By hooking into the World Wide Web, you can look at a variety of electronic
"pages," consisting of documents, pictures, and videos created by people all
over the world.  One of these is a guy named (really) George Goble, a computer
person in the Purdue University engineering department.  Each year, Goble and a
bunch of other engineers hold a picnic in West Lafayette, Indiana, at which
they cook hamburgers on a big grill.  Being engineers, they began looking for
practical ways to speed up the charcoal-lighting process.

"We started by blowing the charcoal with a hair dryer," Goble told me in a
telephone interview.  "Then we figured out that it would light faster if we
used a vacuum cleaner."

If you know anything about (1) engineers and (2) guys in general, you know what
happened: The purpose of the charcoal-lighting shifted from cooking hamburgers
to seeing how fast they could light the charcoal.

From the vacuum cleaner, they escalated to using a propane torch, then an
acetylene torch.  Then Goble started using compressed pure oxygen, which caused
the charcoal to burn much faster, because as you recall from chemistry class,
fire is essentially the rapid combination of oxygen with the cosine to form the
Tigris and Euphrates rivers (or something along those lines).

By this point, Goble was getting pretty good times.  But in the world of
competitive charcoal-lighting, "pretty good" does not cut the mustard.  Thus,
Goble hit upon the idea of using - get ready - liquid oxygen.  This is the form
of oxygen used in rocket engines; it's 295 degrees below zero and 600 times as
dense as regular oxygen.  In terms of releasing energy, pouring liquid oxygen
on charcoal is the equivalent of throwing a live squirrel into a room
containing 50 million Labrador retrievers.  On Gobel's World Wide Web page (the
address is http://ghg.ecn.purdue.edu/), you can see actual photographs and a
video of Goble using a bucket attached to a 10-foot-long wooden handle to dump
3 gallons of liquid oxygen (not sold in stores) onto a grill containing 60
pounds of charcoal and a lit cigarette for ignition.  What follows is the most
impressive charcoal-lighting I have ever seen, featuring a large fireball that,
according to Goble, reached 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit.  The charcoal was ready
for cooking in - this has to be a world record - 3 seconds.

There's also a photo of what happened when Goble used the same technique on a
flimsy $2.88 discount-store grill.  All that's left is a circle of charcoal
with a few shreds of metal in it.  "Basically, the grill vaporized," said
Goble.  "We were thinking of returning it to the store for a refund."

Looking at Goble's video and photos, I became, as an American, all choked up
with gratitude at the fact that I do not live anywhere near the engineers'
picnic site.  But also, I was proud of my country for producing guys who can be
ready to barbecue in less time than it takes for guys in less-advanced nations,
such as France, to spit.

Will the 3-second barrier ever be broken?  Will engineers come up with a new,
more powerful charcoal-lighting technology?  It's something for all of us to
ponder this summer as we sit outside, chewing our hamburgers, every now and
then glancing in the direction of West Lafayette, Indiana, looking for a
mushroom cloud.