He may have been ready for the balloon of fire but not the balloon ON fire.

♫ And on his Farm he has some gas... ♫
♫ E-i-e-i-a ♫

What. Did. They. Think. Would. Happen.

Nope. Not ready for the balloon of fire.

gee. what were the odds.

*dead

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I disagree with video title. Definitely something that HAD to be done. Just not by us so we can laugh.

Stick to meth.

I had a great High School Chemistry teacher.

One day we were having a lesson about butane, so we had a bunch of lighters that were missing their sparker rolls. We filled test tubes with butane by putting a test tube under water and pressing the gas release button on a lighter, then having the released bubbles of butane displace the water in the tube (held upside down in the water).

Once the test tube was filled with the gas, we would put a hand in the water and cap the tube with a thumb, then take it out of the water.

Our teacher said that butane was heavier than air, so we could light small pockets of butane by holding the tubes right-side up (thumb covering the opening at the top), taking our thumbs off of the top and dropping the test tube about an inch or so to make some turbulence and release some of the gas before re-capping it with our thumbs, and then having our lab partner quickly strike a sparker in the area just above the tube.

That worked great -- you get small bursts of the butane burning / exploding, but after several of the pops the butane at the top of the tube has been replaced by air and you have to give the tube a more severe drop/shake to get more butane out. We did that for a while until we stopped getting reactions.

At that point, I figured that there was probably a little more butane left in the tube at the very bottom. So, I told my lab partner that I was going to hold the tube upside down at a bit of an angle so the remaining heavy butane could run out of it, remove my thumb, and then he could spark the area at the end of the tube.

We got set, I took my thumb off the tube's mouth, and about a second later my lab partner hit the spark. Instead of the small fist-sized flashes we had been getting with the other technique, there was a huge burst like the one in this video, accompanied by a pretty loud thump. My lab partner and I had pretty much frozen in space with shock, although neither of us was injured at all except for some singed hair on my hand. Everyone else in the room spun around to see what had happened and went dead quiet.

My teacher said: "Somebody tries that one every year" and grinned.