According the Book of Joe, this little blip ran in the Financial Times “How to Spend It” magazine. (I don’t read the FT on a regular basis, so I don’t know if that’s a regular addition or what.) It describes the “FlashPoint ES”, a portable, unshielded “mini-microwave”.
It has to be a hoax. Even if you could get a little magnetron in a battery-powered device, who in their right minds would sell a directional microwave wand?
The only references I can find online stem from Joe’s scan of the article, so I’m going to just presume the FT got duped by a clever jerk and go see if that block of chocolate I left on my tabletop uranium slab has turned into hot cocoa yet.
FlashPoint ES Pocket Mini-Microwave [BookOfJoe.com via Oh Gizmo!]
It’s not real. It’s a regular small feature at the back of How to Spend it which has hypothetical impossible gadgets.
Joe screwed up…he was looking at his subscription of Fortean Times and mistook it for the Financial Times. C’mon, give the man a break! He is only 97 years old! He has to power his laptop with a flintstone-esque treadmill because they didn’t have electricity when he was growing up!
It’s totally real. The modding of a flashlight into a high powered directional heating device has been done.
Now, in the demo I’ve seen, the flashlight is always used to light paper or tinder, but why not just point it at a cup of coffee?
It’s not technically a “microwave”, but it’s most certainly a hand-held heating wand.
Here’s a video of the “wand” in action:
If you like more things that make sense, check out superforest.org
Yay!!
balls, the video didn’t embed.
Here’s the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BY4LMXfo2yM
laser flashlights! Now good for heating coffee.
Yeah superforestnyc, but (as you mentioned) that’s still not at all a “microwave”.
Plus, the green/red/black buttons really look photoshopped in. More material that leans me in the direction of “this crap is fake”.
Superforest, lasers are coherent visible light. Microwaves are clear over on the other side of infrared, just before you get to FM radio.
ach mein klein flammhetzer, purt near any electromagentic radiation can be made to lase.
Crap! Now TSA is going to want our flashlights…..
i dunno… ever seen an EZ bake oven?
I really don’t know about the heating side (microwave, laser, etc…) but look at it from the battery side:
It takes 4.186J of energy to heat up 1g of water by 1C. So to boil a cup of water (say 300mL) initially at 20C, it would take about 100kJ.
The ad says that it can do this job “in seconds”. So imagine you could get all of that energy into the water in one minute, you’d need batteries able to output 1700W for a full minute! A house microwave can do that. But a hand held device?
For some perspective: my electric scooter needs four 12V batteries weighing a tone (or so it feels) to output 1500W of power (link). I just don’t think that a hand-held device can produce that much power yet. It doesn’t matter what’s on the other side really. From the battery side, you just can’t boil a cup of water in under a minute with anything less than 1700W. Period.
ja, der flashlight vill blow up in yer fershuluggin hand!
Can you bake a yellow cake on your tabletop uranium slab?
But I want one.
Who said lightsaber?
…Considering how focused it is, wouldn’t “Maser” be a closer description of what this is? Either way, it’s not what I really want: the hand-held laser pointer that will burn through a car tire in about 1 second. Perfect for dissuading college punks from tailgating you in the slow lanes
And FYI, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Microwave Lasers are called “Masers”, and have existed since the 60′s (if not earlier). Same idea, different wavelength.
Cheers,
Dave
If you have every microwaved a cold cup of coffee and attempted to drink it, you should realize that this is a hoax.
@17
Haha so true, yet somehow my house mate does this nearly every day.
Mind you I’ve also seen her purchase a longneck of beer. Open it drink half. Put it back in the fridge then finish it 4 days later.
Eeeewww..