How Fire Breathing Works

called um that there seems to be like a couple more. Yeah, maybe to we do the you know that sphere that the motorcycle guys right in the what did they call that thing? The probably the cage of death because it's the most dangerous thing ever. It's a pretty dangerous. Yeah, Gosling did it though in that movie? Did he actually do it? Okay? Of course not what movie was that? Um? Pines one? Yeah, place beyond the pines, among the pines, beside the pines around the pines has something to do

with the pines, had a pine smell to it. Yeah, that was a great opening shot, though, I have to say, Oh, is that I haven't seen that movie. It's this long, continuous shot that eventually takes him from like his trailer into that sphere of death. Well, now the whole movie spoil You might as well tell everybody what the what the final final part of the plot is. They called the Daniu Mall resolution. Yeah, the last act called Daniu

Mall Frenchie. All right. Circus Arts continued with fire breathing. I just did it? Did you see that, Chuck or what are some of the other names, because breathing is technically kind of a weird thing to call it. The fire blowing is the one fire aspirating, And apparently I read something on how some somepoi dot com, which is

basically a fire arts website. Um, they were saying, like, there's two there's a medical term for aspirating, which is to introduce air into the lungs, and they wanted to go out of their way to point out that that's not what they were talking about when they call it asperating. They were using the other definition, which is, uh, exhaling, a missed vaporous missed. So aspiating is probably the best

term technically for it, but everybody calls it fire breathing. Yeah, because a circus, uh what do they call the people that yell a barker, isn't gonna say step right up and see the fire aspirator. Yeah, they may have. Some of those old timing circus barkers were like they were into big words fire aspiration. You'd have to say it like that, exactly, like Walter Winstel exactly. For some reason. Uh chuck, Yes, have you ever seen somebody breath fire?

Sure you have in real life? Yeah, okay, yeah, like the smaller circuses lollapalooza. Well, well I did see the gym Row show. Do they have a fire breath? Then? I don't remember. Just remember the guy that hung from needles through his and I remember dudes eating glass and stuff. But there had to be a fire breather in there. Well, apparently that was around the time of the fire breathing Revival. There was a They think that it's possible people were

fire breathing back in ancient Persia. Apparently that's where naphtha was um discovered, which we'll talk about um and the fire breathing as we know it probably came about around the nineteenth century, around the time when circuses started, as we understand them, medieval traveling players gave way to traveling circuses, which gave way to right uh, and then it just kind of died off for a little while until a little known guy named Gene Simmons started doing it at

shows for the band called k I S S. Yes, what is it stand for? Nights in Satan's Service? That's not a rumor? Is a rumor? Yeah? That's not true? At are you getting me there? Like they just want to party to Jewish guys from New York that or makeup. So yeah, Jean Simmons used to do it on stage at Kiss shows. I didn't know that, did you that he did that? And say, oh yeah, that was a big trick. So you've been in a Kiss tribute band before? Did we dressed up as Kiss for a Halloween concert?

That we did the same thing. We did not play a single Kiss song though, Oh gotcha, because they're kind of crappy. Well, did Dan go in brief fire? I should have. I should have had the blood capsules too, you know. So Gene Simmons taught a guy who was in a tribute band called Black Diamond Um how to breathe fire, so he could do a better tribute act. And that guy eventually started this whole well, he kind of introduced fire breathing to the whole urban tribalism raver

goth culture, and then there you have it. Now, now we have fire breathing. Jeans Emmons is responsible for the resurgence in the nineteen seventies and fire breathing pretty much all right. So, um, if Gene Simmons can do what you say, anybody can do it, and you're pretty much right. But the thing is that it takes a certain kind of person to breathe fire. And with that, I feel like we should see away here, like this is fire breathing.

So there's actually stuff called fire arts. It is a subsection of the circus arts, and it's basically anything dangerous to do with fire, juggling, breathing, eating, eating, anything you can do with fire is pretty dangerous. Fire breathing is far and away the most dangerous of the fire arts. It is extraordinarily dangerous. It is you could say, extremely dumb to do. And I used to think that when I saw it, I was like I could do that.

You know, you just put it in your mouth and you just blow the fine mist just spit it out. But that's you will end up burned and disfigured if you just try that on a whim, which we'll get into. UM. I was reading an article by Pendult about fire eating, and the whole time he was talking about you know how dumb it was, and don't do it, but then he's giving a step by step which is what we're

gonna do kind of um. But he was saying that fire eating and fire breathing, any of the fire arts are one of those rare things where even if you do it right, you're still going to get hurt, if you're not gonna come away unscathed. And in addition to the immediate problems you're gonna have, you can have long

term problems, which we'll get into as well. But we should say that just from the outset, people who are fire breathers typically won't teach you how to do it if you ask them to, and they will also tell you don't listen to podcasts, don't read magazines, don't read books, don't go to websites, like, all of those things have problems, and you if you really do want to learn how to breathe fire, then go find somebody who does this and has done it for years and knows what they're doing,

and ask if they will teach you how to do it. That's the only way you can possibly even remotely safely learn how to breathe fire. That's right. And for this article, um, who wrote this? Uh, this is a Tracy Wilson jam Well you know it's thorough, but um, she interviewed a couple of professional fire breathers, Mike Garner and a lady with the stage name of Pelee, And so we're gonna be quoting from them and a lot of this is their expertise on the page. So we just want to

shout out to them. Yeah. I don't know if they're still doing this, but um a bit they are, Like who hangs up their boots their spurs If you're a fire breather, I think when your mouth falls out. Well they've both been hurt. Yeah, all right, so let's get into it, all right. So, um, with fire breathing, Uh, you've got basically two things that you need. You need a fuel source and a flame source and a mouth. Yeah,

that's pretty much it. Yeah, you don't even take thickly need a hand you could use some sort of robotic arm to hold your flame source. So really you just need a mouth, a fuel source, and a flame. Um. And like you said, it's just you thought you could just do that. You put a little fuel in your mouth and you spit it at the flame and you're fine. I was just gonna do a tiny bit too. Well,

apparently that's all you want. You want about a shots worth. UM, so I already would have done too much, probably thinking it was little and I have a huge beard, which yeah, that's another big one to Some people say that you should do this, um unclothed from the waist up, just to prevent your shirt from catching on fire or whatever. Um. But the the the key to fire breathing, apparently is the mist you produce. You don't want to the fuel to be You want to kind of atomize the fuel

in your mouth with the spit. You want to create this mist because if it's not misty enough, the fuel will be too heavy or catch fire and land on the ground and just burn the grounds. Right And if um, this is something that eventually you want to try and do professionally, and you get hooked up with a professional and they're gonna give you lessons. They're not gonna hand you a cup of Colman fuel and say let's give

this a try. They're gonna hand you a cup of water and then say we're gonna be getting this missed correct and the angle correct for the next two years until you ever touch fuel to mouth. And uh, speaking of angle, that angle needs to be between sixty and eighty degrees because if it's too low might get on your body. It's too high, it might fall back onto your face. And that's that's really important angle. That's the angle of the miss coming out of your mouth in

relation to the ground. Yeah, okay, is that confusing? Okay, They're like, what are you supposed to lay on a board at a certain angle? Uh? So the first thing you want to do, or the first thing the professionals do, is examine their surroundings. They gotta check the wind, of course, even if they're indoors um and Gardner says, uh. Actually, Pale says, to actually watch the flame on the torch is the best way to tell what the wind is doing. Yeah, but it can all change in a moment. Oh yeah,

it definitely can. Win. Wind changes correct a direction and you're in trouble. Yeah. Um, you also want to This is not something you want to show up to. You just put the fuel in your mouth and blow into a flame. You want to do a little recon work first. Um, you want to make sure there's no power lines around where you're gonna be blowing fire. Um that you want to make sure that you know where the people are going to be and where they're not going to be.

You want to know which direction you're standing, the wind direction, wind speed, all of that kind of stuff. Trees, Yeah, no, low hanging fruit nearby, that's right. Uh. And then once you've kind of got your your miss down, your angle of your head, and the knowledge that you don't want to blow fire toward power lines. H, it's time to investigate what kind of fuel to use. That's right. There

are all kinds of fuels. Um. One thing that you want to always avoid is gasoline or just straight up alcohol. It's not safe. Yeah. Methyl alcohols are extremely toxic, and Pale points out ethyl alcohols can induce drunkenness. You do not want anything approaching drunkenness while you're You want to be a sober as a judge, A sober judge while you're while you're fire breathing. Yeah, And both those alcohols are very low um flash points to which makes them

more dangerous. And here's why. So there's something called blowback. Um. If something has a low flash point, that means it ignites at a low temperature. Right, So if you're spitting fuel at a fire source of flame source, that fuel that's close to your mouth, if it has a low flash point, could conceivably catch fire. So the trail of fire can follow the path back to your mouth and then catch your mouth on fire while you have a

mouthful of fuel. Yeah, like, uh, you know the trick that you also should never do, which is what the aerosol can and making that into a flame torch. I've seen it crawl back up towards the nozzle when someone else was doing it, and that's really dangerous. That's the same thing, same exact thing, right, But imagine you don't have a cap that closes a valve with your mouth and you have fuel all around your mouth from the little spittle miss that you've been making with it. It's

a bad scene when blowback happens. And so to avoid that, you you I should say, fire breathers use um fuels. With high flash points. Yeah, so you want to look at your flash point. You want to look at the toxicity, even though most of these are going to be fairly toxic because you're putting this in your mouth. You know, Well, there actually is one that's non toxic that works. Corn starch y. Yeah. Apparently corn starch processing plants used to blow up in the nineteenth century a lot um. Do

you remember that sugar plant blew up in Savannah? Well, a sugar plant blew up in Savannah, and it blew up because of sugar dust. Anything that's that small can explode, can not. So corn starch can as well. So it's non toxic. But the problem is if you get it into your lungs, then it can cause problems. But they actually use that professional fire. But I saw it on house some poy Yeah, ok, and hey they know what

they're talking about. Love You said that like it was the National Archives or something, I mean, and pretty it pretty much is. It's the National Archives of fire breathing. Uh So the taste in the smell, you know, because like we said, you're gonna put this in your mouth and there's also going to be people around, and you don't want to you know, offend people with some malodorous, toxic fumes. You don't want all kinds of awful smoke, uh, and you want it to make a nice plain that

has nice color and it's very visible. All this goes into choosing your fuel, that's right. Um. The fuel, The most prevalent fuel that I came across and researching is kerostene, which is also known as paraffin um and it's toxic, but as far as the fire breathing fuels go, it's

one of the least toxic ones. Paraffin's actually used medicinally is a LA positive, which means that you can suffer anal seepage as a fire breather if you use paraffin as that's one of the side effects of paraffin laxative use. But that's not all right, never mind. Um. They both have kerosene in lamp oils another one. They both have high flash points, so they're a little bit safer, um,

and they burn a low temperature but they're bright. Yeah, but they are smoky, and they do have a pretty nasty smell, and neither one of them is really safe to ingest um. And they do have toxins in the additive. So like you know, nothing's like perfect. No, I like choosing the lesser of the evils. I think there was a um A lamp oil that was colorless and odorless, but it turned out to be extremely carcinogenic. Carcinogenic because whoever was making this stuff used additives to make it

colorless and odorless, and those things were very deadly. Isn't that weird? Yeah, that's weird. I mentioned Coleman fuel earlier. That's what I use. Like camping, a lot of camp stoves and stuff use common fuel. That's what pend you let uses for fire reading a k A white gas or lighter fluid or naptha and that has a low flash point. UM. So it's more volatile and its toxical course um and a lot of people say it is more dangerous inside with the kerosene over the common fuel.

And that's a common brand name fuel by the way, right, But it's so it's almost like tile and all fuel or cleanex fuel. UM. So that we talked about avoiding alcohols in general. You got your fuel, you got your mouth at the right angle, and you get the miss going on. Now you need a flame source. Just look like a match, right, No, you'll catch your whole hand on fire. You want something that you can you can

keep away from your hand. Uh So a torch. Usually there's actually torches that I think are made for this kind of stuff. You can make your own, but you want to be uh I should say. Fire breathers can make their own, but they want to be careful with the the materials they use. Like for example, let's say you had a lot of cotton and that was your that you were gonna dip in naptha. Right, makes sense, but the water of cotton is not going to stay there.

You need to wrap it around with something. Well, you have to be careful what you wrap it around with. If you wrapped around with rope, it can break and fall into your mouth. If you're doing a fire eating trick. Um, same thing with like nylon rope. That stuff will melt and drip into your mouth and just burn until it feels like going out. Um. So, you want to be

careful what you use. And from what I understand, you want to kind of pony up for the torch, the pre made torch that's designed by a professional not to burn your face off if you're gonna if you're gonna be a professional fire eater. You're not gonna cheap out on the torch, right, and I mean really, that's gonna be your most significant investment unless you have to pay somebody to teach you. Because how much is lamp oil? How much is your mouth? Your mouth is free, you know. Yeah, yeah,

this is pretty low buying. I guess it is, but a high cost let you do it wrong. Well, let's talk about the hy uh well dangers in safety. There's one thing called fire eater pneumonia um, and that is a condition that they're prone to called hydrocarbon uh pneumonitis. Basically that's from inhaling fuel and they've nicknamed it fire eater pneumonia because it must just be a common thing in that trade. Yeah. Um, it can lead to coma.

One of the signs of it is stupor um collapsed long You can also get a fluid build up in the lining of the lungs. It's not it's not good, no good. Um. That's not the only problem. We also talked about blowback, because if you think about it like you can, you can influence the direction of the flame,

but you're incapable of controlling it, especially outdoors. So first of all, even without blowback, the wind can direct the flame in a different direction that you wanted to and all the sudden you or somebody you care about is on fire, or maybe someone you don't even like that much. But you don't want to be in the book for setting exactly, you can still be liable trees on fire. There's there's things that catch fire when you're fire breathing,

if if even under the most perfect of circumstances. Uh, some of the lesser effects over time um skin irritation, ulcers in the stomach, gum disease in dry mouth, poisoning, and um general respiratory distress. Like if you're a pro fire breathering, you know it's it's not a normal thing, right to put this toxic fuel in your mouth and blow it back out, So over time it's gonna catch up to you. Yeah, and don't forget anal seepage. Who can that's another for using paraffin. But they do take

a lot of safety precautions. Pale points out that they work with partners who are very adept at putting out fires. Um, they train them in how to put out, the tools, how to put out the person, how to put out the area around it if anything bad happens. And it's basically just an assistant there in case anything goes wrong with all of the accoutrement. Like fire A wet blanket, Yeah, like literally a wet blanket. I guess that's where the

term came from. Fire breathing. Don't be a wet blanket. Uh. In this case, we want someone to be a wet blanket right at the right time. Um. And the person is not only good at extinguishing a tree or a loved one, Um, they're good at extinguishing the fire breather himself or herself. Um, and calling nine on one. Yeah, it's probably good idea. How the old cell phone handing. But you want to have someone you trust and who's

not going to panic. Yeah. You also want to have a first aid kit and make sure you have everything you need. Um. You just don't drive up willy nilly. If you're a pro, You've got all this stuff squared away, You've talked to the local authorities, maybe the fire marshal. You've said, here's what we're gonna do, is it okay? Here's my fire plan? Um. One was saying like she contacts the local fire department or the local fire marshal and says, hey, I'm going to do this. Are we cool? Yeah?

And then yeah, here's what happens if if things go out of control. That's that's the fire marshal says, ah, yeah, that looks good to me. Hey, Jimmy, pass a lasagna over here. Right, fire marshals are known for loving lasagna. Yeah, well, I think that's all those guys do is eat, right, eat lasagna? Well, just good food. Yeah, that's why people go into that business, right, I don't know, hang out with the dudes and eat good food. That Dalmatian that No,

they're saving lives, buddy. We talked about where Dalmatians became associated with firefighting, right at some point we didn't. It wasn't stand alone. I wonder what it was. I can't remember. Uh So. Another thing you can do to minimize the effects of fuel on the body is to, um, you want to in between acts, you want to make sure all that fuel is cleaned off of your face and hands.

Don't one forget any of that. I mean, like literally what they do is they blow, they put the torch down there, um, they wipe their mouth with a wet rag and then they spit whatever fuel remains in their mouth back into like the the fuel cup and wipe their mouth and hands again. And then that's one blow of the thing. That's one blow, ideally one breath. Uh. They also recommend um, or some of the tricks of the trade at least is to eat um like bread and drink milk and an an acid. Yeah, I'm just

kind of funny anything about it. Pendela was saying, like the burps that you will have after this there are indescribable interesting and a little puff of smoke comes out or I think it's worse than that. That be the car smell and the taste of it are just horrible. Wow. Uh. There are associations, real professional associations. The North American Fire Artists Association and the National Fire Protection Association have guidelines for all this stuff with performance safety. So does Home

of POI. M let's go ahead and get to the POI. So the POI um we didn't even mention it in the Maori episode, did we know? So? POI are two heavy balls on a string that you've seen like hula danswers um like swing and thanks to the centripy centripedal force. They maintain this distance, although it takes a lot of like agility and strengthen your arms to spin these things. Well.

Somewhere along the way, some Maori said, hey, let's light these on fire because it will look really cool, and it does so POI are one of the implements you can use for fire arts. Yeah, it's a it's a it's not juggling, but it's almost it's sort of like juggling, you know, it's fire spinning. You can juggle with fire as this one person points out, pretty much any juggling prop you can catch, you can let fire. Yeah. And we talked about fire eating too, um, which is basically

taking your torch or whatever. Um, you get your mouth really really wet with spittle, apparently so wet that you conform ast spit bubble very easily across your mouth when you open it, and then you put the torch in there, um and extinguish it, close your mouth around it without touching it. So that apparently is where all the practice comes in for fire eating, is you don't want the torch to touch anything inside your mouth, and when you close your lips to extinguish it. You don't want them

to have to touch the torch itself. It's probably hot, it's very hot. Um. And then also if you have just recently dunked your torch, um, some of the fumes will stay in your mouth and catch fire, and you can hold fire in your mouth and have somebody light a cigarette or cigar or what have you off of it. Pretty cool. That's a that's a trick. Um. There are different ways of breathing fire, uh different, you know, depending

on what kind of um plume you want. You can alter your mouth and how you blow the stuff out into different types of tricks like the basic pop or the volcano or the fire breathing from palm flame. Oh but that the old ground lifter or the old challenger classic fire breathing moves. And if you go to which one website was this probably home they have little video demonstrations of each one of these the around the world.

The one beat weave connected, the shuffle to get the carousel, and you can just you know, they're all they're a little bit different, and I guess you know, if you're a fire breather, then you want to master each one of those. And there's a record chuck for the pillar, the straight up pillar of fire. Um, somebody exhale the twenty ft pillar of flame once. And it's all about

breathing too. I don't know if we mentioned that. It's not just forming a mist like you have to do breathing ex sizes so you can take a huge deep breath first, because you can't breathe with that fuel in your mouth. You'll aspirate the vapors. Like. You have to be exhaling the entire time. Yeah, just exhale, So you have to be able to um take a deep breath and then exhale it at a steady rate or um control it however you want, and also atomize this fuel

with your mouth. There's a lot to it. Yeah, it's not it. It isn't something that anybody can just do and know. It takes a lot of practice. Yeah, we've got should we go over someone more of these world records? Yeah, let's give these folks their due. Most flames blown in one minute by preacher uh mua dib in Italy in a minute that's like pooh pooh, pooh, pooh pooh pooh. Yeah?

Was that the was that the rhythm? I don't know we'll get five at least most people at once two participants in an event in two thousand nine in the Netherlands. That seems very dangerous. Yeah, how about this one continuous fireflame okay nine point nine six eight seconds by Frederick Carlson in Sweden and November two thousand eleven. That's a long breath. Heck, yeah, that's a real long breath. And uh Antonio Restivo in January two twelve in Vegas breathe

a plume twenty six ft five inches. So I sawt beaten out Antonio. Yeah, maybe you're else. Antonio is the one that or Antonio has a rival and they continually best each other by like six inches each year. It's his older sister. One of them dies of mouth cancer probably, And that's a nice plumber way to end this. Well, I think I want to remind everybody. Yeah, it's dangerous. It is very dangerous. Be careful out there. Yeah, and you know, burning, We've talked about burning. It's not a

fun thing to go through. It's like it's not something you should be playing around with. That's what we think, that's what we hit upon is the worst way to die. I remember, Yeah, if you want to hit on a constant pain that won't go away, that morphine can't even take away, then burn yourself really badly. All right. I'm the one with the bummer ending. Huh. Hey if you're into that, so you got anything else? Got anything else?

All right? If you want to learn more about fire breathing type fire breathing into the search bar how stuff works dot Com, it will bring up this awesome episode. And since I said awesome episode, that means it's time for a message break uh And another thing from us to you now is listener mail. Hey, before I do the listener mail, I think we've got a little something special to announce. We do. So you know our friends at COED, the Cooperative for Education. If you don't go

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the places you need to go. Very cool. Alright, so listener mail, Yes, I am going to call this American werewolf in London. Dudes, guys who just listening to the Wearwolf podcasts. And I'm also a huge fan of that movie and I thought i'd share my experience of the first time I saw it when I was eight years old. It was a big family affair as we were the only ones who had a VHS player at the time. I remember that stuff, so my uncle and aunt came

to watch it too. My uncle was my hero at the time as he was serving in the Navy and also the Navy boxing champ. He told me that if any werewolves came knocking on the door in the middle of the night. Uh that he would be safe as long as he stayed behind him. So anyway, we watched the movie. I loved every minute of it. I was only a little bit scared, not too much. But around midnight that night, I went to bed, safe in the

knowledge to Uncle Allan was in the next room. Just then I started to drift off and I heard a blood curdling scream from outside my window, followed by shots of help and he's going to kill me. I was out of bed in a flash, getting ready to bravely run away hide behind Uncle Alan, when I see a figure running up to the front door through that weird eighties bubble glass that was all the rage back then. Then this figure starts frantically banging the door, shouting He's

gonna kill me, He's gonna get me, He's gonna kill me. Naturally, I had brown underpants at this moment, as most eight year olds would after watching that movie and then hearing and seeing this person screaming through distorted shapes. By this time, my uncle, along with the rest of us, were up and he opened the door to see what all the fuss was about. I was expecting to see a bloodyed and torn to shreds victim of a werewolf attack. But it turns out it was one of our neighbors. I

found out later I had mental health issues. I was having a delusion that he was being chased by monsters. It's pretty weird timing. Yeah, that took a really sad twist, you know, the night this kid sees this though, it's like bad, bad timing. Plus his neighbors like that bad off mentally, it is sad. But guys, we calmed him down and made him a nice cup of tea because in England that solves everything. And mom took him home when he was okay enough to think rationally. So they

took care of the guy. And that is from Al who was now in Australia. Wow, that's a heck of a story. Yeah, it beats my werewolf in Lindon story. So I went to bed. Yeah it was pretty uneventful. Uh. If you have a story about something that we've talked about, I know that's vague and nebulous, but that's good. I mean that it's a wide net basically is what we've just cast. That's right. You can tweet to us at

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