Metallurgical consulting firm tornado-chicken vacuum chamber experiment

~1979. Tom's consulting work at southern test lab (now defunct). Lab owners read Kansas tornado / plucked chicken story, hypothesized low-pressure mechanism. Dead-chicken vacuum test (failed). Live-chicken vacuum test (catastrophic). Tom: "if I had been there I would have stopped this." Cat-in-microwave parallel. ## Figures referenced (recurring numeric anchors, not cases)

Okay, so maybe I should tell the other story — I like to tell stories. There was a test lab down south of here, out of business now. These guys had a metallurgical test firm, and around 1979 or so I became their metallurgist. I was trying to pay for my house, so I became a consultant. I would go down there and do 500 failure analyses a year. These guys also did non-destructive testing — that was their business. I think they all graduated from high school, but none of them had any real college or scientific background. They were always trying to figure out some way to get rich. They read an article about a tornado that went through Kansas, where all the chickens were plucked alive in the tornado. So they decided it must be the low pressure. They had a little vacuum chamber. They got a dead chicken and threw it in there, pumped it down, took it out, and the feathers were still on it. So they decided it had to be a live chicken.