Red Hot Nickel Ball Videos

Submission 29,978

Part of a series on Oddly Satisfying. [View Related Entries]

About

Red Hot Nickel Ball Videos are recordings of a ball of nickel heated until it glows red hot, then being placed on various objects, usually melting through them and sometimes causing remarkable chemical reactions. As with the later 1,000 Degree Knife Videos, the recordings are regarded as oddly satisfying, while others criticized them for being YouTube clickbait.

Origin

On February 28th, 2013, the carsandwater YouTube channel uploaded a video of a ball of nickel heated till it is glowing placed on a pillar of dry ice (shown below). Within four years, the video gained over 4.2 million views and 2,200 comments.

Spread

Over the course of the next four years, the channel uploaded 97 videos^[1] of the Red Hot Nickel Ball being placed on various objects. Some of the more compelling videos were covered by media outlets; Gizmodo,^[2] for example, has posted two dozen articles about different Red Hot Nickel Ball videos. On September 11th, 2014, the channel posted one of two videos in which they applied a super-cooled nickel ball to an object, the first being honey (shown below). The video gained over 5.5 million views in two years.

As of February 7th, 2017, the channel's most popular upload with over 17 million views shows a red hot nickel ball being dropped on floral foam. In the video, shown below, the green foam shrinks and turns black at contact with the nickel ball.