This is a very interesting story, but this article is pretty light on a lot of the details of his life. He got into a lot of mischief throughout his life and unfortunately died a few years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn. It's a real shame, because he was obviously bright and highly motivated and I feel like he was just never able to really put all that potential into action.
My favorite part of the story is that he was arrested for stealing smoke detectors from his apartment building trying to collect radioactive material. One of my first jobs was shipping / receiving for an electronics manufacturer, and smoke / gas detectors were the lion's share of our business. I was told I always had to classify the products as "components for a nuclear reactor" on international shipping manifests, which I thought was silly. Until I read this story...
I've actually called the US Dept of Commerce to get help figuring out which Harmonized System code to use for some shipments. I managed to stump them and they had to give me a callback, but throughout they were extremely helpful.
Was that a new episode/season of that show? Huge fan
I actually met the guy many years ago a few times before he was ever famous. First time he was SO OBNOXIOUS, like we had to be mean as possible and kick him out because he just wouldn't listen to us trying to tell him to shut the hell up with name-dropping Seth Rogen and some early hiphop comedy act he used to do on this website loadingreadyrun when we were trying to watch a movie... Second time he was a security guard at a parking lot next to a rave and we smoked a blunt with him
I don't care how much booze and drugs and radium-powered neutron guns you die from, if the coroner finds Benadryl in your blood, it's going in the report.
This is also the reason modern smoke detectors are all annoying BS. We can't have nice things because this one guy went through a whole lot of trouble to do something silly.
Now they're all oversensitive steam sensing BS models. I'd rather have freaking IR cameras looking for too much heat (outside of kitchens).
The "nuclear" ones are ionization type, which have the useful quality of being cheap. Otherwise, they're almost, but not entirely, worthless as far as being a smoke detector goes.
The other type is the photoelectric type, which is generally more expensive, but rather radically more likely to alert for the sort of fires that kill people.
Ionization types are really good at detecting the emissions from flames. They're disturbingly bad at detecting actual smoke - so the name "smoke detector" for them is a bit misleading, IMO. If you've got a grease fire or something going with basically no smoke, an ionization type will detect this in a hurry, and they're also rather prone to false positives as noticed by anyone with one of them near a kitchen.
The photoelectric types aren't so good at detecting flames, but are quite good at detecting smoke in the air. In some tests, they alert 30-40 minutes before an ionization type notices a problem.
But the problem comes when you start looking at the type of fires that actually kill people. The bulk of fire deaths are from overnight fires, in which something is smoldering (and smoking...) for half an hour or longer before the heat gets to the point that the piece of (usually furniture) ignites. The photoelectric type will alert to this smoke. The ionization type waits until the [whatever] has actually caught fire to bother doing anything - which is far less useful, because by the time the couch has caught fire, the room and the rest of the house aren't far behind. Some realistic tests have shown that there's literally half an hour or more of alert from the photoelectric type, down to "A minute or two" for the ionization type.
Skip Walker has done a number of presentations, and some of his work can be found here:
> In tests, ionization alarms will typically respond about 30 to 90 seconds faster to “fast-flame” fires than photoelectric smoke alarms. However, in smoldering fires ionization alarms respond an average of 15 to 50 minutes slower than photoelectric alarms. Several studies indicate that they will outright fail to activate up to 20-25% of the time. The vast majority of residential fire fatalities are due to smoke inhalation, not from the actual flames and almost two-thirds of fire fatalities occur at night while we sleep.
> In 2007, UL published the “Smoke Characterization Study”. This study tested both types of smoke alarms using current UL testing standards and materials; they also tested the alarms using UL test criteria integrating a variety of synthetic materials and current tests such as smoldering toast. The results are frightening. Ionization alarms failed the UL 217 test 20% of the time using the current standard test materials. This is the test that the alarms must pass 100% of the time to be offered for sale and installed in US homes. When tested using synthetic materials, ionization alarms DID NOT TRIGGER (DNT) in 7 out of 8 synthetic test scenarios. In the one test where the ionization alarm did trigger, it activated at a level exceeding maximum allowed under the UL standard and nearly 43 minutes after the photoelectric alarm in the same test.
He also has a presentation up that just drills down, over and over, into data, studies, etc. The results are quite clear: in the sort of fires that actually kill people, photoelectric smoke detectors radically outperform ionization types - and this is found in study after study that looks at "fires vs fire deaths vs smoke detector types" as well.
You can spider off those if you want, but you really should put at least a few photoelectric smoke detectors in your house.
Don't bother with the combo detectors. They're either an "or" gate, which gives you the worst of both worlds, or an "and" gate, at which point the photoelectric sensor can be screaming its head off about the smoke, but the alarm won't sound until the ionization type detects flame products.
> I'd rather have freaking IR cameras looking for too much heat (outside of kitchens).
They've been tested against smoke detectors and are worse than even ionization types for detecting early fires.
Now I wonder how we allow companies to try to squeeze every drop of profit from life saving devices. Smoke detectors cost a good few tens of bucks here in US, and they still feel the need to use ionization instead of photoelectric? I've taken a few photoelectric smoke alarms apart, and it's literally just an LED, a photodiode, some cleverly shaped black plastic, and a few integrated circuits. I imagine doing reliable averaging/signal conditioning wont be super trivial, but surely it's something that can be all integrated into a single IC for cheap. All of that should seriously cost no more than half a dollar to produce at large scale.
I have no idea. That sounds cheaper than trace radioactives to me, but the photoelectric ones are reliably more expensive than ionization, at least around here. And a lot harder to find, too.
I'm pretty well annoyed that ionization types are still allowed and the default, if it doesn't show. "YOU LIT THE KITCHEN ON FIRE!" alarms are nice, but radically less useful than "Hey, something's smoking and has been doing so for a while and you're all asleep," based on empirical evidence from the studies on fire deaths. Fires while someone's awake and (often enough) involved in the process are important to warn about, but if one has to pick between that and the stuff that kills people at night, I'd bias towards the ones that (a) meet the requirements they're supposed to meet and (b) provably save lives.
Wow, where I am you can get a photoelectric smoke alarm for approx USD 7, or one with a 10 year battery for US$12. Ionisation type detectors are pretty much gone from the market.
Some people might automatically assume that anything that feels modern is bad. Ionization calls to mind the space age, vacuum tubes, and the like, while photoelectric makes you think "Oh, a computer and a sensor like everything else we make".
People love to rush to the defense of anything slightly but not that significantly dangerous, and seem to feel that there has been a loss for all mankind if it goes.
The false alarms you get from the heat detectors are exceedingly annoying to. My last apartment, I had heat detectors as well as carbon monoxide detectors. I could not use the oven in my kitchen without setting off the heat detector in the hallway. Literally open the door after a preheat, and the damn thing goes off. Nothing burning that should be burning (it was a gas oven after all). Lots of open doors and windows (always fun in winter Chicagoland) and waving of towels at the detector...
I lived in that apartment for over 10 years... Never once had a "real" fire, but easily had hundreds of alarms. Very, very low signal to noise ratio...
The simple answer is put ionization detectors near the kitchen/fireplace which have open flames, and photoelectric detectors near bedrooms which tend to smolder.
That would lead to a whole bunch of false positives when people are cooking. Which is an issue too.
Anecdotal: a friend had these in apartment and they ended up covering them with sacs everytime they wanted to bake meat. Cause otherwise the whole building risked evacuation just because they wanted damm baked chicken or something.
Steam from showers sets off some types of smoke detectors as well. I know of a student halls of residence that had them. In the uk that type of building is classified as high risk so the alarm system is directly connected to the fire brigade. Cue grumpy firemen making students stand out in the rain at 1 in the morning every couple of days while they search the building for a non existent fire.
Highly motivated yes, bright, probably not. He never actually managed to build anything useful. He did manage to designate his backyard a superfund site though. And managed to get arrested for trying to do it again, this time in an apartment building full of people.
If you read through the history of his life, it looks much less like a smart, resourceful person trying to do science being kept down by The Man. It's more like untreated mental illness putting others in danger, and resulting in his premature death.
Yeah, I'm saying he was not smart, nor was he resourceful. He was certainly mentally ill.
He didn't build a reactor. He didn't build an x-ray machine. No experiments took place. There was no scientific method employed. He took apart a bunch of smoke detectors. He irradiated his mother's back yard, and then he tried to do it again in an apartment building.
He wasn't a misunderstood savant.
The guy did nothing that should be emulated, lauded, or praised. He's a cautionary tale of untreated mental illness.
Smart or not he had a lot of domain knowledge and had the ambition to learn more. Its vastly disappointing that none of the authorities or adults in his life steered him towards work in the nuclear field
As far as I know he didn't do well in math. I suspect what might have helped most is to have less enablers.
He didn't seem to have ambition to aquire the kind of knowledge that makes a difference. Math. Safety protocols. The politics of working with others and creating a sense of absolute trust.
He may have had a lot of domain knowledge, but was any of it at all relevant to a supercomputer simulation of a reactor?
This isn't something you learn as you go. If you try something, and aren't already 99% sure what is going to happen before you try it, then you may be learning lots of random nuclear facts, but you aren't learning what the professionals do.
99.99% of nuclear engineers have probably never done even one DIY experiment past the very safe "Let's measure bananas" stuff.
The best way to steer him towards a real career would be to make him understand why you do not build backyard reactors, and why you learn your math, go to college, and do things professionally or not at all.
It's been more than a decade since I read the book. If I remember correctly, the parents were pretty absent/clueless and uninvolved. It's possible someone tried to steer him (science teacher working with the tanning lotion). But it doesn't seem the the parents would have been likely to do it based on his side of the story.
Most people could not / would not go and teach themselves chemistry in their bedroom.
While not a savant, it sounds like he might have benefited from being given direction from an interested adult.
There is this odd bias in our culture. If a guy does a bunch of stupid and unethical stuff with tech sounding things, people tend to assume he is smart and has oh-so-high potential.
See the 2003 film about him, made while he was still alive, at link below. This film has some details about his homemade reactor at about 17:24 minutes in.
> The Scoutmaster’s wife noted that a typical kid working on this badge goes to a hospital and asks about x-rays. David decided to build a Breeder Reactor. This was perfectly logical to someone with a rather naive social awareness, accompanied by a passion for collecting all the Periodic Table Elements.
Can someone explain the logical connection between "naive social awareness" and "choosing to go way above and beyond for this merit badge"?
As someone with Asperger syndrome (very mild) and the parent of a kid with it (more so), I may be overly sensitive to stereotyping on the topic. So in that excerpt above, what I hear is a neuro-typical adult dismissing the kid's amazing accomplishment here, just because he's socially awkward.
I'm sure she's actually a lovely person, so I'm hoping someone can give me a better explanation.
It sounds like he was hyper-focused to the detriment of his health and others around him at several steps in the story (lying to nuclear scientists, performing dangerous experiments in a residential area, it goes on). I agree with you that he did amazing things, but those things are tainted by his disregard for others. I think that's what they mean by social naivete.
My sons recently completed the Nuclear Science merit badge, and one of the experiments involves the creation of a cloud chamber. The 'old school' method for obtaining a radioactive source is using a lantern mantle, which is a practical item that a scout might be able to access. I did not previously realize that old school mantles were dipped in Thorium. Alas, these are somewhat difficult to obtain today as you might expect. It was pretty fun to discover that the modern solution is to just order some Uranium ore from Amazon.
As far as I know Hahn was never formally diagnosed with it, but as an adult was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and bipolar.
Perhaps she was implying he was not neurotypical(Many think he wasn't), perhaps she was referring to something else.
She's probably not a psychologist, she probably knows she isn't supposed to diagnose, so she's probably not thinking in those terms. She's just thinking something is wrong, and it was, and she probably felt a need to say it politely, and might have, without really thinking, used phrasing typically used when trying to be understanding about neurodiversity issues.
If it were me I can't say I would be proud of what I might have said about it. I almost feel bad writing this post at all. But I probably would have thought they needed some kind of immediate state or even police intervention.
I'm not a psychologist either, but I do suspect I have Dyspraxia myself, and many friends with Aspbergers, and some of the stories do fit, but it doesn't fully explain everything.
The problem is... this is not that much of an amazing accomplishment. He didn't discover something new. He actually made himself LESS likely to have a nuclear career.
To me it looks more like pyromania with nuclear materials.
It's definitely true that most people might not be able to do all that. I probably couldn't. In fact, I absolutely know he was more capable than me. Already driving by 16, while I'm 28 and still occasionally make mistakes crossing streets on foot.
But still, I doubt any nuclear professional would be happy to see what he did. It was difficult, special, and impressive, but maybe more importantly, it was horrifying.
He had some raw potential, but the experiment was a tragedy, and possibly the result of untreated mental health traumas.
He needed help. But not the help a lot of people now think he needed. His superfund creating experiments shouldn't have been encouraged. Someone should have made him understand why he needed to do better in school.
I think the aura of impressiveness the whole thing had may have led to some enabling happening.
"Naive social awareness" is euphemism for disregard and possible endangering of well being of others. Not just in this case, in general too. Basically, they did not wanted to sound critical of him and wanted him to sound good/cool.
Theoretically, the hidden assumption is that the only reason why you would not do certain things is because you guessed from social clues other people might be mad.
From my limited background in psychology what really separates him is the drive to execute on his goals and not the social awkwardness. But, creating the device would obviously have a large amount of time invested which would be the same for whoever would build the device .
I'm trying to be the biggest loser and outsmart the system, but thank God, I failed. The sociopaths want to copy the homework. Whatever good ideas you and your kid have, please type them and share! There's no intellectual property here. We're not afraid to ask "What if?"
Welcome to the community of the Internet, we love you.
This happened again in Sweden [1] with another guy who didn't seem to think he was doing anything wrong until he called the radiation authorities there and ended up getting raided. His old blog is pretty funny [2]
There was also this Nivenhbro guy on the Ars forum about 15 years ago.
That was horrifying to see unfold. Like a giant radioactive slow-motion car crash.
This story always reminds me of the Nth Country Experiment, from 1964, where the United States wondered how long it would take a country to design a nuclear weapon, starting from no particular expertise or classified access. One answer, they learned, was three new physics PhDs and two and half years. I don't know if that's when the US started focusing on enriched uranium, but that is really the only limiting factor in the whole deal.
There are a lot of difficulties in creating modern, highly effective thermonuclear weapons. But building a primitive fission bomb like Little Boy is not very difficult. As you say, enrichment is the limiting step. All the science is in university textbooks.
"The Scoutmaster’s wife noted that a typical kid working on this badge goes to a hospital and asks about x-rays. David decided to build a Breeder Reactor."
.!!.
I'm currently reading through the 1950s "Tom Swift Jr." stories... so maybe that's why I expected this HN post to be a great work of fiction. Like Charles Stross' "De-chlorinating the Moderator" http://www.antipope.org/charlie/fiction/moderator.html
The real world can be more delightful. And terrifying.
> In his mug shot, his face was covered with sores, which investigators believed could have been from exposure to radioactive materials, psoriasis, or possible drug use.
Was just telling some friends about this story the other day. He want to the the same high school as I did, although he was a few years after me; I think he may have had a class with one of my siblings.
> Did this one just lift the title for a different piece on the same topic?
I suspect it lifted more than the title. There's a significant overlap between the articles.
Harper's:
> by age twelve was digesting his father’s college chemistry textbooks without difficulty. When he spent the night at Golf Manor, his mother would often wake to find him asleep on the living room floor surrounded by open volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica. [...] By fourteen, an age at which most boys with a penchant for chemistry are conducting rudimentary gunpowder experiments, David had fabricated nitroglycerine.
> David’s parents admired his interest in science but were alarmed by the chemical spills and blasts that became a regular event at the Hahn household. After David destroyed his bedroom—the walls were badly pocked, and the carpet was so stained that it had to be ripped out—Ken and Kathy banished his experiments to the basement.[...]
> Not even his scout troop was spared David’s scientific enthusiasm. He once appeared at a scout meeting with a bright orange face caused by an overdose of canthaxanthin, which he was taking to test methods of artificial tanning. One summer at scout camp, David’s fellow campers blew a hole in the communal tent when they accidentally ignited the stockpile of powdered magnesium he had brought to make fireworks.[...]
> David was not deterred. One night as Ken and Kathy were sitting in the living room watching TV, the house was rocked by an explosion in the basement. There they found David lying semiconscious on the floor, his eyebrows smoking. Unaware that red phosphorus is pyrophoric, David had been pounding it with a screwdriver and ignited it.
Tales from the Nuclear Age:
> By age 12, he was easily reading college level chemistry text books. At Patty’s house in Golf Manor, she often found him in the morning asleep on the floor surrounded by encyclopedias and chemistry books. At age 14, he did the typical teenage synthesis of gunpowder, but quite atypically, moved on to synthesize nitroglycerine.
> Explosions and chemical messes became rather routine at the Hahn’s house. When one explosion pock-marked the walls of his room and destroyed the rug, Ken and Kathy insisted he remove his experiments to the basement.[...]
> David’s adventures with the Boy scouts included his penchant for experimentation. He appeared at one scout meeting with a distinctly orange face. He had ingested a “tanning” chemical, to investigate artificial methods of sun tanning. At one summer camp, a group of scouts blew a hole in the main tent when David’s powdered Magnesium exploded. He had brought it along to make some fireworks.[...]
> There were other problems. One evening Ken and Kathy were in the living room watching TV, when a large explosion shook the walls and floor of the house. Rushing down to the basement, they found David lying on the floor unconscious with his eyebrows smoking, and the basement strewn with broken equipment. David had been pounding a pyrophoric chemical with a screwdriver when it ignited spontaneously…
My favorite part of the story is that he was arrested for stealing smoke detectors from his apartment building trying to collect radioactive material. One of my first jobs was shipping / receiving for an electronics manufacturer, and smoke / gas detectors were the lion's share of our business. I was told I always had to classify the products as "components for a nuclear reactor" on international shipping manifests, which I thought was silly. Until I read this story...