Hindenburg Mythbusters

I was just watching the Hindenburg episode of Mythbusters again, and more than any other episode, this one drives me completely nuts. I've just gotta get it off my chest.

So the "myth" they set out to disprove is that the Hindenburg was coated in "rocket fuel" and that is what caused the conflagration. They also state that it is a verifiable fact that the Hindenburg was filled with hydrogen.

So it seems to me what you want to test here is if there's a difference between a hydrogen-filled zeppelin with the historically accurate paint and a hydrogen-filled zeppelin coated with something that is definitely not incendiary. That way, the only change you make is to the coating in question, which is what they want to test.

But that's not what they do. They make two scale-model zeppelins, one filled with hydrogen and coated with the historically-accurate paint, and another filled with normal air and coated with the historically-accurate paint. In their test, they found that the one filled with hydrogen burned faster. Shocking!

It seems to me what they determined is that hydrogen is highly flammable. I don't think that anyone should be surprised by that conclusion. I don't think that anyone would claim that hydrogen is not flammable, or that it had no effect on the Hindenburg fire.

Argh!

I haven't seen it yet here in Oz, but it doesn't surprise me.

I find they do lots of tests like that where they change too many variables or simply the wrong ones (like this one).

No wonder they get so many messages "on the website"

As an engineer and someone looking for real scientific tests, the whole concept of the show is waning on me when they do stuff like this. That said, this is just obviously wrong from what you've said.

it's just an entertainment show

It was definitely one of there best myths. I think sometimes they bite of too much in the build and forget about what they should actually be testing.

Still, it is balanced out by their excellent Lead Balloon myth

Their excuse is that they actually do more tests/research but they don't film it. I don't know how much they actually do extra if any.

Quite a few of the experiments used to test a myth are just wrong.

It is supposed to be based on mostly scientific principles and proper testing.

It is still vastly better than the stupid "science" show we get here called Brainiac. Most of their material is faked.

i have seen that show too, but where is the "science" part in that show?

Brainiac is almost univeral awful. I don't watch it anymore, but I did catch the end of the program the other day where they were playing darts with the board supposedly rigged to blow up a caravan. Which it quite clearly wasn't.

They also claimed to blow up the caravan with semtex, which was a complete lie as it was clearly blown up with some sort of fuel/air explosion.

Still they did do the best test ever of non-Newtonian fluids. They had a decent sized swimming pool filled with the stuff and it didn't appear to be faked.

Actually, they made 3 blimps. But yes, they didn't include the most important one (hydrogen with different paint) for the comparison.

The scale model also fails to factor the thickness of the fabric, but it should nonetheless have provided some meaningful results.

I've seen other episodes that have bothered me a lot more with regards to missed or badly configured tests. The show's format has changed slightly in the past few years and I'm not as impressed with it anymore. There's too much intro schtick tacked on - their banter is usually just too unnatural/fake.

Has the show gone on hiatus for the past year? On Discovery's site I noticed it says the last newly aired episodes were from last summer.

Oh wow, I've seen Braniac. They started showing it in the last days of TechTV here in the states, and it really did seem pretty awful. I remember thinking "this is the kind of crap I'd expect from Americans."

Yeah, sometimes their process is not very good. Other times they seem to put a lot of thought/science/math into the experiments. The brace position comes to mind. At least, they put a lot of thought into it until they actually got into the contraption. Now that was stupid.

and you have to love them for the climax of "Easy as shooting fish in a barrel"

It sure seems to have. For a while there it seemed like they were on for a full year. Maybe they ran out of "myths." (...and sayings, old-wives tales, internet memes, rumors, childhood pranks, fairy tales, made-up stuff "from the web site",...)

That was brilliant. Then the build team got to have fun with that gun for another myth. Can't remember which one now...

That was Machine Gun Lumberjack. Which may well have been the real reason they got hold of if, given that it wasn't strictly needed for Fish in a barrel

Yeah. There are too many cheesey intros which seem to be mainly to use up some time. The "Did you hear about the <blah> myth? Oh, you mean <blah blah blah blah blah?> Exactly!" routine is getting a tad old...

The UK shows have had the announcer replaced with some British guy who gets his jokes from reject Christmas crackers. Not sure how it is in the US with the original.

If you're going to do the "ultimate" test of whether a gun barrel can split then don't weld the metal plug into the barrel...

Thankfully the US shows have much better voice over. The BBC2 versions of the show are even worse, with the myths presented in one chunk and most of Jamie and Adam's banter cut.

The subwoofer episode comes to mind. There are people right here on this BBS who participate in audio competitions, and we've even answered questions about the empeg in relation to SPL competitions, so we know just how powerful some of those systems can be, and how much the vehicles have to be reinforced.

Their answer was to build a poorly-made speaker cone hooked up to... the drive shaft? That was so not anything remotely like a subwoofer or even a speaker.

Despite that, I still adore the show and think it's one of the best things on television. Even if some of the experiments are failures in terms of scientific accuracy, they are teaching critical thinking to the general public in an entertaining way. That's important, and I hope they keep doing it forever.

By the way, I got front row center tickets for this...

I guess what bothered me most about this one is that while many of the other tests they've done have had bad experiments, or they draw incorrect conclusions, with this one they weren't even testing the right thing.

Sometimes I wonder if they do that kind of thing on purpose just to prod their viewership into thinking for themselves a bit.

Or maybe it's that the producers and the video editors don't understand the science very well, and they sometimes accidentally edit out some of the more important stuff. Knowing just how complicated their productions schedule must be, I could imagine that this sort of thing occasionally goes unnoticed before it's too late for a re-edit.

They what? That's unforgivable! When you think about it, the narrator is almost the biggest part of the show. At least, he's the one you hear the most. I can't imagine the show without him!

Although, frankly, I only hear half of his total dialogue. After every commercial break I skip forward about a minute and a half to get past all the recap stuff.

I think there's yet another announcer for the Australian market.

'fraid so, they have the narrator convert all the Imperial units in SI units as well, for no particularly good reason.

On the totally hacked about BBC2 version he also has to fill in all the gaps after they have hacked out Adam and Jamies conversations about what they are doing.

Thank goodness for bittorrent...

I'm guessing its the latter. They've admitted that they've been wrong a few times because they just didn't know enough about the subject matter. The frozen/thawed chicken against aircraft windscreens being the major one.

I was thinking maybe its for the European showings but they'd have to dub/subtitle those anyway wouldn't they?

On the plus side they very occasionally reinstate things that were cut from the US broadcast version. I have occasionally spotted sequences in the Discovery UK versions that weren't in the US versions. Not that that really makes up for it.

I actively dislike the US narrator. Nothing against him personally, he's got a great voice and everything, but he's too "FM-Radio DJ" sounding for my tastes. I'd rather hear someone more geeky and less practiced.

Listen to the UK guy and you may change your mind. He's desperately trying to be funny all the time and do impressions and jokes.

He's actually Australian voice talent doing an American accent. Sometimes you can tell this when he's obviously unfamiliar with colloquialisms that apparently don't exist there. I specifically remember him once accusing Adam of making up words when he was not. I wish I could remember the episode, but it was a relatively recent one.

(Yes, obviously he doesn't write the script, but if he were familiar with it, you'd think that he'd have pointed that out to the producers and they would have changed it.)

Are people really so geocentric that they need their voice talent to share their own regional accent? They do the same thing with Junkyard WarsScrapheap Challenge.

I can see it now, "Redneck Mythbusters"

Elroy: OK, Bobby, we got this here letter from Joleen and she says "If someody is drinkin' a Coke and you make 'em laugh, well, Coke will come shootin' out of their nose!" Well, I say that's a damn myth!

Bobby: Sheeeeit!

Elroy: So we have Joleen here and we're gonna make her take a big swig of Coke!

Bobby: Hell, yeah!

Elroy: So Joleen take a big swig!

Joleen: Okey-dokey <glub, glub, glub>

Elroy: Bobby, tell that joke!

Bobby: What joke?

Elroy: Hell, any old joke! Joleen , don't swallow! Wait up! Bobby, tell a joke!

Bobby: OK, so what do you do with a year's worth of used rubbers?

Elroy: I dunno, what?

Bobby: Melt them into a tire and call it a goodyear! A GOODYEAR!!

Joleen: <SPREEEEEEEN!>

Elroy: Bobby, lookit that!

Bobby: Sheeeeeit!

Elroy: I think we done confirmed a myth!

Bobby: Hell, yeah!

In Australia there's two versions. One on (government funded) SBS which as far as I'm aware is untouched from the American version. The DJ sounding guy. That's the one I watch since it was the first and has the most recent episodes.

On fully commercial 7 they run parts of a show as a segment of another show (can't remember the name) and the replace the voice over/narrator guy with an Australian.

Mythbusters is by Beyond Productions which is an Australian company anyway

Yeah the 7 version is tied up with another Beyond production.

They have a few Aussies in the crew I know. For an Aussie the accent stands out on the few occasions they say something. I guess making it a fully Australian show wouldn't quite have worked.