Can you die from testing a 9V battery on your tongue?

[Johnboy60]

Asked by Liam Johnson of Frankfurt, Germany

First the simple question: Can you die from testing a 9V battery on your tongue? I have read newspaper reports (around 1990) of a woman dying after her boyfriend used a 9V battery as sexual stimulation.

A brief look on the internet brings up a number of comments.

1. Apparently there was a US sailor being trained as an electrician who killed himself by sticking the probes of an Ohmmeter through his skin to measure his internal resistance.
2. There are also claims of eight people a year dying in Australia (why just Australia?) from testing batteries.

Now, the explanation I have heard as to why this is, is that in certain freak cases, the battery can make an almost direct connection to the nervous system where the nerves are close to the surface and the skin is wet, thus ionising the nerves so that they will not work correctly. Result is death.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/28/the_odd_body_death_by_battery/

 

[Locrian]

My first response to this was a big Not Possible, but I did some googling, and it is a pretty complicated situation. First off, the rumor about 8 people dying a year in Australia testing batteries is probably false or misleading. It sounds much like an urband myth. As for the navy man dying, this would seem to have some validity, but I question the value of a sample size of one.

In any case, as someone who has tested a significant number of 9V batteries on his tounge, I can tell you there is no guarantee of death in doing so.

Think about it: You press a 9V battery to some part of your body. The electrical current is going to go from one tip to the other. The only way to die is to have that route happen to be through your heart. Why wouldn't it just go through the immediate nerves to the other lead?

I'll ask some medical people I know more about the nervous system, but this would seem pretty hazy to me.

 

[jess91877]

If that was true, I would have been dead by now

 

[Michael]

I'm with Jess and Locrian . I'd be long since dead if the percentage was very high. In my 20's, I did a lot of work with electric garage door openers and gate openers. I can't even remember now how many times I "tongue tested" a battery in a transmitter by touching both leads to my tongue. I actually got to be pretty good at spotting a "weak" battery vs. a good one that way. Occasionally I'd even use a volt meter to test myself and the tongue test never failed.

The current in this case passes mostly through the tongue itself, going from one terminal to the other through the path of least resistance, the tongue. To actually die, the heart would have to be included in the circuit in some way, and I don't see how that's possible with a simple tongue test. At worst case even a good Duracell would just make the tongue tingle a bit.

I'd have to look up the current flow necessary to stop a human heart, but I seriously doubt a standard 9volt battery by itself can deliver anywhere near that kind of current through something like human tissue.

 

[chilehed]

...Can you die from testing a 9V battery on your tongue?...

Only if you slip and get it lodged in your windpipe.

 

[Michael]

Only if you slip and get it lodged in your windpipe.

LOL!

 

[Alarum]

This calls for Mythbusters!

 

[[serious]]

it would be possible to die from 9 volts. It would not be possible to die from a 9 volt battery without doing some funky stuff with it.

Current is more important than voltage. While you may be able to stand up to a garden hose shooting watter at 10 miles per hour, but you certainly couldn't hold your feet in a chest deep river of that speed.

I imagine it would be possible to boost the voltage of a 9 volt battery enough that it would kill a person, but it would take a whole lot of boosting (tasers boost a source like this up to 300,000-1,000,000 volts so it would likely have to be well above that)