Full Transcript
This pair of scissors spontaneously combusted on this table according to this person. The internet is trying to figure out how this could happen, assuming it's not a hoax. So, the post that was posted to a chemistry subreddit simply says, "A pair of scissors sitting on my table for Micah Top suddenly burst into flames. No heat source, electricity, or battery nearby. No contact with anything but the table. I suspect some sort of chemical reaction between the handles and the table occurred. Any ideas? Here is where the incident occurs. You see the spot where they caught fire. So, if you put on your detective hat or chemist hat, you will probably have two immediate guesses. The first is, is it possible that sunlight came in from this window and focused on the spot? But no, it happened at night. The second guess were, could the scissors have been used to open some sort of a container of a chemical that then reacted with the rubber in the handles or something like that? But no, they say the scissors were about one year old, were only used for cutting household packaging, wrapping paper, and copy paper. They had last been used about an hour prior to combustion to open a bag of Smart Pop. That's just the bags of popcorn. So, people asked, "What specific scissors were they?" So, they could go look at the materials in them. And here's where some cynics will say, "Aha, see this is all viral marketing for this Scotch brand of scissors, but why would they market them as these will burn your house down?" But they posted the exact listing. Scotch precision ultraedge titaniumfused scissors. And from that two theories started to form. The first is that titanium powder is spontaneously combustible. Remember the scissors had titanium in them. So is it possible that over the course of a year of use that there would be just enough on there that it could contact the table and catch fire. The other theory is that there is a chemical used in plastic coatings called nitro cellulose that happens to be highly flammable. And while they didn't know what would cause it to spontaneously combust, they said it simply would not take a lot. Now, they did post an update a few months later, but before I get to that, if you want to try to figure it out again, there's the scissors. There's the residue they left. There is another view. They were able to extinguish the fire just by putting a bowl over it. So, they reached out to the manufacturers, 3M, who asked them to send in the scissors, including the other ones in the package, and also to scrape some of the residue off the table so they could test it. 3M responded with this letter. You can pause it if you want to read it, but basically it comes down to they could find no manufacturing irregularity in the scissors. And also they were unable to replicate the event, but of course they were. I mean, what did they do? Just set them on a table and look at them for a few months. But there's a final twist where they said that after they posted this, they were contacted by two other people who said they had the same thing happen to them. One of them had pictures and all of them bought the same scissors from Costco at around the same time. So, beyond being an interesting science question, if you happen to own these scissors, just be careful with them, I guess.