A couple of years ago, self-described “professional mad scientist” and undisputed YouTube legend Drake “Styropyro” Anthony uploaded a video featuring various experiments performed with the crazy amounts of electric current provided by 100 car batteries wired in series. Ever since, he’s been teasing a scaled-up version with 400 car batteries.
That video has finally arrived, and—as one might expect from a man responsible for videos like “Building a fire death machine using Soviet military tech” and the immortal “My homebuilt 200W LASER BAZOOKA!!!!“, who owns a “science machete”, and whose idea of a relaxing day away from work is driving into a tornado—it is pretty batshit.
Anthony spent two months wiring up all these batteries, and while the voltage of the resultant configuration is relatively low—65 V—the current is… hoo boy. The current is wild. As the video progresses, the peak currents that Anthony achieves increase steadily, and he eventually exceeds 150,000 amps on a regular basis. If that number doesn’t mean anything to you, Anthony pauses to explain at one point that “a single shot from these batteries is … comparable to an entire thunderstorm’s worth of lightning bolts.”
So what can you do with this much current? Well, for a start, you can vaporize pretty much anything you want. The circuit is designed with a gap that can be bridged by a conductive object clamped to two wooden blocks. Once the switch closes, the current scythes through the unfortunate object, continuing until it either a) vaporizes, b) burns through, or c) is ejected from the circuit by the magnetic fields that accompany this much current, which we’ll discuss shortly. Much of the video involves Anthony vaporizing a variety of metals, including zinc, aluminum, copper, and iron, and the resultant footage is wild: there are billowing clouds of plasma, startlingly violent explosions, and showers of molten metal raining down on the surrounding area.
And then there are the magnetic phenomena. The nature of electromagnetism dictates that a moving current creates a magnetic field—and since these experiments involve a metric shitton of moving current, they also result in the generation of some outrageously powerful magnetic fields. Anthony puts these to use in one experiment, wherein he causes a hollow copper pipe to implode, but they also play havoc with both his long-suffering cameras and the circuit’s second major point of interest: its switch.
You can’t just wander down to the store and buy a switch rated for this much current, so Anthony builds one himself from two 65-pound blocks of copper. These blocks take an absolute beating over the course of the video, especially once Anthony rewires the switch to try to mitigate an issue with it bouncing open. When the switch closes, the extreme current vaporises the copper, and the vapor forms a plasma, which is then compressed in on itself by the resultant magnetic fields. This leads to a phenomenon called a z-pinch—the plasma collapses into a narrow filament, through which an insane amount of power and heat are blasted. As Anthony explains, this is the same reason that lightning forms thin, narrow bolts; otherwise, the phenomenon is rarely encountered outside of a fusion reactor. Soooooo yeah.
The whole video is worth watching—other highlights include using the batteries to power a home-made plasma cutter, and an appearance by a squirrel named Ophelia, whom Anthony has befriended over the years and is, as far as we can tell, the same squirrel who memorably climbed all over an FBI agent when Anthony received a visit some years ago. (God only knows how many watchlists our hero is on at this point.)
Given the nature of his videos and the fact that he’s never kept to any sort of regular upload schedule, it’s become something of a running joke among Anthony’s fans to post comments on every new video to the effect that it’s nice to see he’s still alive. Anthony actually addresses this at the start of the video, explaining that he is “not a risk-taker.”
“I know that this must come off as the most ironic thing I’ve ever said,” he continues, “but I don’t approach anything potentially dangerous without fully understanding and mitigating the risks at hand.” He notes the absurdity of having to tell people not to try this at home, given that “even a single car battery can mess you up if you screw up hard enough.” (Unsurprisingly, he’s had a somewhat fraught relationship with YouTube over the years—he has had videos both demonetized and removed completely, and at one point his channel appeared at risk of being closed permanently.)
Thankfully, his relationship with the platform appears to have improved of late, because it’d be genuinely sad if we were deprived of videos like this. It’s also heartening that people like Anthony can make a living from performing these sorts of experiments in 2026—he’s a genuine original, the kind of which it feels like there are vanishingly few these days.
Read the full article here
