Burning a Magnesium NeXT Cube (1993)

This reminds me of burning scrap VW engine blocks or transmission cases. It can be done on an ordinary wood camp fire. You'll probably want to cut up the scrap into more manageable chunks rather than go for the whole thing at once. Then, toss a few into the hottest part of the fire. For about a half hour, nothing will happen. Then, the chunks will begin to melt, forming puddles onto the bed of coals, where they will ignite.

It is interesting that the pools of liquid metal burn quite slowly in the middle of the regular fire; you will only get a bright orange flame rather than the spectacle promised. Maybe only 5x as bright as a normal fire. But, if you scoop some up onto a stick (a long piece of steel angle iron is recommended) and pull it out of the fire into open air, it will burn with the brilliant white flame with which you are generally familiar.

For the finale, plunge the end of the stick into a large bucket of water, where you will observe the magnesium blob continue to burn while submerged for several seconds. Do not attempt to do this the opposite way by dumping the bucket onto the fire; an explosion will result instead. In fact, keep all moisture away from the fire in general. If you need to put the fire out for any reason, too bad.

After the fire burns itself out, the next day you might find some solidified blobs of unburnt magnesium. Be sure to remove all of these so you do not have an unexpected experience the next time you have a fire there. I have quite a nice piece where the magnesium flowed around a stick, but did not ignite.

This comment comes with the obvious disclaimer that nobody anywhere should try this for any reason, especially not the reason of fun.

The meandering and hyper detailed style was nostalgic to me. Maybe I'm misremembering but I feel like this style was a lot more common 15+ years ago. I wouldn't dream of including this much detail now, and I don't think my writing would be well received if I did. But there's a lot of character in it. It also had more and different typos than I'm used to reading now, typos on the Internet now are mostly the wrong correctly spelled word.

“The first round of photographs were dreadfully underexposed. We set up a second bar of magnesium, set it burning, and discovered that an f-stop of 3.5 with an exposure of 1/60th of a second with 100ASA film was just about right.”

That part is truly retro: the professional photographer having to worry about exposure and capturing the scene with the flames.

Stories such as this make me nostalgic, and wish my Cube still booted up, and/or that GNUstep would get some traction, or even that I had a better successor to Altsys Virtuoso than toggling the settings for my stylus in Windows so that I can run Macromedia Freehand/MX.

For an article about photographing the burning cube, it contains surprisingly little pictures.

The NeXT Cube's magnesium case was chosen for its excellent EMI shielding properties and heat dissipation, but this same material burns at approximately 2200°C (4000°F) - making this likely one of the hottest computer fires ever documented.

Knowing magnesium burns as brightly as it does and is so difficult to put out once lit, having done both as a kid, I'd always just assumed magnesium was the name of the paint color or something - not what it was really made out of. As they'd mentioned briefly in the article, water just makes the flame worse rather than better.

Seems like asking for trouble, but perhaps it's enough of a pain to light initially that it's not a concern?

liked the read but it gets a bit confusing at some point, its abut unclear whos telling the story. moved the cube from sophies to _your_ basement, from that part. whos you? its like it was being recalled or confirmed by someone else not the writer (thats good) but not completely put in the right 'person' for the article.

totally love that the first thing on ur mind was burn the cube hah. also funny such an good opportunity eventually came by :D

A lot of cars use magnesium in components to save weight. Another hazard for firefighters in addition to the batteries / fuel tanks, airbags, tyres, etc.

I make videos of burning foods like jelly beans for fun, with the idea that if something catches fire easily it's probably not good for you due to calorie density and low water content and, by proxy, lack of nutrition and unnatural components like petroleum based vax. For example, honey will not ignite unless dehydrated first.

I feel like there was a Wired article or something that covered this story. I remember reading something like this, or maybe exactly this article, on Hacker News years ago.

Jobs left Apple and formed NeXT in 1985.

If he had chosen MIPS instead of the 68030, then the fate of the hardware line might have been quite different.

I imagine having a lab full of these during a fire would be...inconvenient.

No image of the backup cube?

Is it just me or does this read a little boring and a lot longer than it should..? So much of the email is just him calling random people... whole paragraphs of it