You may have seen it performed by Superman, but you have probably never wondered what it really looks like to snap a steel rod in half.
Turns out, it is pretty miraculous.
The Slow Mo Guys’ latest YouTube video shows a one-and-a-half inch thick steel bar being snapped in half by a machine with a “pulling apart force” of 220,000 pounds.
Just as the beam is reaching its breaking point something spectacular happens—it begins to stretch like a piece of rubber. When it can’t take the force any longer, it snaps clean in half.
The film suddenly becomes a work of art when the 148,000 frames per second shot is replayed at 25 fps. At this speed, every tiny dusk particle shaken loose from the mini-explosion of the snapping rod can be seen slowing drifting away from its old home. The result is a gorgeous shot of glittery steel particles slowly drifting downward like rain in front of a street lamp.
H/T Digg
