Over the past few years, there have been several claims that you can cook an egg using the energy from mobile phones.
In fact, this is impossible. Whether you like your eggs soft or hard boiled, you’ll have to stick to the conventional pan of boiling water.
Yet even though this myth has been well and truly debunked, some websites still maintain that it’s true.
The making of the myth
The myth first appeared in an article on www.wymsey.co.uk in 2000. The article was a hoax and its authors’ names, Suzzanna Decantworthy and Sean McCleanaugh, are made up. The website’s creator, Charlie Ivermee, admitted to the online magazine Gelf in 2006 that he was the real author. He explained that he had written the article to “add to silliness” surrounding mobile phones and health, but had “really underestimated how many people would take it seriously”.
In 2006, the Russian journalists Vladimir Lagovski and Andrei Moiseynko claimed to have cooked an egg in around 65 minutes using two mobile phones, reviving the hoax. The Russian tabloid newspaper, Komsomolskaya Pravda published an article about their experiment, and this is the source of many of the photos, articles and emails still circulating the web today.
Debunking the myth
The Australian Centre for Radio Frequency Bioeffects Research held a live demonstration at its 2007 Science Week to show that cooking an egg with two mobile phones is impossible. They also tried and failed to cook an egg with a base station antenna, which has 10 times the power of a mobile phone. Watch a video of the demonstration here.
Several others have published their failed attempts to cook an egg using mobile phones. Canadian Software developers and consultants, Three Wise Men, report on their website their failed attempt to cook an egg using three mobile phones, plus various other common pieces of electronic equipment that use radio frequency waves. Food writer Paul Adams wrote in the New York Times that his egg was still cold and raw after 90 minutes of ‘cooking’ using the wymsey method. And finally, the UK science TV show, Brainiac, found that even 100 mobile phones piled on top of an egg have no effect.
If anyone still needs convincing, the Mobile Manufacturers Forum’s website explains in irrefutable scientific terms that the energy from a mobile phone is nowhere near enough to raise the heat of an egg to cooking temperature.
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