The Red Hot Nickel Ball (RHNB) is well established on YouTube, but meet its new companion, the Red Hot Glass Ball. Super-hot metal can survive a cool bath in water, but what happens when molten glass goes for a swim?
The video below begins much like the Red Hot Nickel Ball ones do — with a blowtorch. After the glass is glowing and molten, it is picked up with pliers and dropped into a dish of water. The surface immediately fractures as the water makes contact. It’s the same reaction you get when you drop an ice cube into a room-temperature beverage — thermal shock.
Thermal shock, sometimes called heat shock, occurs when a thermal gradient is formed in different parts of an object. This gradient causes the material to expand or contract at different rates, which can lead to breakage. Glass is an “amorphous non-crystalline” solid, which means it can fail in dramatic fashion if the integrity is compromised. That’s just what happens here.
The outside of the glass bead begins contracting much faster than the inside, which is still very hot. After the outside begins to give, the stress continues to build until the glass shatters. It happens in a split second, and the remaining bits are very brittle from the network of cracks. Will the Red Hot Glass Ball make additional appearances? Maybe, but we’ll go through a lot of glass. Watching the glass ball lose is the fun part (unlike the RHNB, which always wins).