HOWTO, Cook an Egg With Your Cell Phone

xPosiMattx writes "Suzzanna Decantworthy published an article in her Wymsey Weekend column that described how to cook an egg with two cell phones. From the article: "Many students, and other young people, have little in the way of cooking skills but can usually get their hands on a couple of mobile phones. So, this week, we show you how to use two mobile phones to cook an egg which will make a change from phoning out for a pizza.""

A cheaper way

1. Preheat oven to 350deg.
2. Oil and flour a 8" pan (or use nonstick).
3. Dial your ex.
4. Place phone in pan.
5. Crack an egg on the phone.
6. Season to taste.
7. Bake at 350 for 20 minutes.

OK, obviously #3 is a problem...

Re:A cheaper way

i'm still using my xbox charger. it's more versatile, i can cook pizza too

Re:A cheaper way

> 4. Place phone in pan.
5. Crack an egg on the phone.

#5 might be closer to a solution than you guess.

I, like others, RTFA, and along with everyone else who'd like their 30 seconds of "WTF" back, here's a way that might actually work.

1) Remove batteries from phones.
2) You've got between 1 and 2 amp-hours of 12 volts to work with.
3) You need to get the yolk to around 63C for soft-boiling, and from 20C room temperature, that'll take you around 15-20kJ of energy. Yeah, I've skipped a bit [ex.ac.uk].
4) ...but it's within the right order of magnitude [mpoweruk.com] to cook an egg, particularly because the low internal resistance of such batteries allows for very high current.

Crack one egg onto one phone - you'll cook something as you short the entire battery out through a pile of egg. If you used the battery as a swizzle stick, constantly stirring the egg mess, and constantly scraping the battery terminals free of solidified gunk, you'll generate a decent amount of heat in the gunk. (You'll also probably electrolyze some of the stuff in the egg, so I wouldn't recommend trying this at home - FSM-only-knows what kind of stuff will show up at the battery terminals beyond hydrogen and oxygen.)

At worst, you'll end up with a partially-toxic, soupy, warmed-over mess with a few chunks of scrambled egg in it.

6) If you've got enough surplus energy (like, say, 100kJ to work with), break up the battery packs, use them to power a small hot plate or peltier unit, (preferably with 12V, but if you've got even more surplus energy in the battery packs to waste on conversions, you could use a converter to turn 12VDC into 120VAC), and power your heater with that.

Crack the egg onto the hot plate, and you'll end up with a light fluffy omelette.

Either way, you're way ahead of the author of the original link.

Re:A cheaper way

At worst, you'll end up with a partially-toxic, soupy, warmed-over mess with a few chunks of scrambled egg in it.

You mean a McGriddle?

It May Just Be Me...

...but the little foot icon looks astonishingly like an old rotary telephone today.

Not so fast there.

FTFA:

6. Phone A will now be talking to Phone B whilst Phone B will be talking to Phone A.

I love urban legend as much as the next guy, but this isn't exactly true. These are cell phones not two-way radios. Phone A will be talking to a cell phone tower, whilst phone B is talking to a cell phone tower, whilst each cell phone tower is talking to the two phones respectively. There is no reason to think that you are forming some sort of ultra powerful death beam between the two phones by placing them in close proximity to one another. Having said that, if I was being attacked by a giant stay puff marshmallow man, I might give this a shot as a last resort.

Easyish to achieve

Placing large metal objects round the phones until their signal strength meters read 1 bar would be an easy way to max out the power consumption.

However this is obviously BS. Especially as phones all talk to the tower, so using two of them serves no other purpose than halfing the cook time.

This is your brain on CDMA

Re:Not so fast there.

I beg to differ. Analog phones (and digital ones for that matter) scale the transmitter power output according to the received signal strength, or when the base station tells them to bump up the transmitter. The modulation scheme being FM has nothing to do with it.

As to believers of the original article, eggs average around 50 grams in weight. It takes one calorie to raise the temperature of a gram of water by one degree Celsius. One calorie = 4.184 Joules (let's say 4.2 because this is a rough approximation anyway). Room temperature is 20 Celsius, so the difference to boiling is 80 degrees C. You need 4000 calories to bring an egg up to boiling (50 gms * 80 degrees C), or about 17000 Joules. Since a joule is equal to a watt-second, that means your average phone with 1 watt output would need about 4.5 hours to raise the egg to boiling temperature, assuming NO other losses.

Re:Not so fast there.

> A: you don't need to heat an egg to boiling to cook it.

I will give you that the first part of A is probably true.

However, the volume of an egg is at least half water, probably more like the human body around 80% or more. Remember it turns into a chicken which, like nearly all creatures on the Earth, are mobile sacks of water.

> That brings the time down to 20 minutes - which is what the article says.

FTA:
"For instance, a pair of mobiles each with 2 Watts of transmitter output will take three minutes to boil a large free range egg"

Where did you get 20 minutes from?

It takes 3 minutes to hard boil an egg in water. There's no way your cell phone (or even a few of them) could put enough heat into an egg to make it's temperature go up even a couple degrees. You need to be able to put more heat into the object than the air around it can dissipate.

Re:Not so fast there.

"Where did you get 20 minutes from?"

From thin air? I really don't know. Somehow that's what I remembered.

And you are right about the water level of an egg, looking at the Nutrition Facts I count 11g of other stuff in a 50g egg, AKA 39g of water AKA 78%.

I now acknowledge that this is a hoax. There really is no way for a cell phone to cook an egg in 3 minutes.

Re:Not so fast there.

Technically while the phone itself is omnidirectional, a cell site is not. It isn't highly accurate, however the tower does know what direction you're calling from and will transmit to your phone in close to that direction using panel antennas. This is also one way that cell towers achieve greater call density, since there is no need to transmit away from the phone (what good would that do). This frees up channels on the antennas your call isn't being transmitted on to handle other users, and allows it to direct more power to you and not in directions that clearly don't need it.

Of course the cell phone thing is ridiculous. Even IF you could get two modern (i.e. microwave-band) phones to operate at the full 2W continuously, you're a far cry from the hundreds of watts a microwave oven needs to cook the same eggs -- and a microwave oven has a resonation chamber to bounce the waves around until they're absorbed by the food. I suppose if you irradiated an egg using cell phones and could build a metal chamber to resonate those waves and contain them until absorption, you could eventually cook an egg. It would take a long time though, and for what it will cost you in either cell bills or fried phones you could have just bought a damn Egg McMuffin!

Re:What's the radio for??

So you don't get bored waiting, because you'll be waiting a very long time. Especially considering the fact that this method does not work.

That SO wouldn't work...

Ha! Like they expect us to believe th -- OOOH! Shiny!

Re:can't cook an egg with two cell phones.

Now now, give it a chance. The author quotes a power output of 2watts, which means you need to track down one of those ancient brick phones, I don't think any modern phones still have that power level. And if you compare that 4 watts of unidirectional power to the focused power of a dorm room 600 watt microwave, you an quickly see how with the 200x microwave application aucustic concentration effect of modern radios, you can see how this might work to cook an egg as fast as a microwave.

Re:can't cook an egg with two cell phones.

"how with the 200x microwave application aucustic concentration effect of"

It's even more if the radio rolls all 20s.

Note to self...

...don't talk on two cell phones simultaneously.

Dupe

Sigh.... Anyone actually like to find the article. I found this which shows it's a year old. PS. Woot. My first dupe whine. http://www.engadget.com/2005/09/07/boil-an-egg-ins tead-of-your-brain-with-your-cellphones/ [engadget.com]

Re:Wow...

Thats funky. I wonder how many eggs I cook every day while im chatting with my GF...

Two, if you keep your phone in your front pants pocket.

Brainiac

Bzzt. Brainiac (an alternative to Mythbusters) tried this with 100 phones, and the phones were literally covering the egg, and they left the egg under there for a while. It definitely didn't cook, and they reported it didn't even get remotely warm either.

Brainiac is the worst program ever

EVER.

It has none of the charm or actual science of Mythbusters and yet the people who make it think they're the coolest, funniest, sexiest people in the world. What they don't realise is that they're actually English.

A few problems

Problem #1. Handheld cellphones do not emit 2W. The old analog handhelds were capped at 700mW and I suspect the digitals emit much less based on the power available to them and the talktime.

Problem #2. Even if you scrounged up some old bagphones with their 3W output power, they still only gives you six watts of power. I don't think that is going to cook an egg in the time claimed.

Remember, kids...

Don't ever put two cell phones in your front pant pockets. You might cook your eggs but no one will ever know. And if you have two cell phones in your back pant pockets, your ass will catch on fire and everyone will laugh at you. Life is a cruel master.

This will never work

For so many reasons:

1) Cell phones are the wrong frequency. They are 800, 900, 1800, or 1900 MHz depending on the service. To make water heat up, you need to be at the frequency water resonates which is 2.4GHz.

2) Cell phones are too low power. A microwave that will cook an egg in a couple of minutes is going to have power expressed in at least the hundreds of watts, and probably will be 1000 watt. Cellphones have output power expressed in the miliwatts, that 1/1000th of a watt. We are literally talking over 5 orders of magnitude difference.

3) Microwaves function because they build standing waves. You find that if you take the frequency of a microwave (printed on the back usually), measure the size of the cavity and run the numbers, it works out that it's of a size such that standing waves build up. Taking a magnetron out of the case makes it work very poorly, despite the power output.

4) Cellphones operate in bursts. They do a burst when they have something to transmit, then fall silent. Saves on batteries. That's not going to cut it for heating, you need continous output.

I'm not sure if this is a joke or what, but you'll never get something like this to work. To even have a chance, you'd need to use a cordless 2.4GHz phone. It's at least in the right frequency ballpark, never mind all the other problems.

Re:This will never work

1) Cell phones are the wrong frequency. They are 800, 900, 1800, or 1900 MHz depending on the service. To make water heat up, you need to be at the frequency water resonates which is 2.4GHz.

Why does this myth persist? I have no idea. Whenever it pops up, someone points out that it's not true. But it still persists. It doesn't even make sense, after all - microwaves heat dry things (like... plates) as well as wet things.

Microwaves work via dielectric heating [wikipedia.org], which is just the vibration of any electric dipole due to any electromagnetic radiation. Radiation in the gigahertz band is typical, but it's a wide band. Microwave ovens use 2450 MHz because it's in the ISM band.

Water does heat best, but that's because it's one of the strongest dipoles known to exist.

Water vapor has a resonant frequency at 22.235 GHz [brucegary.net] and 183 GHz. You can see the 22 GHz line in the graph on the linked page. Also of interest is the fact that clouds don't have that absorption feature because liquid water droplets are small compared to microwave wavelengths.

Note that if water's resonant frequency was 2450 MHz, absolutely no one would use that band, as you couldn't transmit anything on it, because water vapor in the air would be opaque to it.

a quick calculation

Assuming an egg has the heat capacity of 60g of water, and a 1000mAh * 3.7V cell phone battery, it looks like a fully charged cell phone battery could actually raise the temperature of an egg by 55 degrees C. That is, if you could somehow expend your entire battery into heat, and have it all go into the egg, you could cook one.

The article is still a joke, of course - the egg won't even come close to warming by any measurable amount.

Egg, brain, whatever...

this is nonceklse - ive;benen using my cebll phone for yearsnow and theresno obsevvable effecsts.

Really Works! Call Now!

This really works! I've done it!

And, for the first time since yesterday, I am offering for sale a revolutionary new product that will protect your precious head from the same egg-cooking x-rays that make you breakfast.

For three small payments of $19.95, you can block the radiation emitting from your cell phone by adding this small device to the back of your phone. The unique lattice-like orientation of the pantented gold-copper-lead electrical conduits create an electrical "net" around your phone, forcing the dangerous radiation to be emitted directly up into the sky instead of into your brain! Simply peel the backing off the product and affix it to the back of your phone, between the phone and the battery. Be sure to read the manual for proper placement, because if you are even a fraction of an inch off, you won't get the proper protection you deserve. If you are feeling nervous about doing it yourself, I also offer a service to install this device on your phone for you, for only two additional payments of $19.95 each, plus postage. Just send me your phone and rest easy!

But wait! Call now, and I will throw in, completely free of charge, a cell phone privacy guard. This handy device fits over the mouthpiece of the phone and prevents malicious hackers from listening in on your calls by scrambling your signal. Don't miss out on this opportunity!

First one hundred callers receive a deed to the Brooklyn Bridge as a FREE GIFT!

Wow. Who knew? Cook an egg with 12 Watt-minutes

Uh. Huh. Let's see ... an egg is, oh, say 50 grams. So it takes 50 calories to raise the temp of the egg by 1C. and a hard-boiled egg is more or less at equilibrium with boiling water, so the minimum would be something like 70×50 calories, and 4.2 joules/calorie, so its going to take MINIMUM 14,700 joules.

60 joules to the watt-minute. 720 joules in 12 watt-minutes. 720 joules < 14,700 joules.

Check: it takes about 1 minute for my 700 watt microwave to cook 1 egg. 700 watt-minutes is 42,000 joules. 720 joules < 42,000 joules.

I call bullshit.

Irresponsible

It is EXTREMELY irresponsible to post such stupid stuff here - don't you realise that soon this will be duped several times on Digg and then other Diggers will post it to their blogs, while others look for someone (or a cell phone company) to blame, and will start wrapping their phones or heads in tinfoil - heck, some Diggers will probably TRY and cook an egg and may get salmonella from the eggs on their fingers, which they will transfer to their mouths when they suck their thumbs and so will end up needing antibiotics.

For the sake of humanity (Diggmanity?) *** --No Digg ***.

I better go warn them before it's too late.....

It's a HOAX!

This has been widely [flutterby.com] discussed [brainwagon.org] online [livejournal.com] and it is a pure hoax. The wymsey site also has such highly factual articles as hunting the wily tofu [wymsey.co.uk]. Obligatory dig at slashdot editors elided for space.

Holy bejesus

How does anyone get out of high school without the ability to call bullshit on stuff like this?

It takes one calorie to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree C. To a first approximation, an egg weighs about 50 grams, and is full of stuff whose specific heat is probably not too different from that of water. Let's say cooking an egg at room temperature requires you to raise its temperature by 50 degrees C for one minute. You will need something on the order of 2500 calories to do this, or about 10,000 joules. This energy will have to be transferred to the egg over a one-minute interval, assuming 100% efficiency.

A joule is one watt-second, so this cooking process is going to require exposing the egg to about 166 watts for one minute. At 100% efficiency.

A cell phone puts out about one watt, and good luck funnelling all of its output into an egg. (For extra credit, calculate the impedance of a chicken egg in free space, and design a suitable matching network).

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to my public-safety campaign, warning gullible Americans about dangerous levels of radiation in voting booths.

Snopes!

First place [snopes.com] I check for these urban legends.

If this were true, a naked magentron would be a great cellphone jammer. Even if not, it still might be!

Shocking level of knowledge from slashdot readers

The number of untrue or inaccurate statements in the posts about this article just go to show how little slashdot readers seem to actually think about the article (like that's a surprise).

First off, as stated in an earlier port, 2.45GHz is NOT the resonant frequency of water molecules, otherwise only the surface of food in microwaves would be heated.

http://rabi.phys.virginia.edu/HTW/microwave_ovens. html [virginia.edu]

Cell phones work at 850MHz or 1850MHz, so it's not looking good right from the off.

Second off, as stated by the article, "For instance, a pair of mobiles each with 2 Watts of transmitter output will take three minutes to boil a large free range egg."

Four watts. Four joules per second.

Lets look at this. I'll use some glaring assumptions just to get an estimate of the time taken to cook an egg with 4W (with is a factor of ten greater than you'd really expect from two mobile phone).

First off, lets assume that you want to heat the egg (70g - it's a large egg) from 20C to 100C. I'm not sure if that constitutes cooking, but it'll do for now.

Lets also assume that the energy required to heat the egg is similar to that of water (4186 J/kg).

So energy required is 4186 * 0.07 * 80 = 23kJ.

At 4W, we're talking 5860 seconds, or 98 minutes. And that's assuming 100% efficiency, which definitely won't be the case in this situation. (Not forgetting the already incorrect factor of ten for the phone output power, frequency of operation and burst nature of phone comms).

By the by, I discovered this page on egg boiling science as I finished writing this post:

http://newton.ex.ac.uk/teaching/CDHW/egg/ [ex.ac.uk]

Perhaps someone with more patience than me can more accurately calculate the energy required to boil a 70g egg?

Okay, but ...

How many honey bees [sciencenews.org] does it take to cook an egg?

It really works!

I tried it and it works!

The only thing the article fails to mention is that the phones must be inside a 400 degree oven for the entire process. But other than that...

Common sense and a little math

Ok, first of all; if I could cook an egg in say five minutes using two phone, I could cook it in 10 minutes using one phone. I talk longer than that on the phone sometimes - how would the right side of my brain look if the phone actually emitted enough energy to boil an egg in that time? Right - you would faint after talking just a few seconds (heating the brain is *really* not a good-for-you thing to do). After 10 minutes of talking you wouldn't be able to guess your own name, should you wake up...

So, obviously this is BS.

Now. A big egg, let's say that's about 80 grams of mass, and that the specific heat of the combined egg contents is similar to water (shouldn't be too much of a long shot). So, we have 80 grams of something that has a specific heat close to 4 joules/(gram*kelvin).

To boil that, we need to heat it about 80 kelvin (room temperature around 293 kelvin, water boiling at 373 kelvin). That's 4 [joules/(gram*kelvin)] * 80 [kelvin] = 320 [joules/gram].

We had 80 grams of egg. This gives us 80 [grams] * 320 [joules/gram] = 25600 [joules].

We had five minutes to do this - that's 5*60=300 seconds. A joule being one watt in one second, we get: 25600 [watt*second] / 300 [seconds] = 85 [watts]. So, using 85 watts for five minutes should get an egg from room temperature to the boiling point of water. Approximately.

Each phone would then have to emit around 42 watts (could this be a coincidence? Oh, nevermind..).

Let's say you get around one third of the energy into the egg (I'm really being generous here - the egg would have to cover 1/3 of the output of the antenna and completely absorb the energy) - you would need two phones each with a 126 watt transmitter.

Mobile phones with 100+ watt transmitters? I know there are rural areas in the US of A, but I sincerely doubt that it's common to carry phones that pack that much punch.

Besides, the article talked about 2 watt output phones... Again, BS.

Ahhh.... Have a nice day.