In an job interview with Dick Cavett, Lucille Ball made a spooky claim: when driving down a bumpy street, she commenced to hear music—not from her radio, from within her mouth!
Were Lucy’s tooth fillings really buying up radio alerts, or is this just another tall tale?
Tooth fillings applied to be an amalgam of mixed metals like tin, copper, and even mercury. Due to health and fitness issues, amalgam fillings are no for a longer period employed nowadays.
But what if you nevertheless have steel in your mouth? Effectively, that may well make you a great candidate for getting a human radio—at the very least in notion.
To start with, you want an antenna: one thing to decide on up radiation in the air. Even little scraps of metal can get the work completed. When the metallic makes speak to with drinking water, this kind of as the saliva in your mouth, a miniature semiconductor is born. Now, all you require is a speaker.
Audio speakers create brief vibrations, correlating with the sound waves of a tune on a radio sign. When Lucy was driving down a bumpy street, the velocity of her car or truck may well have been just more than enough to produce vibrations from the loose fillings in her mouth. Her mouth echoed the seem, and violà—music in her head!
This phenomenon may well make perception in principle, but it has been challenging to reproduce in a lab.
However, some studies show that amalgam fillings could functionality as antennas for extra hazardous forms of radiation. When shut to a cellphone, for case in point, a human being who continue to has amalgam fillings could expertise intense dizziness or tiredness.
So, if you are listening to this episode of A Moment of Science from your mouth, it could possibly be time to go again to the dentist.