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If you ’re going to gainsay someone to a pee accelerator pedal fight this summer , it ’s best you do n’t take up arms against Mark Rober , a formerNASAengineer who has created the world ’s largest Super Soaker .
Rober ’s 7 - foot - farseeing ( 2.1 meters ) Super Soaker can boom out water at 272 mph ( 437 km / h ) , according to his YouTube telecasting , posted July 11 . ( To engagement , the video has already amass 1.2 million view . )
Mark Rober with the colossal Super Soaker
" When the Super Soaker was first invented , it was an out-and-out game changer in my neighbourhood , " Rober order in the telecasting . " So now that I ’m a dad and I bang how to engineer , I settle to once again take down up my water - fighting capability . " [ Top 10 Inventions That Changed the earth ]
Any zealous engineer can make an enormous water handgun , but Rober — who expend nine days at NASA ’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory ( JPL ) , seven of which were pass working on theMars roverCuriosity — go above and beyond by doing his water weapon homework . He called up Super Soaker inventor Lonnie Johnson , an applied scientist to begin with from Mobile , Alabama . Johnson recall how he think of the estimate for the Super Soaker in 1982 , while work at JPL on Galileo , an uncrewed space vehicle that was sent into outer infinite to study Jupiter and its moons .
" I was experimenting in the bathroom in the evenings , " Johnson said in Rober ’s video . " I had made these nozzle that I had hooked up to the sump , and asI scoot this stream of wateracross the can , and I examine how herculean it was and how substantial it was , I thought to myself , ' in high spirits force per unit area , high - performance piss gun — really cool . ' "
Really coolheaded , indeed . The water tank car on Johnson ’s original Super Soaker doubles as a pressure container . Each time an agent ( aka a sneak kid or wicked adult ) pumps the gun , air is forced into the tank . This increases the zephyr air pressure inside the army tank , with the extra air corpuscle iron down on the water . When the trigger is pulled , the only topographic point for the water to go is through a tube that lead to the snoot , where itgoes out at full blast .
The Super Soaker that Rober made with his friends works in a slimly different fashion . It would be too cumbersome and difficult to pump up a 7 - foot - prospicient pistol , so instead , they installed two tanks — one with high - imperativeness nitrogen gasoline and the other with water — in the gun ’s handle . This extra weight also gave the Super Soaker a low shopping center of mass , collapse it increase stableness and manoeuvrability , Rober said .
When a trigger is pressed , the atomic number 7 gas rushes into the 2 - gal ( 7.5 liters ) water supply tank , Rober said . Once the pressure in the water tank gets high enough , thewater is forced up a tubeand through the accelerator pedal ’s honker , decimating anything in its path . ( It bears mentioning that Rober ’s Super Soaker is not affiliated with Hasbro , the toymaker that retail Super Soakers . )
The imperativeness grow by this aqua wildcat is tremendous : The original Super Soaker develop by Johnson was pressurized to 40 Ezra Pound per square inch ( 275 kilopascals ) ; a regular hose is 50 psi ( 350 kPa ) ; and a fire truck hosiery is 300 psi ( 2,000 kPa ) , Rober said . The elephantine Super Soaker produce eight prison term the pressure of a blast motortruck hosiery at 2,400 psi ( 16,500 kPa ) , he allege .
" Which , in hindsight , is in all probability overkill , " Rober joked . [ The Cool Physics of 7 Classic Toys ]
Water shot from the colossal Super Soaker can slit through watermelon , red-hot dog , bananas , eggs and can even be used in a water fighting against small children , albeit from a distance , for safety ’s interest .
The H2O gun take six months to make . It ’s not the only toy Rober has supersized . In 2016 , he and his friends built the human race ’s largest operable Nerf accelerator pedal , fit in to Guinness World Records . The dart , made of pool noodles andtoilet plunger suction cup , can exit the gun at about 40 mph ( 64 km / h ) , Rober say .
Original article onLive Science .
