Ping Pong Balls Make Plane Buoyant (Nov, 1936)
Ping Pong Balls Make Plane Buoyant
MORE than 10,000 ping pong balls were in the wings and tail of the Vultee airplane in which Harry Richman, orchestra leader, and Dick Merrill, former Eastern Air Lines pilot, flew from New York to London on Sept. 3. Their unique purpose was to supply buoyancy to the airplane in the event that engine trouble caused a forced landing at sea.
The tiny celluloid balls added less than 30 pounds weight to the plane, but pre-flight tests indicated that their combined buoyancy would support the plane on the water indefinitely. The flying team ordered 30,000 balls but dealers could supply only 10,000.
Donald Duck approves!
From Wiki:
A 1949 Donald Duck ten-pager features Donald raising
a yacht from the ocean floor by filling it with ping
pong balls. In December 1965 Karl Krøyer, a Dane,
lifted the sunken freight vessel Al Kuwait in the
Kuwait Harbor by filling the hull with 27 million tiny
inflatable balls of polystyrene[5]. Although the suggestion
is often made, Krøyer denies having been inspired by
this Barks story. Some sources claim Krøyer was denied
a Dutch patent registration (application number NL 6514306)
for his invention on the grounds that the Barks story was
a prior publication of the invention. However no definite
proof of this story is available.[6][7] Krøyer later
successfully raised another ship off Greenland using the
same method, and several other sunken vessels worldwide have
since been raised by modified versions of this concept.
The television show MythBusters also tested this method
and was able to raise a small boat.
Wont ping pong balls become loose and wedge on the flap? And besides, he doesn’t need ping pong balls. The guy looks pretty buoyant himself!
A few years back, somebody brought up the idea of raising the Titanic with golf balls. It didn’t get far, considering the Titanic is in two large pieces (and about half a million small ones), both of which are open to the water, and it would likely disintegrate if it were raised even six inches.
Golf balls? I need another cup of coffee. Ping pong balls, of course!
I believe the balls in the photo were just put there for the photo. The real ones would be inside closed compartments in the wings, stabilizer, and other sections of the aircraft.
Blurgle, I think you were right the first time.
Ping Pong balls would be crushed in 100 feet or so.
Steel spheres? Glass spheres?
Either way, the Titanic is a poor candidate for being raised.
they should reconsider using celluloid balls, since celluloid is a very, VERY flamable, almost explosive substance: cellulose nitrate, aka gunpowder…
I think you mean Guncotton.
yeah, guncotton!
Awesome, can’t see it catching on though!
I dunno, kind of cool, but like you say!
Didn’t Douglas Bader, the famed legless fighter pilot of WWII, have his prosthetic legs filled with ping pong balls when he flew in the Pacific theatre?
Ping pong balls are cellulose, not nitrocellulose (aka gun cotton), which is basically nitroglycerin-soaked fibers (glossing over the details, of course.)
Mythbusters proved this it works
Elliot: Actually Mythbusters investigated whether you could “pump in” ping-pong balls to raise a sunken boat.
Also, for the record nitrocellulose is NOT cotton soaked in nitroglycerin. In fact, gun cotton (nitrocellulose) soaked in nitroglycerin is the explosive Cordite.
The nitrocellulose used to make ping pong balls has a lower nitrogen content than the nitrocellulose used in explosives or guncotton and is not explosive. Flammable, yes. Explosive, no. At least not in any ordinary circumstance. Millions of people play ping-pong in the U.S. and there are ping-pong balls all over the place. When was the last time you heard of a ping-pong ball explosion or even a fire.