Hurricane Balls

SUBTITLES AVAILABLE

The 'Hurricane Balls' consist of two ball bearings welded together by passing 800 Amps through them. If you spin the Hurricane Balls on a smooth surface, you can use the plastic pipe to blow at one side of the Hurricane Balls. Not only does this keeps them spinning, you can accelerate them up to incredible speeds. Speeds of 12,000 rpm have been recorded for the Hurricane Balls using a laboratory strobe light.

At home, it is possible to use a tv as a simple stroboscope. Dr Adam Chalcraft writes "I can easily get a speed of 3600 RPM, and more to the point I can easily measure this, by putting the top in front of my (NTSC) TV in a dark room. As it runs down, I can clearly see 60Hz, 30Hz, 20Hz and so on. Of course if you try it in front of a PAL TV (in the UK) you will see 50Hz, 25Hz and so on." Thanks for that, Adam.

Any smooth surface will work for spinning on, but the very best is a concave mirror, e.g. those round, magnifying bathroom mirrors.

Once the Hurricane Balls are spinning, you can then use the coloured LED torches to illuminate them, with different colours at different angles. In a darkened room, the effect is magical!

MARCH 2016 UPDATE. Sadly, the man in Germany who used to make these for us has passed away. However there is now a version of the Hurricane Balls called Tornado Spheres. These are made in China, and are cheaper as well! See http://www.grand-illusions.com/acatal...

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Closed Caption:

One of the all-time favourite discoveries
I made at the Nuremberg Toy Fair a few years ago
are Hurricane Balls as we call it, which
is just two ball bearings, they're half inch
ball bearings but they've been welded together
with 800 amps of current, so heavily joined together.
And they do a most remarkable thing when they are put on a surface;
either a business card or a table; or in this case we're putting them on a mirror surface.
Because when you spin them and then when you blow on them,
you can get them up to about a few thousand
r.p.m (revolutions per minute) as follows.
I'm blowing them with a small tube and the
noise slowly revs up, just like an engine revving up,
and they will spin for perhaps
three or four minutes, on a surface.
But in addition to that you can also light them,
as we are suggesting here, with little torches
that we provide, red or blue or white ones.
There's a blue one.
Then you get a wonderful effect here because
you get multiple rings due to the reflection
in the mirror below.
And they appear to dance and become elliptical
as you move the torch to one side.
I'll do one of the white ones and I'll try and do all
three. But I like the fact that the ball bearings
on a smooth surface will stay spinning with
enough inertia, for a considerable amount of time,
three or four minutes I've timed
it for. There we are, there's all three now.
The noise is fun too, and then when it does
stop of course it stops very abruptly,
like another spinning top I've got.
But that's quite the best thing I've ever
come across I think, at the Nuremberg Toy Fair.
Hurricane Balls I've named them, because of
the speed they are going in a circular motion.
And I've had a lot of play value from that,
many other tricks and so on, you can do with it.
And it will keep on spinning, on and on and
on, far beyond the length of this little film.
Huh! Hurricane Balls.
Gosh