MythBusters - Barrel Of Bricks

" This one is the barrel of bricks myth."

" Oh, this is when the guy was trying to take bricks off of a roof and the barrel was too heavy and it drags him up, hits him on the way up."

" Cracks his skull, injures his collar bone, keep shooting straight up until he's about 2 knuckles deep into the pulley."

" Of course the barrel exploded when it hit the ground, losing the load, then his weight was obviously heavier than the barrel's weight."

" The barrel goes back up and this guy goes back down. He hits the barrel about halfway down."

" And I've even heard that he then let go of the rope and what was remaining of the barrel came down and hit him."

" But he survives?"

" Yes."

" So we're going to replicate this."

" Yeah, it's going to be tricky."

" This is a study in Physics and bad luck; victim holds rope, heavy barrel pulls him up, the barrel hits the ground and loses it's load so the victim falls, victim lets go of the rope, barrel falls. To test this myth, the guys will have to creat as building-site scaffold over 10 meters high. They'll run a rope through a pulley at the top with a 250 kilogram barrel of bricks on 1 side, and the victim on the other. [unk]"

" You got any idea what these are for? Okay. Am I about to feel really, really stupid?"

" Probably."

" Now that's a floor."

" Both of them know the risks."

" More than 10 feet can break limps. At where we are at about 30 feet, you could easily die falling that high."

" The pulley is attached to a crossbar at the top of the scaffold with 250 kilograms in the barrel plus the counter balance on the other side, there would be 500 kilograms pulling on the rig."

" Where the pulley is, it's actually pulling on the back side of the scaffolding, so in fact, a tremendous amount of force is on 2 little bolts that are holding the back of the scaffolding up."

" The guys are also worried about the strength of the barrels."

" Here's perhaps the critical question, when the barrel supposedly falls, it breaks and lets go of it's bricks, do you think these barrels will do that?"

" Personally, I doubt it."

" See, I think, they'll fall out on the first try. I think it will shatter."

" Oh."

" You wanna bet?"

" I don't know. Here we go again."

" Come on. I got a dollar. Here we go."

" In 5, 4, 3, 2, 1."

" The barrel didn't fail."

" Alright, I owe you a dollar. There you go."

" Even with 250 kilograms of bricks falling from 10 meters, the barrel stays intact. The barrel is supposed to break open, spill the bricks, fly back up to the pulley, then fall when the rope is released. Instead, buster is left hanging."

" Okay remember Adam, it may be bricks everywhere."

" You got that knife [unk] of a board down there, I don't know what that's gonna do."

" You don't know what it's gonna do? It's gonna wreck the barrel for us."

" In 5, 4, 3, 2."

" It worked perfectly."

" That was fun. That was really cool. I mean it went up, it went down, it went up, then it went down. It's like a dummy getting beatin' every which way on. All through the whole process that was hysterical."

" Best of all, they finally managed to break the barrel. The board did the trick, but what does it mean for the myth?"

" If you were dumb enough to load a barrel that had already been modified to fail, I'd see that it, you know, the sequence of events is definitely possible."

" Just the fact that we were able to get what we got is, I believe, a very strong proof that it was conceivable."

" But alas, not true."

" Well on the case of this particular story, it was printed in a 1918 joke book. So, it seems that it may have started as the brainchild of 1 person."