Who among us has not tested a 9-volt battery by touching its leads to our tongues?<\/p>\n
I discovered this as a child–taking the 9-volt, sticking out my tongue, touching the exposed leads to the tongue, and getting a shock as the current flows. At a recent inventory, after I’d pulled a weak 9-volt battery from one of the portable scanners I touched it to the tongue, and after a brief shock I said, “Well, it’s still got some<\/i> juice in it.”<\/p>\n
I’d never have thought that testing a 9-volt battery’s juice with one’s tongue could have potentially fatal consequences.<\/p>\n
Could someone die from a 9-volt?<\/p>\n
Well, it’s really, really<\/i> unlikely<\/a>:<\/p>\n Dr Xheng Hu of the School of Electrical and Information Engineering at the University of Sydney confirms that a 9V battery does not have enough voltage to kill a person by testing it on the tongue.<\/p>\n He adds: “It cannot be entirely excluded however. If a person is very ill, for example, has heart problems, or has a heart pacemaker that could be disrupted, and so on, they could possibly die from testing the battery in this way. But normally it wouldn’t happen.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n So, now we know–a 9-volt battery, applied to the tongue, won’t kill you. If any of you were worried, fear not! You, too, can test 9-volts with the tongue and suffer nothing more than a mild shock and the taste of metal. \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Who among us has not tested a 9-volt battery by touching its leads to our tongues? I discovered this as a child–taking the 9-volt, sticking out my tongue, touching the exposed leads to the tongue, and getting a shock as the current flows. At a recent inventory, after I’d pulled a weak 9-volt battery fromContinue reading “On Testing Batteries”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[229],"tags":[1096,396],"class_list":["post-817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-work","tag-batteries","tag-silly","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=817"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/817\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}