- That sounds perfect. Let's do it. - OK.
So after the first of many cheap gags...
You need to stop playing with your balls and get back to work.
...Adam sets sail on the small scale.
Now that Newton's cradles is effectively an instant lesson in energy transfer.
And energy transfer is the soul of this story for
when we bring this up to full scale wrecking balls,
the biggest problem we could encounter
is that the energy transfer doesn't work,
that when we lift ball one of the wrecking balls
it does not send ball five
like you would expect a Newton cradle to work.
So, how are we going to know
how we're doing as we scale this up incrementally?
This is how.
I will pull ball one up to this block,
which is the exactly same distance from ball one
as this block is from ball five.
I release ball one, it sends ball five a certain distance
that I can measure and compare
against the subsequent Newton cradles.
It's a simple but short-lived setup.
So let's see it again in slow motion.
Adam releases ball one
and in a clear demonstration of this cradle's efficiency,
ball five almost kisses the blue block.
What did you get?
The energy transfer was surprisingly clean.
Ball five traveled 98% of the distance that ball one did.
- Wow, only 2% loss after one hit. - Yep.
Why don't we take it up a notch. Next size up.
Absolutely. Let's do it.
Now, I'm gonna make one of these with five of these.
Now clearly all I have to do is attach some strings to this,
but that's no mean feat.
I don't know if you have tried to drill into a chrome steel bearing,
but I have. It sucks.
And with that complete, a quick montage later,
and Newton 2.5 is ready to roll.
And roll it does.
It's not easy being me sometimes.
But after a quick re-string...
Shall we try it out?
...it's got Adam dancing with excitement.
Oh, that's cool.
And while both he and Jamie
get particularly pleased at something a little low key...
- Isn't that nice? - Uh-huh.
...it's definitely a build to be proud of.
It's funny.
Even these two and a half inch balls are making me giggle.
I love it.
But in my mind's eye, I'm already seeing
the larger and larger ones that we're going to be building,
and it's gonna be hilarious.
But before that hilarity,
it is time for scale test two.
Two and a half inch ball Newton cradle
in three, two, one...
Let's check it out on high speed.
Like last time,
Adam releases ball one before measuring
where ball five maxes out,
and the results are very encouraging.
- Come on, come on, come on. - It's looks like it's gonna touch.
It is three-eighths away, which is 3%,
which means pretty fricking efficient.
The desktop model,
the ball went 98% of the original distance.
This is 97% of the original distance.
It is scaling beautifully.
And what that means
is that going ludicrously large like the myth may just yet work.
Next up, a cliff hanger of a myth.
All right, so I have a classic physics meets Hollywood myth.
All right, let's hear it.
The car goes skidding off the road, and it's about to go over a cliff
when it's saved by stopping precariously at the edge,
it's perfectly balanced.
But a little bird comes and lands on the hood,
and the whole car goes crashing off the cliff.
A little bird causes the car to go over the cliff?
Look, I am skeptical. But, you know what, sounds like a good test.
It is a favorite in many a script writer's handbook.
But if a car comes to a stand still on the very edge of a cliff,
can an inquisitive bird be enough to tip the balance?
All right. So obviously we're going to have
to balance a car on the edge of a cliff.
Why don't we build our own cliff?
That way we know it can hold the weight of the car,
and if it goes over, we won't get killed.
Good idea.
And then for the fun part,
getting a bird to land on the hood,
I don't think that is gonna be as easy as we think.
No, I think balancing the car is going to be the easy part.
So, with tipping over a real cliff ruled out for obvious reasons,...
at the bomb range,
the MythBusters are going to build their own.
I think we mean business.
We got a lot of work.
Luckily we have the big tools today.
All right, let's do it.
All right, let's move some earth.
What we got here is a front loader.
Big toys for big boys.
This thing is very powerful. It's got to move a lot of weight.
Let's see what I can break with this.
What are we gonna be doing? We're going to be moving a lot of earth
to get our slope up to our cliff.
Nothing better like playing with big machinery.
Although it may look a little bit precarious,...
the goal here is to build a solid cliff edge,
courtesy of a shipping container...
Enter one portable cliff.
...which a car can then be balanced on.
It is taking a while.
Well, it took mother nature
like hundreds of thousands of years,
so really, we're right on schedule.
Beyond the cliff edge,
they're making a sloping escape ramp
which should make a survivable descent
when the car tips over a little more likely.
It may look like we have been out here all day playing.
I mean, I have been up and down this ramp probably about 100 times.
But there's a very good reason,
that reason is we're going to be in the car
that goes off the container and down that ramp.
So we want this thing to be perfect.
And Grant better hope 100 times was enough,
because with the cliff car delivered and pimped...
Just in case there was any confusion who was pushing a car off a cliff
out in the middle of a bomb range.
...it is all systems go for the pre-bird testing:
finding out the precise balance point of the car.
OK, you guys ready?
No!
Finding the tipping point in three, two, one...
You're just going to ease forward, right?
Oh, man!
Tory's first task is to carefully drop the front wheels over the edge.
OK, slow, you are about to hit the tyre off.
You can make it.
I got nightmares like this.
And once there, the balance point test can begin.
But it is a delicate operation.
OK, slowly, slowly.
Little less on the accelerator.
Too little throttle
and they won't budge.
Ok, we're not tipping yet.
Too much and they'll flip over the cliff
without finding the tipping point.
We get no more traction on the back wheels.
And that was too much.
Holy crap, that was scary.
It was like one second we were on the edge,
and then boom, we were off.
I think we need to do that again.
I think so.
Good news and bad news.
Our safety ramp worked.
We are able to get the car go off the cliff
and land safely and we didn't die.
The bad news is though, I hit the gas too hard.
and instead of finding that teetering point,
we just went off the cliff.
So, we don't know exactly what that tipping point is yet,
we are gonna do the test again to find that.
This is going to be fun.
Still to come, bird balance gets bizarre.
But next, wreaking ball baloney hits a hurdle.
It's potentially very bad.
Is this crazy construction site's viral video really real?
Or is this myth headed to the wrecking yard?
Well, so far it's so good.
I love it.
Because scaling up the Newton cradle with bigger ball bearings
appears to be working.
It is scaling beautifully.
But now it's time to go bigger again.
Next up, we're going to a 6 inch diameter ball bearing.
This is 33 pounds.
And that means that it is 323 times as massive as these little ones.
Like the two and a half inch version,
it is Adam who's in charge of the build.
Another day, another Newton cradle stand.
From the stand that this time is more heavily reinforced...
Nice rack.
...to the ball securing system.
Yes, wow that's heavy.
I have been obsessing about this story ever since I first came across it.
I am finding it difficult to describe how much fun it is,
so the only thing I could come up with was to just show you,
the little balls,
bigger balls,
and really big balls.
Need I say anything more?
Actually, yes, Jamie.
How about you give us a count down to the efficiency test?
Three, two, one!
Nice.
That was a good clean one.
- Shall we check out the high speed? - Yeah.
Alright Jamie, ball five went to 94.1% of the distance of ball one.
Yeah, that's an additional 3% loss.
I'm still feeling pretty good about this thing.
Yeah, still working.
So is increasing the mass causing us a problem?
Well, we are seeing an increase in losses, the more we scale these balls up.
But here's the thing, it is not proportional.
These balls are over 200 times the mass
of the original small balls on the toy.
And yet we're only seeing a total of about 6% loss.
It is not very much.
Although there is drop off with increasing size,
it is so slight that the bigger cradles still work as hoped.
And that means full scale may not be so far fetched,
provided of course that real wrecking balls
perform the same as ball bearings.
To find out if a bird can tip a car over a cliff,
the MythBusters first need to find
their car's balance point,...
which is proving harder than expected.
Hey, you guys are safe!
We're alive.
Bad news is that was a little too Thelma and Louise.
So we have to put you back up there.
- Alright. - Yeah!
I didn't think you would disagree.
After a somewhat epic but really fun failure,
we decided to change our methods.
We actually put the car back into place,
and now we are going to inch that car forward.
So, with the car engine off...
OK, we're ready.
Alright, begin the tipping point test.
...the forklift will instead gently ease it forward.
Okay. Stop, stop. Stop.
But will it have the required control?
Right about five and a half feet.
How does it feel?
There's no tipping.
Okay, give them just another tiny little nudge.
Well, so much for plan B,
because like plan A,
the cars tip too soon.
And without finding that tipping point,
they can't bring on the birds.
Alright, plan C!
We're actually going to use straps this time,
so that if we go too far off the edge,
we can pull the car back to the tipping point.
Hope this one works.
With resets taking too long...
Can't tell you how many times I get myself into these situations.
...the guys are hoping that the strap system will let them
find the balance point a little more quickly.
Give it a little bump, give me your angry inch.
But as it turns out,
it still takes an entire afternoon of pushing and shoving...
All right, now pull it back to five and a half.
I'll tell you when to stop.
...before they think they cracked it.
Grant, we are at the point of no return.
After a lot of tinkering and a lot of trial and error,
we have found the exact tipping point.
I feel like we're gonna go over at any second.
I think at this point, with even a breeze, that car is gonna go over.
Don't make any sudden moves.
So now, when the guys start to sway and move their weight,
I think they're gonna go over the edge.
Ready? Let's do it together. One, two, three.
Yes!
Finally, they've hit pay dirt.
Hey, I think we found the teetering point.
Wobbling at the six and a half foot mark,
the car was so finely balanced,
that a slight lean from Grant and Tory
was enough to sent it over the edge.
But could a landing bird also tip that balance?
Now, it takes a long time to get the car to that perfect balance point.
But after seeing how easy the car went over the edge,
I think if a bird would land on the front end of the car,
we're definitely going over.
Well, in that case, let's unleash the beast.
Later on MythBusters...
World's largest Newton cradle, in three, two, one...
- But next... - Can a bird tip a car off a cliff?
Who knows?
In wrecking ball baloney...
I'm confused.
...Adam and Jamie's shock tests using giant ball bearings
have been a hit.
I don't get tired about that.
This is what everyone will be wanting for Christmas this year.
Which means it is time to go full scale,
where the first thing on their shopping list
is five identical wrecking balls,
which somewhat unexpectedly turns out to be impossible.
But all is not lost.
There's nobody who has five identical wrecking balls.
Well, you know what that means.
I think I do.
We're going to have to build our own.
How do you want to do it?
Big steel balls filled with concrete?
That could work.
- Shall we try it in scale first? - Sure.
All right.
So, our full size wrecking balls need to be identical for two reasons.
First, that because that's what you see in the video.
But second, and more importantly,
their mass needs to be identical,
because that gives us the best energy transfer possible.
Not only their mass but also their surfaces have to be
as round as we can get them.
So we're gonna make our own.
We're gonna use the building blocks of real wrecking balls, steel and concrete.
Before we go to full scale,
we're gonna try a scale experiment with the simplest arrangement that is possible.
A steel sphere filled with concrete.
So, I have sourced some six inch hollow steel balls.
I'm gonna drill a hole in them
and fill them with ceramicly hard plaster,
that matches the compressive strength of concrete.
I'm gonna build a Newton cradle out of that,
and that really ought to give us a good guidance to the viability
of our concept for the large scale.
And once the fillings hardened,
everything is set to see if they work.
Here we go.
Uh-oh.
Hey Jamie, you'd better come take a look at this.
What's up?
Check this out.
Doesn't last very long.
Clearly we're gonna have to come up with something other than
just filling our wrecking balls with concrete.
Yeah, that's kind of dead.
This is just what I was afraid of.
These mild steel balls are filled with an ultra hard gypsum based product.
But they're still not passing enough energy through to do the job we want.
They're absorbing it somehow.
Personally, I'm bumped.
I know when you look at the high speed shot here,
it looks like the energy transfer you are expecting
with Newton's cradle is actually happening...
ball one goes down and ball five comes up.
But here is the thing that makes a Newton cradle awesome.
The energy transfer continues. Tick, tick, tick.
What I am getting from this isn't tick, tick, tick.
It's tick, tick...
and everyone seems to want to go home.
I don't know what we're going to do.
With real wrecking balls unavailable,
and the most simple do it yourself design falling flat,
what this myth needs is a brainstorm.
So giant Newton cradle.
How do you want to do it?
Well, we've got this problem, right?
This is gonna be probably 20 feet high.
- We can't forge these solid steel. - Yeah.
There's no way we can...
And yet we can't have just a big sphere
that we fill with something like concrete.
It is a slow start, so let's speed things up.
Their goal is to design a wrecking ball standing
that transfers energy better than their earlier effort.
Jamie gets a bolt from the blue.
Oh, oh, I know.
All you need is a plate to go right through the middle.
And then we get some metal spheres,
weld them top and bottom,
then fill the rest with three barn concrete.
Don't they make buoys that are made of steel?
Yeah, that's the ticket.
Then we get one of those,
we put the plate in the middle,
we end up with something where it is solid steel transfer from ball to ball.
But no one could look at them and say that's not a wrecking ball.
Like that.
That is perfect.
I think we've got a plan.
Let's do it.
Eureka, they've cracked it.
But for the rest of us,
here is a graphic.
They're going to take a 28 inch naval buoy and cut it in half.
Across the center, they'll weld a three inch thick hardened steel plate
that should be able to transfer the energy of the swing.
Inside the buoy, they'll add rebar and concrete,
just like some old-fashioned wrecking balls.
That leaves two questions.
With five in a row, will it work?
And can they build them?
Well, with the delivery of buoys,
the guys get that ball rolling.
These things are going to get cut in half,
then we're gonna weld the plates, right down the middle.
This thing is going to be
the center of our wrecking balls.
It's a three-inch thick piece of especially hardened steel that we have chosen
because it's gonna be the contact point from ball to ball.
And because it is really hard,
hopefully it's gonna transfer the energy just like the Newton's cradle does.
We're also gonna weld structural stuff that we need onto it,
like a bunch of reinforcing bars
and the rest of the space will be filled with concrete.
It is definitely an all-hands-on-deck type build.
Even if a couple of those hands get distracted.
But once Adam and Jamie chime back in,
their fearsome spheres,
the kind of hybrid of real wrecking balls and giant ball bearings,
take shape fast.
And off we go.
And while the concrete fill starts chaotically...
Slow down! Stop.
...it is not long before the team...
John, I need you to get the vibrator ready.
...has this part of the build in the can.
Messier than I thought.
Isn't that the title of your autobiography?
Lovely, look at that.
And, after two weeks to cure plus a quick paint job, they are all set.
But will they actually work?
After a couple weeks' work,
this is either 10,000 pounds of awesome
or 10,000 pounds of failure.
Coming up next on MythBusters...
A wrecking ball size Newton cradle.
But the question is, will it work?
A precariously balanced car is no laughing matter.
But can a landing bird really send you over the edge?
So we're back at the bomb range.
Now, it took a really long time to get our car
perfectly balanced on our cliff.
But now that we've done it,
it is time to bring in some birds.
We have our expert, Jim, coming in
to use progressively bigger and bigger birds.
Should be really interesting today.
So essentially, this myth is all about leverage.
Now, imagine that this block is the cliff,
and this break is the car,
and this rock is the bird.
Because of leverage, out here at the edge,
a small bird can land there
and cause the giant car to go over.
Just like this.
That's the theory.
But will bird one, a classic
yet humble pigeon, provide enough leverage?
All right. So now we're going to start testing with the birds.
But we're going to test it a little bit differently this time.
We're still going to put the car on the edge of the cliff
right where it's balancing, just ready to fall over.
Should have paid more attention to the signs.
Cliff ahead.
But this time we're going to tether the car,
so that way if it does go off the cliff by the weight of the bird,
it doesn't go down the hill.
Because let's face it. We don't want to hurt these birds.
We don't care about ourselves.
We just don't want to hurt the birds.
With Grant and Tory sitting anxiously
in the hot seats of their balancing car...
All right. This is it. Okay.
Come on, bring to them, birds.
...Jim flips the birds. And...
Okay. The birds are in place.
Yep, and we haven't gone over the edge.
...there's not a hint of tippage.
But to be sure, the guys shoo the birds down the hood.
Go away. Go away.
- Get out of here. - Go!
Don't you have a park to poop on?
Because the further they are from the fulcrum,
the greater the chance of a tip.
Two pigeons, not happening.
Nope, we are not going over the edge.
Ain't that the truth?
The two pounds of pigeon is just not enough
to cause their balanced car to tilt up and over.
Which means...
I think it is time for a bigger bird!
Okay, so we didn't get any tipping from pigeons.
So we're going to move on to hawks.
Not only are we going to get the extra weight,
but also the momentum of the hawk's landing.
I still don't think it's going to be quite
enough to tip the car.
You guys ready for the birds?
It's time to let the hawks go.
All right, hawk number one ready to deploy.
Murray lands in a hurry...
but there's no wobble to their wheels.
That didn't send us over the edge.
All right, bring out another hawk.
Doubling the mass to almost five pounds
does seem to make a difference...
I can see the hood kind of bobbling there.
...but it is still not enough.
All right, that's two hawks at the end of the car,
and we have not gone over the edge.
You're not going over.
We did not fall over.
And when two hawks fail...
Got some work to do. You ready?
...it's time to bring in the big guns...
the giant eagle owl.
You know, in many cultures, an owl is the harbinger of death.
- Thanks a lot. - Harbinger of death?
Thanks for the encouragement, Jim.
And with those wise words,
it's go time.
All right. Let's see if this owl will send us over the cliff.
He is big, he's really big.
- We survived! - We did!
He is at the edge of the car,
and we did not go over the cliff.
Yep, once again, the car's balance is unaffected,
even with this seven pounder right at the front of the hood.
Well, if the owl is not going to do it,
I don't know what is.
Grant, for one, is not that surprised.
Ok, so why don't I think this works?
Imagine that you're at a playground,
and you have a perfect seesaw.
Theoretically, if you have a mass,
which is the bird, landing far enough away from the pivot,
it should be able to move the seesaw, no problem.
The only problem here
is that this seesaw
weighs 3000 pounds
and it's on a metal pivot.
The bird isn't heavy enough
and it's not landing with enough force to cause it to move.
In other words, it's going to take
an even bigger bird to tip this car.
And for that, it's back to the shop.
Do you hear that?
That's the call of the wild.
Advertise your product or brand here contact www.OpenSubtitles.org today
Adam and Jamie's wrecking balls are ready.
Let's move them out.
All right.
Now they just need to be
strung up into the world's largest Newton's cradle.
This is our location.
It is a dry dock in Vallejo, California,
and we've used it a number of times before for experiments.
Check this out.
I don't mind saying, I am hyperventilating.
So why this location?
Well, for the wrecking ball scale version of Newton's cradle,
we need to be able to suspend the balls at quite a height.
Now, we could do it on top of a large building,
or we could do it by suspending them over a big hole,
like this one.
As well as the big hole,
the dry dock also comes complete with its own cranes.
But unlike the video,
the guys won't be swinging their balls from them.
Now in the clip, our wrecking ball Newton cradle
is actually suspended from five adjacent tower cranes
next to each other.
There's two problems with this picture.
One is, they don't use tower cranes
to swing wrecking balls.
And two, we were never ever going to find
five tower cranes that we could park right next to each other.
So this I-beam and four others quite similar to it
are going to be a figurate structure
which we are going to hang our wrecking ball cradle from.
Just about to weld it in place.
- That's it. - That was fast.
- Let's get it in the air. - Yeah.
With the frame secured so that
it juts out over the dry dock,
the guys then need to attach their wrecking balls to it...
I'm going to go over here.
...which given their combined weight of over five tons...
Aren't they pretty?
...is something which is easier said than done.
Given that each of these balls weighs about a ton,
it's going to be quite a process to hoist them,
and maneuver them into place.
So I'm going to be on the ground with a forklift,
and I'm carefully going to cradle them,
and pick them up, and put them in place...
Okay.
How does it look up there?
Looks beautiful!
...while Adam is overhead on a boom lift, arranging slings and the cables,
we will carefully skooch them all in so they precisely fit.
Because if this thing is going to work,
that's the way it's gonna have to be.
I think it is good.
Looks perfect.
And once that's sorted,
the guys get on with the finishing touches.
Does that add something to them?
Totally.
Yeah, it makes them pop a little bit, huh?
But some viewers may be wondering
why there's not two strings attached.
Why, oh why, you might be asking, are we hanging these wrecking balls from single
cables, when every Newton cradle we have thus far built in this episode
hangs from two cables in a V formation?
That's because this
is the arrangement that we see in the clip.
We are testing the circumstances
of the clip first.
And only if that doesn't work do we go to two cables.
With the string theory sorted,
everything is finally ready for a test.
All right. You ready?
I have been waiting for this, you know?
I know. Me, too!
World's largest Newton cradle, test no. 1,
in three, two, one!
We had a... a little rig settling there.
Yeah. It wasn't very exciting though.
No, it wasn't.
It was one hit.
- Yeah. - One-hit wonder.
A one-hit wonder indeed,
and not a good one at that.
But all is not lost.
I don't need this high speed camera
to tell me that that one was,
shall we say, lackluster...?
Where did the energy go?
The middle of every one of these balls
is a big hardened steel plate.
Well, some of the energy was absorbed by the balls,
but some of it was absorbed by our framework actually moving.
The amount of force from ball one hitting ball two moved
our entire multi-thousand pound framework.
So we've secured it.
And we're gonna go again.
With the framework secured to within an inch of its life,
its onwards and upwards.
Because this time...
I think that's good.
...they're pulling ball one back as high as it will go,
to try to maximize the energy of the swing.
Single string, maximum pull back
in three, two, one!
That was a hell of a hit.
It was a hell of a hit.
And a very sad, sad story.
They're all just sort of swinging together.
That's kind of a let down.
That is a real let down.
Yeap, despite ball one hitting ball two
with an impact in excess of 150,000 PSI,
there's still no ca-ching to the swing.
Hear that?
That is the sound of failure.
This thing is so awesome!
I wish you could see it!
Unfortunately, all we've got to show for
it is some swinging shiny balls.
They're not tick tick ticking
like the Newton cradle of our dreams.
Sorry.
No need to be sorry, Adam,
because this myth's grand finale
is still to come.
A pigeon cannot cause a precariously balanced car
to tip over the edge.
But could a much much bigger bird?
All right. Despite what they say about working with animals,
those birds were really cooperative.
But since we don't have access to any bigger flying birds,
I think we need to come up with another plan.
Yeah. And it is starting to get a little dangerous for these birds.
What if we went with a model helicopter?
We get one that's the same weight as the biggest flying bird,
and have it land on the front of the car.
That's a great idea.
Not only can we match the mass of the bird,
but we also get the down force from the rudders,
just like the bird flapping its wings.
Awesome.
Weighing over 20 pounds,
the California condor is majestic,
a far cry from the MythBusters helicopter stand-in.
But, while it won't win any prizes for elegance,
what's key is that the condor-copter weighs the same as the real deal.
So we've slightly altered an RC helicopter,
to emulate the heaviest flying bird in North America.
Should not only be the same weight,
but also it should represent its flight path
when it lands on top of the car.
And that flight path's
something that's been studied by Grant.
Now, I found something very interesting
about the way large birds land.
Check out this video of our giant owl.
See how he swoops down
right before he lands, he rears up,
and then lands very softly,
minimizing its landing speed, minimizing that momentum
that he then parks on the target zone.
And that's exactly what we're gonna want our helicopter
to do on the hood of the car.
Well, with the boys all buckled up...
All right, time to go to work.
...an expert pilot Wolf Witt chomping at the bit,
it's time for this myth to lift off.
It is trying to psych us out.
I know...
I know! Here it comes!
The very precise landing ramp that the heli must adhere to
is making life very difficult for pilot Wolf.
Get away, condor!
And when the wind kicks up, things get harder still.
He's playing games with us!
But eventually...
The eagle has landed.
He did it.
He did it, and we didn't go over!
We survive!
Still there.
20 pounds,
just like the condor,
the biggest flying bird in North America,
still didn't tip the car.
So to get that elusive drop off,
the team is finishing up with some poultry in motion.
We want to see bird-wise what it takes
to get the car to tip off the cliff.
So I spent all morning training 80
of my best hens to land gently on the hood of that car.
They are going to single file line up
at the front and work their way back
until it finally goes off.
Okay, you guys ready?
All ready!
No laughing.
Each hen weighs a pound and a half.
They just sit and play dead.
It's incredible.
So by keeping tally of the number on the hood...
How many you got on there?
- Five. - Oh! Bird down.
...the guys will know how much weight it would take...
- 22. - Starting to get a little nervous.
...to unbalance the car.
60!
Can you believe this, 60 game hens!
That's 90 pounds, man.
90 pounds and still we are hanging on to cliff.
Yet, incredibly, even with all 80 hens on there...
It is like a small person standing on the hood.
...the car still doesn't go.
This is getting stupid.
That's totally stupid.
But Tory came prepared for this eventuality...
I don't like it, I don't like it!
Oh my god! That's crazy.
...and brought a 20 pound robotic turkey
which dances and jigs until...
Oh, my god!
That was crazy!
I wish you could see the trail
of bird destruction behind you.
You have to make it stop.
It is so creepy!
All right.
It is not looking good for this myth.
I know that movie version, where a tiny little bird just kind of...
lands at the end and the whole thing goes,
looking a little busted to me.
Good news is, we got birds to
get the car to go off the cliff.
The bad news is, it took over 80 birds,
140 pounds to be exact.
And the only way that would happen
is if a pterodactyl were to land on the front of your car.
And we all know that that's not gonna happen.
And what that means is this myth is busted.
At least now we know why the chicken crossed the road,
to get out of the way of the falling car!
The MythBusters giant Newton's cradle started with a song...
Five homemade wrecking balls,
one huge steel frame,
huge empty dry dock,
and a wrecking ball Newton cradle.
...but ended with a dong.
That was a hell of a hit.
And a very sad, sad story.
But there may be light at the end of the tunnel.
So check this out.
Even though this is hardened steel,
the areas where the balls are impacting have become
flattened from the impacts,
and it's not just here,
it's throughout all of the balls,
which means that they're all kind of squashing like hamburger patties.
The amount of force here is something on the order of
500,000 times as much as
what's happening with those little balls on the desktop toy.
So, clearly lack of energy is not our problem.
Which means the problem may be
the single cable system
causing the balls to lose focus.
That's kind of a let down.
So, having restrung the balls with an extra cable,
things are looking up.
So, with some preliminary playing
with the five wrecking balls on the two lines,
Jamie and I are actually seeing somewhat
of a radical improvement in their behavior.
That's a little more positive.
We're actually not just seeing a tick and then a boom,
we're actually seeing tick tick, which is...
makes me cautiously optimistic about this next test.
So, why would two strings per ball
work better than a single string?
Well, the Newton's cradle is all about efficient energy transfer.
So if any one of these balls is a little out of line,
that's gonna mess up the efficiency.
The two strings will help keep these all lined up perfectly,
and hopefully that will improve
what we're seeing from this device.
Well, there's only one way to find out.
Wrecking ball size Newton cradle,
V-formation cabling,
in three, two, one. Go, baby!
Yes!
One, two.
- Three. Four. - ...ish.
It's another disappointing result.
But at least there was some improvement?
That was a little bit better.
While our single string gave us a 30% throwout on ball five,
our double string version gave us a 45% throwout on the same ball.
Now, that's nowhere near the desktop version
which gave us 98%
and it's nothing like the clip.
But before this balls-up gets concluded,
there's one last thing to try.
Ball one, pulled back to the max.
Two strings, max pull back.
In three, two, one!
It really is now or never. And...
...it's never.
That went quite a ways.
And now it's all done.
So cue one of the MythBusters models,
failure is always an option.
There goes one of our cameras.
As far as we're aware,
this is the largest Newton's cradle that's ever been built.
And it is a Newton's cradle,
because it is demonstrating exactly the same
physical properties that the small one does.
But as we get larger and larger,
it becomes harder and harder to rein in
the physical losses of energy in the system
from the balls to the cables
to the overhead structure.
While it is a Newton's cradle,
it's just never going to be as
perfect as the little ones are.
So where do we stand?
We set out to replicate what we saw in the clip.
And nobody can say that we didn't give
a wrecking ball size Newton cradle
the best possible chance in succeeding.
But it didn't look anything like the clip.
Nup, this one is totally busted.
Yeah, it's busted.
And it's busted not just because
their best case scenario balls failed to fire,
but also because the viral video was nothing but CGI.
Hey, you know, we ought to start our own demolition company.
We got wrecking balls, we got explosives,
- Absolutely. - whatever you want.
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