Posted: Fri May 04, 2007 2:45 pm
I heard a story about a guy in the US Navy electronics class who managed to kill himself with a multimeter. There is 9V DC running through the two leads in most common ones, he was trying to measure the resistance of the human body. Holding each lead in a hand yields you the total resistance of the skin path between each lead, so to measure the body's resistance he stabbed the leads into his thumbs. The human body, internally, offers close to no resistance and the full current of the battery was pulled across his heart, killing him. You can kill yourself with a 9V if you present low enough current resistance, such as internally. Your skin (even your tongue) presents enough resistance to avoid this normally. Bypass that, though...Doog wrote: So, if you hooked up a 9V battery to yourself in a certain way to yield 2A of current, it could kill you?