Spontaneous Combustion

[jcherbstritt]

Does anyone remember in the 80s there was all this fuss about people spontaneously combusing.  There was a QED programme about it.  I remember an old lady had apparently spontaneously combusted, and just her slippers were left by the fire.  It freaked me out, being only about 10 years old.   Now, looking back I wonder - is it all just an April Fool?

[bernardo]

Not quite - ther ehave been such cases, and they are well-documented, but they are not cases of "spontaneous" combustion.  They are mostly cases in which the person has become incapacitated (injured or unconscious) and have been unable to take the normal steps to tackle a minor fire.  It works by using the "wick effect" whereby the clothes become the burning bit (like the wick of a candle) and the fat from the body continually feeds the fire until the body is burnt.  This combination enables the fire to be hot enough to burn the body, but the flame to be small enough that it doesn't spread to iother furniture etc. (The flame is only a few inches high).  It has been replicated by the use of a dead pig.

[Peter Pedant]

Yes Bernardo is absolutely correcticus!

the wick by the way is the clothing. Photos exist of normal flesh above a sockline and an incinerated foot below and so on.

Interest has been around for 200 years.

Dupuytren (Famous French Physician was the first to suggest a wick effect)

DIckens was interested in the subject and there is some evidence that he researched it before having Mr Krook spontaneously combust in Bleak House - very well described -\perhaps that's how people know he researched the idea.

There were two programs in the eighties within a few months of each other and the New Idea which was not hyped as it is a bit technical is that not only do you need a source of ignition but also that the room has to be sealed,so that the burninng is slow and hypoxic - curiously enough described byDickens.

[Peter Pedant]

Hell fire

sorry, she has no socks and the incineration was above the feet.

I remember that photo as well, and that kind of 'proved' the outside wick idea.

and then i think the prog went on to say - and of course this idea has been around for a long time In 1830 in France.....

it obviously had an effect on me too - i had just read Bleak House

[brachiopod]

There was a lot of interest in this sort of thing in the early eighties, wasn't there?

There was one of those Time Life "complete in 6,842 monthly issues" type magazines and of course, the television programme "Arthur C. Clark's Mysterious Umbrella" 

[woofgang]

The chap who is our fire officer at work is an ex fireman and as down to earth a man as you could imagine and he swears that on eof the cases that he was called to was spontaneous combustion. I know we have at least one fireman poster on here, and would be interested in his view?