Comment by fecal_henge
5 hours ago
Extra dangerous aspect: On really early CRTs they hadn't quite nailed the glass thicknesses. One failure mode was that the neck that held the electron gun would fail. This would propell the gun through the front of the screen, possibly toward the viewer.
Likewise, a dropped CRT tube was a constant terror for TV manufacturing and repair folks, as it likely would implode and send zillions of razor-sharp fragments airborne.
My high school science teacher used to share anecdotes from his days in electrical repair.
He said his coworkers would sometimes toss a television capacitor at each other as a prank.
Those capacitors retained enough charge to give the person unlucky enough to catch one a considerable jolt.
Touching one of those caps was a hell of an experience. It was similar in many ways to a squirrel tap with a wrench in the auto shop (for those who didn't do auto shop, a squirrel tap with a wrench is when somebody flicks your nut sack from behind with a wrench. Properly executed it would leave you doubled over out of breath).
lol I did this with my mates. Get one of those 1 kV ceramics, give it some charge and bob's your uncle, you have one angry capacitor.
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I remember smashing a broken monitor as a kid for fun, hearing about the implosion stuff, and sadly found the back of the glass was stuck to some kind of plastic film that didnt allow the pieces to fly about :(
I can't still get over how we used to put them straight in our faces, yet I never knew of someone having an accidental face reshaping ever.
I don't know, "Killed by electron gun breakdown" sounds like a rad way to go. You can replace "electron gun" with "particle accelerator" if you want.