Bullets HITTING Bullets in Slow Motion - THE IMPOSSIBLE SHOT - Smarter Every Day 287

Three, two, one. Fire (BANG!) Hey, it's me, Destin. Welcome back to Smarter Every Day. I'm at the American Museum of Natural History. It is a Smithsonian Museum. And this is something I saw ten years ago and it changed the way I think about

bullets

, ballistics, probability and things like that. They are two

bullets

from the Civil War that collided. Look at this. It's poorly lit so I'll have to turn on my phone light here. Well. I don't know if you can see this. So these two mini bullets met nose to nose. The plaque here says in Fredericksburg in December 1862.

Let me see if I can control the glare here. But look at that. Two bullets perfectly aligned. Now, the interesting thing is that this is not an indirect hit. Like a complete transfer of momentum between the two. So you have a bullet going one direction, a bullet going the other direction, they hit and stop perfectly. I've seen many attempts at trying to reproduce this, but they all fail. I'm going to try this today. It will take a little engineering, but let's try it. In fact, I have had some internal conflict about making this video because the Internet video has become sensational and spectacular.

The moment I visualized a bullet

hitting

another bullet in my head, I thought about all the camera angles. I'm like, I have to make the video, but I want to do it in a smart, respectful way that doesn't seem like I'm trying to beat the Internet. I just want to see this and I want to take you with me. So I want us to think together about how we're going to address the security aspect of this. That being said, never do this. I worked for 15 years as a missile flight test engineer and had mentors who

slow

ly guided me through the safety processes.

And I made mistakes, and they corrected me, and they were always watching over my shoulder. So I'm not just a guy trying to do something complicated. I've done much more complicated things like this with larger groups of people. And we did it safely. And the way we did it is with intellectual humility. So we're going to have an air and atmosphere of intellectual humility about it. Let's start talking about what we have to do. If we are going to give him a bullet. With a bullet like this, we have to have guns, right? So we have two empty weapons.

If I go here and put this gun right here, I have to aim it so the bullet goes right here in the middle, right? And I have to aim another gun from this side. And the problem is that I, who is there with that weapon, am in the firing path of this weapon. So we have a problem, right? Well, let's say you figure out how to wield weapons, you have to think about other things. Good? Let's say we load this gun. How do we load this safely? Because we're below the reach of that one, right? How do we pull the triggers?

That's one thing. And once we do that, we have all these mechanical inconsistencies. Because these things are not repeatable in terms of timing, which means those bullets might not be right here in the middle where we line up with that high-speed camera. It could be here. It could be here. What happens if this bullet misses? Will this bullet destroy this weapon? All this means is that we have to over-engineer this. There were four of us involved in the design of all this. First of all, my friend Ernie. He is excellent in electronic design. He has years of experience designing circuits for explosive systems.

You may recognize Jeremy Fielding. He is an excellent educator. He is a fantastic mechanical designer and designs all kinds of crazy gadgets. Jeremy helped design the security shield. He also worked on an ingenious contraption. I'll show you in a minute. Then there's my friend David, a mechanical designer, who you may recognize from the vortex collision episode. He is really good at

every

thing he does. He also reloads ammunition as a hobby, so it was a perfect fit for his skills. We

slow

ly worked on this project in the background for years. In fact, we even used the shield as part of the supersonic baseball cannon video.

Modern ammunition is quite different than Civil War ammunition, so we settled on the 45-long Colt cartridge for this experiment. There are several reasons for this. It is a straight wall cartridge. It is very easy to design and looks old, like a bullet from the civil war. We considered molding our own bullets using an authentic Civil War bullet mold. But in the end, this was so easy to get that we chose 45 cold pitches. Is the time. I finally make the video I was waiting for. To do it for a long time. This is the dirty place for many reasons.

Number one, it's a bowl. So if the bullet misses this way, it will go to the ground. If you fail this way, you will go to the ground. The sun is up there. And so this is what we've been waiting for here. What do you think of this piece of land here? - Did you find a good low point? Yes. The first thing you should do when you do a test like this is establish the center of the Earth. I declare this "The Center of the Earth" right here. We made this big I beam, this is our data.

Let's assume that it is rigid and

every

thing is measured from it. Once we got it into position, it was time to grab the gun. This thing is heavy. Well, this seems like a moment. These are the simplest weapons we could make. They are very special and we will talk about it. That's in a minute. But first we have to bolt them to the I-beam. Before we delve into how these things work, let's take a second and look at the mechanics of how a normal gun works. With a mechanical firearm, you have something called lock time. Now, I have the high speed camera set up here and I'm going to set up the camera here.

I'm going to look for the high-speed camera trigger and the gun. "Lock time" is the time it takes for the mechanical hammer to drop and strike the firing pin and firing pin to activate the percussion primer located on the back of a bullet. David, can I load? - Forward. And I'll take a high-speed camera when it happens. Are you ready, David? - Ready. Alright. Three, two, one. You will notice that it takes time for the spring in the handle to accelerate the hammer toward the primer. That's called "Block Time". From the moment you pull the trigger to the moment the primer is activated, that is the lockup time.

All that follows is the "Bullet Dwell Time", how long it takes to light the primer for the powder to ignite and for the bullet to exit. So most weapons have a lock time of about ten milliseconds or less. In our case, we are going to hit bullet against bullet. So we cannot control the dwell time. He will ignite the gunpowder for as long as necessary. But what we can control is the blocking time. And the way we do that is we replace that mechanical trigger system with an electric trigger system. In fact, we replaced the mechanical choke with an electric choke.

Alright, here's how this works. This is the gun and it's just a cannon. That's all it is, a ready-to-use keg. And this is the gap. So the bullet goes right here, it goes right there, like this. This right here connects right here. So we have a positive side and a negative side, so everything is grounded. We have a stationary plate on the bottom and you tighten these screws right here to change the asthma from left to right. We're pivoting around this point right here. David, what would you say about the lifting technique here? This is something primitive we had lying around, just a locking screw.

Okay, so how do you load one bullet and then load another bullet without being downstream of the first bullet? Well, I drew something on a napkin. My friend Jeremy Fielding has a CNC plasma and he helped make this, he designed it. We talked about how to do it. Alright, go ahead and unlock the first weapon. Yes. Cool, right? I know right? Well, basically, here is an ellipse in a piece of steel that can withstand the impact of a bullet. And the idea is that we come back here and load a bullet. We activate the breach, you can close it and we block it.

And then once we blocked it, you see that the bullet would hit there. And then any fragments of the bullet would go in that direction. I like it a lot more than I thought. Dude!!! It's amazing. The engineering is done. It's time for paperwork, which is extremely important. Yes, we have a really cool locking system, but that won't keep us safe if we don't use it correctly. So what I did at this point was create a checklist that thoroughly details how these things should be done. And most importantly, I made these stick figure drawings to try to explain to myself how everything could be done safely.

I'm not going to show you all the safety measures here. There are so many things that go into this circuit, voltages, all these things. But if there's one thing I've learned over the last few years doing dangerous things, it's that the moment I start to think I've got it figured out is the moment I get into trouble. So at this point, I knew it was extremely important to involve other experienced people so they could critique what I had done so I could keep myself safe. The advantage of living in Huntsville is that you have friends who test explosives and know what's up.

This is Sheldon. This is Cooperative. We'll do a safety checklist and they'll tell me what I did wrong... and probably... Will they be mean... or nice? Mean! Mean?! Alright, let's go for it. These men are world-class subject matter experts and conversations like this are one of my favorite things to do. They made suggestions and corrections that were obvious as soon as they were said, and that's why I love doing this. - When you approach the south canyon to remove the chamber... I was going to say you could... - Disconnect first? - Disconnect first - Write it down - Just ask. - Let's do it, so where would that go? - Between three and four.... {Destin and Coop's tone indicates that they have worked together} - Well, I'm thinking if you put a hangfire on this one and that one it's fine.... - Yes..? -I guess one has probably been

shot

and this one hasn't fired then… so we wouldn't have that problem. - So if the high-speed camera, for example, says that it shoots... (thinking about it) - Yes.

There's still a chance it could fire this way if you're on this side of the shield with it open... - Yes. - So... I need a misfire procedure for every... possible...? - Correct - Yes. - ......Well. Yes you're right. This is useful. Thank you. Get smart people in your life who love you enough to smile and tell you that you are wrong. Okay, first

shot

. We started by testing each gun independently to make sure all the hardware worked and that our checklist ran smoothly. - Verify that there is NO voltage. Three, two, one, fire. Our idea was to shoot at a piece of foam and then align both barrels at the same point in space.

We also wanted to test our background colors to see which would work best with the high speed camera. Very good, I vote for us to do it. -But do you want to go see where these holes are? Well, that makes sense. Ha ha ha! - I'm pretty sure... - (Sarcastically) You make sense, David. - Yes. They are significantly out of place. - Oh, wow!! Not crazy. That's the same hole. - Oh, is it? Well. Yeah, I was looking at the waste paper there. Once we looked at the holes, we realized they were a little off, so we got a laser to make some adjustments.

We decided not to move the north canyon. It was going to be our reference point and we decided to move the south barrel so the holes would line up and hopefully the bullets would intercept. So here we go... It took us years to get to THIS moment. - Two bullets? - Two bullets... - I'm going to generate stray voltage here. Parasitic voltage checking is good here. Parasitic voltage check is good. Are you undercover? - Yeah! - I'm loading the north gun. {Slight mechanical noises as the breech is screwed together} {There is a tense silence. Destin and David are switching to a more disciplined form of communication} - Okay, lock down the north canyon.

It's good! Well. Loading the south gun. We lost all our light. Alright, unlock. Here is the arm plug. - Armed. - Ready? - When you are. Three, two, one, fire. I felt fragments here. Did you hear it? - uh-uh (no) It happened... We're about to see... This is about to happen. I felt fragments. I didn't feel them... but I heard them. I was going to say, can you elaborate on that? Yeah. I mean, we're about to see a bullet hit another bullet. David, I think this just happened. Well. Wow. Alright. The heart beats faster than expected.

Whatever it is, it will be something to build on. Well. They are bullet fragments. Check it out. That was only about five or six inches to the right or center, right? Oh, David, now we know what we're doing. Oh man, that's pretty dramatic. Yes. Third time is the charm. David, we did it on the third shot. You could almost say it was the first shot. Yeah, it's the first time we tried it, there was a little feeling inside, like, did we really just do it? Maybe we can skip the part of the video where we're having a hard time figuring it out because we did it the first time because we're so good.

No, we are not. You will see it in aif I was holding him back. And maybe even that air tag contained it. He almost stayed. Yes, only a small piece of bullet remains. Well. We have my wallet, an unfired bullet, and the bullet we took from there. First the bullet. Digital scale, 14 grams. Well. What happens to what we take out? 22 grams. We had a partial meltdown inside the wallet and I've decided it doesn't count. I love to do this. Thanks to everyone who supports on patreon. You help me do this. It takes years to do a project like this.

And I'm grateful to everyone who supports me on patreon.com/

smarter

everyday. This is not over. We have ideas. Let's uh, well, I'm not going to tell you what we're going to do. We only have ideas and we are going to try to solve this. So if you consider supporting on Patreon, I do a few things. Everyone gets a baseball when they sign up there. And also every year we have what we call a sticker team for the people who "stay" with me. The first year it was the Supersonic baseball team. The second year we had the James Webb Space Telescope.

That was a holographic sticker. That was incredible. I'm thinking this year we should have some kind of bullet-on-bullet team or something. So if you want to consider staying with me, you can do so at patreon.com/

smarter

everyday. Additionally, there is an email list if you would like to check it out. I promise not to spam you. I'll let you know when I upload new videos and leave a link below for that. Anyway, I'm grateful to everyone who watches this. I would do this again even if internet videos didn't exist. This is what I love to do and I appreciate you being here.

I appreciate that you are consuming this content, that my friends and I spent so much time creating it. We are grateful. Anyway, I'm Destin. Thank you so much. You are getting smarter every day. Have a good. Bye bye.