Adam Savage Fights Fire with Fire – Unimpossible Missions

Adam Savage meets with combustion engineers at GE to find out how they tackled the idiom “Fighting Fire with Fire” in their Unimpossible Missions series, and gets to set some stuff on fire himself (and on high-speed, too) in the process! Watch more here!

Comments (27)

27 thoughts on “Adam Savage Fights Fire with Fire – Unimpossible Missions

  1. Adam is a good actor. There is no way he was surprised or even impressed by this, considering the did something very similar already on Mythbusters.

    Well whatever, hope you got paid well!

  2. With all of the technology that GE is working on this is the best advertising they could come up with? I have also been curious who exactly they are advertising to when they run commercials about their train or plane engines during TV shows aimed at people who probably don’t own large transportation companies.

  3. Interesting method for it.

    However, fighting fire with fire has been a standard tool in a firefighters kit for handling wildfires. Burning out areas with controlled fire to create firebreaks for example…

  4. You could use whatever, in this case it was just the fact that enough air was displaced to blow out the candle.

  5. Very misleading title, it’s got nothing to do with fighting fire with fire. It’s blowing out a candle by moving a large volume of air, the sound they used to drive the speaker could have been of anything.

  6. It’s really too bad that this idea doesn’t scale up very well. It would save a lot of water if fire trucks had acoustic cannons to putout fires, rather then just pumping foam/water mixes at them. Neat series by GE though, the Snowball in Hell show was kind of a quick and satisfying video to watch.

    Thanks Adam and Tested

  7. My biggest issue with this is :

    The phrase – “Fight fire with fire” isn’t that it is impossible to fight fire with fire. Its about fighting back against an attacker using the same method.

  8. So we have the volume of air, the leading edge of the air mass’s momentary density, and the db at impact which will change with frequency/distance and energy in. If the result is held constant what is the difference between just random noise and the “sonic interference pattern” they created. Is there any? How much energy does it save, etc. That part seems a bit post-factual magic to me. but with data I’ll listen.

  9. You blew out the candle. That’s not really fighting fire with fire. The way that you fight fire with fire is by setting a counter fire that creates a fire break. Fire fighters have been fighting wild fires this way for years. It’s called backfiring. There’s also a method for before a wildfire occurs called a controlled burn. This is when a fire is intentionally set in a controlled manner in order to eliminate fuel for an uncontrolled wildfire. http://science.howstuffworks.com/nature/natural-disasters/fight-fire-with-fire1.htm

  10. Id say the way to “fight fire with fire” in this case, is with an explosion eating up all the oxygen.
    Like they do with oil well fires.

  11. Anyone remember “MythBusters Episode 76: Voice Flame Extinguisher” from April 2007…?

    My feelings on this new video echo what many have said here and on the Tested YouTube channel, not really anything new and not really fighting fire with fire, or even sound waves. It’s just air being pushed out fast enough by a speaker (which could be playing any bass sound) to blow out a candle.

    And as someone said above, there are videos on YouTube from 2015 showing people doing this with handheld speakers with vortex cannons attached.

    So not really sure of the intent of this video by GE or Tested…?

  12. Mythbusters covered fighting fire with explosives in 2007, for the ‘Voice Fire Extinguisher’ episode. 🙂

  13. Now that is a much more compelling demonstration!

    This isn’t a bad Tested video because it’s an ad; It’s a bad Tested video because it’s lame.

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