The Best Bar-B-Que Starter

 
The Boston Globe Magazine
June 25, 1995
     
There's nothing worse than trying to set fire to a pile of balky 
charcoal.
     
The average back-yard chef, wishing to cook hamburgers, tries to ignite 
the charcoal via the squirt, light, and wait method, wherein you squirt 
lighter fluid on a pile of briquettes, light the pile, then wait until 
they have turned a uniform gray color.  When I say "they have turned a 
uniform gray color," I am referring to the hamburgers.  The briquettes 
will remain as cold and lifeless as Leonard Nimoy.  The backyard chef 
will keep this up - squirting, lighting, waiting; squirting, lighting, 
waiting - until the bacterial level in the side dishes has reached the 
point where the potato salad rises up from its bowl, Bloblike, and 
attempts to mate with the corn.  This is the signal that it's time to 
order Chinese food.
     
The problem is that modern charcoal, manufactured under strict 
consumer-safety guidelines, is one of the least- flammable substances 
on Earth.  On more than one occasion, quick-thinking individuals have 
extinguished a raging house fire by throwing charcoal on it.  Your 
backyard chef would be just as successful trying to ignite a pile of 
rocks.
     
Is there a solution?  Yes.  There happens to be a technique that is 
guaranteed to get your charcoal burning very, very quickly, although 
you should not attempt this technique unless you meet the following 
criterion:  You are a complete idiot.
     
I found out about this technique from alert reader George Rasko, who 
sent me a letter describing something he came across on the World Wide 
Web, a computer network that you should definitely learn more about, 
because as you read these words, your 11-year-old is downloading 
pornography from it.
     
By hooking into the World Wide Web, you can look at a variety of 
electronic "pages," consisting of documents, pictures, and videos 
created by people all over the world.  One of these is a guy named 
(really) George Goble, a computer person in the Purdue University 
engineering department.  Each year, Goble and a bunch of other 
engineers hold a picnic in West Lafayette, Indiana, at which they cook 
hamburgers on a big grill.  Being engineers, they began looking for 
practical ways to speed up the charcoal-lighting process.
     
"We started by blowing the charcoal with a hair dryer," Goble told me 
in a telephone interview.  "Then we figured out that it would light 
faster if we used a vacuum cleaner."
     
If you know anything about (1) engineers and (2) guys in general, you 
know what happened:  The purpose of the charcoal- lighting shifted from 
cooking hamburgers to seeing how fast they could light the charcoal.
     
From the vacuum cleaner, they escalated to using a propane torch, 
then an aacetylene torch.  Then Goble started using compressed pure 
oxygen, which caused the charcoal to burn much faster, because as you 
recall from chemistry class, fire is essentially the rapid combination 
of oxygen with the cosine to form the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (or 
something along those lines).
     
By this point, Goble was getting pretty good times.  But in the world 
of competitive charcoal-lighting, "pretty good" does not cut the 
mustard.  Thus, Goble hit upon the idea of using - get ready - liquid 
oxygen.  This is the form of oxygen used in rocket engines; it's 295 
degrees below zero and 600 times as dense as regular oxygen.  In terms 
of releasing energy, pouring liquid oxygen on charcoal is the 
equivalent of throwing a live squirrel into a room containing 50 
million Labrador retrievers.  On Goble's World Wide Web page (the 
address is http://ghg.ecn.purdue.edu/), you can see actual photographs 
and a video of Goble using a bucket attached to a 10-foot-long wooden 
handle to dump 3 gallons of liquid oxygen (not sold in stores) onto a 
grill containing 60 pounds of charcoal and a lit cigarette for 
ignition.
     
What follows is the most impressive charcoal-lighting I have ever seen, 
featuring a large fireball that, according to Goble, reached 10,000 
degrees Fahrenheit.  The charcoal was ready for cooking in - this has 
to be a world record - 3 secs.
     
There's also a photo of what happened when Goble used the same 
technique on a flimsy $2.88 discount-store grill.  All that's left is a 
circle of charcoal with a few shreds of metal in it.  "Basically, the 
grill vaporized," said Goble.  "We were thinking of returning it to the 
store for a refund."
     
Looking at Goble's video and photos, I became all choked up with 
gratitude at the fact that I do not live anywhere near the engineers' 
picnic site.  But also, I was proud of my country for producing guys 
who can be ready to barbecue in less time than it takes for guys in 
less-advanced nations, such as France, to spit.
     
Will the 3-second barrier ever be broken?  Will engineers come up with 
a new, more powerful charcoal-lighting technology?  It's something for 
all of us to ponder this summer as we sit outside, chewing our 
hamburgers, every now and then glancing in the direction of West 
Lafayette, Indiana, looking for a mushroom cloud.
     
The Boston Globe Magazine
June 25, 1995