Black light bulb eye injury case
Appears in 2 lectures.
Appearances across the corpus
Forensic consulting case. Hand-blown black-light incandescent bulb made in Korea for GE, not properly annealed; water drop after a shower caused the bulb to explode and blind the user. Compared to properly-annealed Corning-line bulbs that withstand water drops indefinitely. The teaching example for residual stress from poor thermal annealing of blown glass.
Korean hand-blown black light bulb shattered when soapy water dripped on hot bulb; teenager lost an eye. Tom proposed a drop test he wasn't allowed to run himself; students ran it and confirmed residual stresses caused the failure. Case settled.
One time I got a call from some attorney in Southern California, and he had some 14- or 15-year-old teenager whose parents had given him a black light for his birthday or Christmas or Hanukkah. He had just taken a shower, and he came out and wanted to see if the soap would radiate. He was standing over the black light, and a drop of soapy water hit the light bulb, and the light bulb shattered, and he lost an eye.