Late Condolences to a Brother in Arms
Turns out we aren’t the only idiots in the world. Some other guy decided to copy us and make a Jacob’s ladder. Unlike us, though, they were unable to keep themselves safe. They are no longer with us. Actually, they haven’t been with us for almost a year now. We didn’t get the message until recently.
Homemade Jacob’s Ladder
A young boy, not unlike the members of Blasted Science, built a Jacob’s Ladder in his garage, just like we did. Tragically, he was found dead by his parents.
A 15-year-old boy in Ohio electrocuted himself while attempting a science experiment he saw on YouTube, Reuters reported.
The teenager, Morgan Wojciechowski, tried to conduct a high-voltage experiment, called Jacob’s Ladder, in the garage of his home in northern Ohio. Wojciechowski’s parents found him there on Tuesday, ABC News reported, and emergency crews took him to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Cause of Death
The article suggests that the reason he died was because many online Jacob’s Ladder tutorials don’t have any warning about how dangerous it is:
It’s easy to find a Jacob’s Ladder tutorial on the internet, and it might not tell you you can die from making it.
That’s a pretty awful thing for people to do. How could they just ignore the danger to their viewer’s lives? That’s downright sinister. A big problem for many tutorials is that the author can unintentionally assume that the viewer already knows how dangerous electrical experiments are.
(Editor’s note: contrary to popular belief, we aren’t guilty of this whatsoever; we know how dangerous Jacob’s Ladders are, but choose to ignore it. Because we’re smart, y’all.)
The Lesson
Don’t be a dumb! Compared to the one in the article, our Jacob’s Ladder had double the voltage and we probably took less precautions. There’s also no chance that we’re more intelligent than our deceased compadre. How did we survive? The answer is simply the combination of our two best traits: sheer luck and incredibly thick, resistive skin.
Blasted Science’s first attempt at a Jacob’s Ladder.