YIKES! exploding light bulbs!! !

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I was sitting at the shop today getting some work done with it all nice and quiet after everyone else had gone home...no phones ringing, no radios tuned to annoying clearchannel rant stations...just nice and quiet. The noisest thing was the air conditioner, then POW!! !! In a shower of sparks and glass, the bulb above my workbench blows up! I jolted so hard that my knees put dents in the center drawer of my desk.

Luckily, I wasn't underneath it at the time, but it blew a fuse too, making the place dark, as the rest of the lights around me went out too. It took me several minutes just sitting there in the dark before I calmed myself down and came to my senses as to what happened. With a flashlight and a pair of pliars, I removed what was left of the blown bulb, then I stumbled my way to the utility room and reset the circuit breaker, then found another bulb to install.

Anybody had this happen before. I've burned out lightbulbs before, but never this spectacular!! !

Was it a spherical one or one of the infamous Flourescent ones?

I remember walking along the corridors at school with Merlin, and then 'Pow!' a light above me shattered into a billion and one peices! I was wearing my cap as usual, so the shards just flowed off it and onto the ground. It was so cool.

I've seen that happen three times in the past two years here at the TV studio on campus. High wattage halogen bulbs are very sensitive to anything.

In fact one just happened this afternoon. We were using a mole-richardson 2000 watt soft box to kill a shadow on a talents face when with out warning, one of the two bulbs blew out, taking out the glass shield with it, sending shards flying everywhere. This very same light blew up a month ago with the same results.

Can't resist telling you about the game show pilot David Letterman did called The Riddlers. A bulb explodes over JoAnne Worley's head. She bolts the stage in fright and to calm her, Letterman assures her, "Oh, it's just a little sniper fire. Happens all the time on new shows like this."

TAKE COVER

/me dives for cover

When i was reading in bed the lamp beside it blew up, plungimg the room into darkness, not only did i step on a bit of glass (ouch) as i went to put the main light on, but then out of the many bulbs stacked in the cupboard i couldn't find one that wasn't a screw in (sigh).

I have never seen this happen before but have broken several while they were on over the years in customers basements with my head and once had a florescent light transformer melt and start dripping hot plastic all over my desk at school

Lightbulbs are a good place to hide bombs. Though that's mostly for when one turns on the lights. I forget if I read that in the Anarchist Cookbook or Terrorist Handbook.

(Yeah, I read some fun things ^_^)

For a bomb of the size of an ordinary lightbulb to cause real damage, you have to put in some of the most powerful explosives that were ever made. At least RDX or HMX. To get these, you must either have access to military stuff or a pretty good arsenal of chemicals and equipment.

Or gunpowder and ball bearings. Small amounts of gunpowder are far more dangerous than one would be led to believe. However, when he says "bomb" I think he means bomb in the sense of *light on... bang... person(s) in room are rather dead" as opposed to *light on.. building flattened*

I find explosives and the like very interesting for some reason...

Yes, with ball bearings. But gunpowder only wouldn't kill someone or harm especially much if the person wasn't standing very close to the light bulb. And you need a percussion cap for the gun powder, otherwise it will just "puff".

The German Wikipedia is probably the best site on explosives. If you can't read German, there is a site in English as well, but not that big and detailed.

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kategorie:Sprengstoff