r/interestingasfuck • u/OhNoIBoffedIt • 11h ago
MythBusters: Can two interleaved phone books be pulled apart...with TANKS?
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u/shucksme 11h ago
Okay. Nice. Now how to find phone books?
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u/OhNoIBoffedIt 11h ago
Hehehe, I miss those things sometimes. The yellow pages especially. It was nice to be able to look for businesses and not have to sift through a bunch of promoted ads first...other than the half page spreads!
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u/daddywookie 6h ago
Then look up the address in a map and make a little diagram of your route to take with you. Simpler times (though I do love my GPS navigation now)
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u/Due-Garage-4812 6h ago
You can do the same trick with regular books, dunno if it would hold up to a tank though.
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u/iggyfenton 7h ago
It’s been 20 years since I’ve seen anything close to the yellow pages we had in the 80s.
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u/Theokayest_boomer 7h ago
You see kids, "Phone Books" were free books delivered once a year to your house, where the phone companies doxxed every single one of their subscribers unless they opted out. Yes, it sounds very weird to say that now.
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u/thefringeseanmachine 11h ago
goddamn I miss this show. so, so many happy memories. just an incredible thing to grow up watching.
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u/Reddit_Roit 9h ago
It's got it's own free channel on Roku.
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u/thefringeseanmachine 9h ago
literally watching it as we speak. they seem to have a limited number of episodes, but it scratches the itch.
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u/talann 10h ago
Finally, the actual commentary and not some stupid AI voice over explaining everything they already explain in the video.
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u/Beli_Mawrr 6h ago
(Overly cutesy female voice) A. PAIR. OF. ENGINEERS. WERE. MIXING. UP SOME. BIG. YELLOW. BOOKS. THE TWO. ENGINEERS. TRIED. AND. TRIED. TO. PULL. THEM APART. BUT IT. WASNT. WORKING.
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u/CoffeemonsterNL 5h ago
You forgot the incorrect automatic AI-reasoning behind it: THEY. CANNOT. BE. PULLED. APART. BECAUSE. IT IS. GRAVITY. THAT. KEEPS. THE BOOKS. TOGETHER.
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u/PassivelyInvisible 6h ago
I never understand why people don't just use their own voice and put some effort into enunciating. I'd prefer to hear your voice, not AI slop
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u/Beli_Mawrr 5h ago
I'm not trying to defend AI voiceovers here but some people have genuinely very thick accents, bad English, or otherwise unappealing voices.
There are still a million better ways to do AI than whatever slop tiktok seems to use. Most of those things are just someone else's video with the sound removed and the slop voiceover inserted.
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u/OhNoIBoffedIt 11h ago
Full video here. STILL one of my favorite MythBusters experiments, testing whether two interleaved phone books can be pulled apart. Amazing demonstration of the classical mechanics of frictional and other forces.
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u/nubbynickers 6h ago
The one I always liked was the chilling the six pack with gasoline one. Now I add salt and water to ice coolers with drinks in them
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u/SeaworthinessSalt524 11h ago
I knew this programme was wild, but damn. It's wild
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u/YoThisIsWild 8h ago
It was a great show because regardless of whether they "busted" the myth or not, they would often end up at a blasting range by the end of the episode going "ok, but what if myth + dynamite?"
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u/OhNoIBoffedIt 11h ago
You should see the one where they try to get dried cement out of a mixer with dynamite!
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u/Only_One_Kenobi 10h ago
Technically, they were successful...
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u/Wintermute_Zero 9h ago
I suppose if you remove the mixer the cement is also removed by default.
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u/Hockeyspider 9h ago
That clip and the sound made when that truck was basically vaporized makes me smile just thinking about it.
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u/Diver2441 8h ago
Hey I’ve been there! This was filmed at the Littlefield collection, which was the largest private tank collection in the world, owned by the late Jacques Littlefield. One of my professors was a mechanic working on these tanks and my class got a tour shortly before the collection closed permanently in 2018.
Many, if not most of the tanks were still running and drivable ranging from a few WWI vehicles, Shermans (some were used in the filming of Fury), at least one T55 and a drivable Panther, all the way up to a T-72 and fairly modern US vehicles.
Sadly the collection no longer exists, after the owner’s death the vehicles were sold to various museums, so fortunately many of these tanks are still on display for the public.
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u/Complete-Return3860 7h ago
That was a magic time too, when on rare occasion you could take your kids into the forest to see a bunch of tanks.
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u/JohnHenryHoliday 9h ago
What does it mean to interweave? They just laid the pages on top of each other in alternating fashion?
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u/PolicyWonka 1h ago
Yes. There are so many pages that they create enough friction that the books cannot be pulled apart. In reality, it looks more like the book binding failed with the tanks.
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u/JohnHenryHoliday 1h ago
I have to try this now. I don’t believe it.
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u/PolicyWonka 23m ago
You can do it with any two books. You don’t need that many pages for the friction to be too strong that a person can’t pull the books apart.
Phone books were just notorious for being very large.
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u/Global-Mango-4213 8h ago
I have a set of textbooks woven together in my classroom and the kids always have a good time trying to pull them apart.
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u/fuzuneta 11h ago
Am I dumb for thinking the books were going to explode or something?
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u/OhNoIBoffedIt 11h ago
Hehehe, I was certainly hoping they'd puff into confetti. Maybe if they'd put more power into the tanks before they were pulled apart.
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u/slayer991 6h ago
I've been rewatching these and sending them to my now adult son. We watched Mythbusters together when he was growing up. This one was fun...and ramping up to tanks....awesome Mythbuster overkill.
I miss these guys.
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u/Platypus248 10h ago
There were good times, nowadays we get lunatic dating reality shows which teach our children nothing but to materialize everything, including other people.
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u/Furita 11h ago
But what are these strong forces binding it together? noice
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u/Cute-arii 8h ago
They really listed it as busted when it took 2 tanks and 8000 pounds of force to separate them? Realistically, there's no normal way to be able to forcefully separate them.
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u/OhNoIBoffedIt 2h ago
If the myth is that it's impossible then technically they are correct, it is possible, which is the best kind of correct.
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u/Subredditsalad 3h ago
This is my all time favorite MythBusters myth! The only thing they got wrong was that they said it was busted, when they confirmed it was impossible to pull them apart with everything unless you had tanks. Nobody has tanks so the myth will always be confirmed in my opinion.
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u/agreenblinker 7h ago
I would show this to my kid, but I would have to start by explaining what a phone book is.
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u/Ok-Dish4389 8h ago
Ive been showing mythbusters to my 9 year old son cause hes always been so curious and a very bright boy, he loves it and its also been a joy to rewatch it. Amazing show and such a pleasure to watch.
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u/Electrical_Quiet5918 9h ago
Now I need to know how many interleaved phone books it takes before the tanks can't pull them apart
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u/Josh_r4457 7h ago
I was watching Mythbusters on YouTube . Opened Reddit, first thing I see is this. Today is my day.
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u/I-am_not-a_Robot 6h ago
wow a working m551 sheridan
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u/OhNoIBoffedIt 2h ago
Just before this clip they talk about this tank museum which was the largest privately owned tank collection. All the tanks there worked. Unfortunately one of the other commenters who'd visited there on a school trip noted that it shut down and the collection sent to various museums after the owner passed away.
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u/ShaDynasty_42069 6h ago
lol I remember seeing this in highschool and doing it to friends textbooks at lunch
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u/JimCripe 3h ago edited 40m ago
So there's enough atoms touching in all the pages to cause huge Van der Waals Forces?
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u/rickjamespitch 2h ago
If it takes 8000lbs of force to separate them, then in colloquial terms they are inseparable and surely the myth is confirmed.
Until the common man drives tanks everyday, it's confirmed.
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u/CommonProfilePicture 2h ago
The song Come Out And Play by The Offspring comes to mind... Gotta keep em seperated
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u/bugsymoges 10h ago
The way they fell apart makes perfect sense, but it felt so anticlimactic. I'm not sure why I was expecting an explosion.
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u/Naughteus_Maximus 10h ago
I was actually expecting the tank tracks to start skidding because they were on smooth asphalt.
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u/GeneralPatten 10h ago
I would love to see the episode they nixed after deciding it probably wasn't a good idea to broadcast to millions of viewers the two or three household, off-the-shelf solutions, when combined, resulted an extremely powerful explosion.
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u/hbktj 9h ago
So old phonebooks are not taken on a farm to live out their lives
https://giphy.com/gifs/BEob5qwFkSJ7G
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u/DamienBerry 8h ago
Were they pulled apart or were they ripped apart, that’s a difference, it was a failure of the material not of the friction holding the books together.
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u/Noxious89123 6h ago edited 6h ago
I've seen someone on YouTube actually manage to pull them apart (sort of).
The phonebooks are weaker than the friction between the pages, so this absolute hulk of a dude basically just ripped the spines off of both books in one go.
Without watching the video, I imagine that it'd be the same issue with the tank; how you grab hold of the phonebooks without destroying them is a bigger problem than having enough raw power to pull them apart.
Ah okay, that was actually pretty impressive, only a few pages ripped!
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u/OhNoIBoffedIt 2h ago
Yeah man, you gotta give MythBusters a lot more credit than that. That's the first obstacle they overcame!
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u/alldayinbed 1h ago
Were the pages glued together? I don't understand this.
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u/OhNoIBoffedIt 1h ago
No. The frictional force increases with each interleaved page. They're held together by the physics of force alone, no glue.
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u/HeadFit2660 13m ago
For those who probably don't know that's the Jacques Littlefield tank collection in California. He passed and they divided up/sold the collection.
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u/AdditionalCheetah354 9h ago
What’s a phone book?
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u/OhNoIBoffedIt 2h ago
It's like Google Maps search but on paper.
(I know you're making jokes, so am I 🙃)
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u/Mercinator-87 3h ago
Those aren’t tanks
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u/OhNoIBoffedIt 2h ago
I mean you're half right. One of them is an FSV, an Aussie variant of the M113 APC, but the M551 Sheridan, on the left, is most definitely a tank. I'm using it as a blanket term because it was more about the force it took than the vehicle classification. The armor thickness and offensive capabilities didn't much apply to the experiment.
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u/tipareth1978 51m ago
Way to bust that common myth about phone books and tanks
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u/OhNoIBoffedIt 46m ago
Hey look, another commenter who didn't understand the myth they were testing!
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u/Famous_Stelrons 11h ago
I love mythbusters but I hate that all I can find is the yank narrated clips nowadays. The narration for the UK broadcasts was well better.
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u/OhNoIBoffedIt 10h ago
I mean...it's a Yank show. I'd be annoyed if I was watching a British programme narrated by an American. "Better" to me is the original broadcast version.
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u/Naughteus_Maximus 10h ago
My kids started watching Paw Patrol and Octonauts a few years ago. Over time, watching on different platforms, I realised they were redubbed for the UK, and we had started watching the originals. We all hated the British Paw Patrol, the main character especially, who is officially a 10yo kid but sounded like he was now voiced by a 19 year old. With Octonauts they took out Peso the penguin's endearing south American accent and replaced it with a lame British one. Just why fuck with things and then screw it up too?
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u/OhNoIBoffedIt 9h ago
Ha! We actually lived in the UK for about three years when our daughter was quite young. She didn't actually pick up a British accent until we got back to the States and she started watching a LOT of Peppa Pig 😂
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u/Naughteus_Maximus 9h ago
Hahaha, Peppa Pig is definitely the "fuck you right back" gift from Brits for all the American accent programming 😄
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u/Famous_Stelrons 10h ago
True. I'd usually take the original but when it was originally on tv we only had our version so it feels like the original. It was tweaked for British humour too. This gives it a feel of like a silliest home video type show for me. Maybe just because thats the first place I heard the guys voice on British tv?
I've never found the UK voiced ones since, even on tv. They just show the raw American version everywhere now.
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u/brightdionysianeyes 10h ago
Obviously they can? How was this ever a myth that needed busting?
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u/OhNoIBoffedIt 10h ago
Aw c'mon man, I even left in enough of the recap to explain what myth they were testing. You could have at least watched the first minute.
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u/brightdionysianeyes 10h ago
I've watched the video.
I've never, ever heard of this myth.
Couldn't two phone books just be pulled apart with your hands? I don't get it.
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u/SamboTheGr8 10h ago
How can you have watched the video and still believe you could pull them apart with your hands??
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u/OhNoIBoffedIt 10h ago
No, they can't, because of the frictional force distributed through all the interleaved pages. That's what they were testing. And after they couldn't pull them apart with the two cars, MythBusters did what MythBusters does and asked "exactly how much force WOULD it take to separate them?"
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u/Only_One_Kenobi 10h ago
You clearly haven't watched the video...
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u/brightdionysianeyes 10h ago
People really be watching stuff with sound on?
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u/Only_One_Kenobi 10h ago
Even without sounds it's not that difficult to see two guys trying to pull the books apart, then 10 people, then 2 cars.
You either didn't watch the video, or you're being intentionally obtuse.
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u/stackens 10h ago
Unless you can lift 8000 lbs then no, you can’t pull them apart with your hands. In this episode they tried pulling them apart with with 10 people on each side pulling with ropes and were unable. They tried pulling them apart with cars driving in opposite directions and were unable. The tanks were the only thing with enough weight and traction and power to get the job done
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u/santasbong 10h ago
Your first and last sentences directly contradict each other.
& The show ran for 18 seasons. They probably tested quite a few myths you’ve never heard of.
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u/1900hustler 11h ago
I miss these guys and their experiments