Technology Connections did a video on those.
this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2025
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What got me to subscribe to his channel.
Excellent channel.
Skill issue, they always worked for me
These worked just fine if the battery had charge.
In hindsight I never, ever used them on a partially spent battery (because who takes out batteries to check their charge remaining?) so I have no idea how well they worked anywhere between 0% and 100%.
I tested partially spent batteries all the time, because my childhood home was full of imps who would take one or two batteries out of a remote to power their DS or other handhelds, then replace them after gametime was over. So if the remote wasn't working it was nice to just check a battery for charge than to assume one or all batteries were dead before stealing batteries to game with.
Tap for spoiler
one of the imps was me
The DS had a rechargable battery, though.
You're right, I never had a DS! I forgot the name of the GameBoy and my old brain did a silly substitution
Pedantry! It's not a crime but it feels like one. Fitting for a defaultusername...
Burned/shocked myself on these as a kid and never used them again.
from 1.5V DC? Literally impossible.
Ok so if it didn't happen why would I remember it and then post about it like 35 years later on a niche social media platform?
Because people do not have perfect memories of 35 year old events, especially events that occurred while they were a young, imaginative child.
This has made me irrationally angry.
Sorry homie, op is right as far as getting shocked. 1.5v isn't high enough to feel with your hands. Hell, you can grab both terminals of a 12v car battery and it won't do anything to you.
Those little strips do work by heating a resistive wire though, so it's completely possible that you just heated up the spot you pressed enough to hurt a little. Unless you were a particularly curious or accident prone kid, you probably didn't have a reference for the sensation of getting shocked, so you'd assume that's what happened.
I accidentally touched the hot prong of a radio when i was a kid and thought I got punched by a ghost until i did it again years later. Kids have no idea what's going on.
punched by a ghost
Huh, being shocked does kind of feel like that.
Especially as a kid that has no concept of what 120v going from hand to bare foot on concrete feels like. Tenses up your big muscles in the shoulder and peck just like a good punch.
Just another entry on the list of dumb shit that's almost killed me.
Wait, which part of the radio is the prong?
I can only assume they were plugging in the mains cord.
Either that or a tube radio with the tube heated up enough to burn?
you can grab both terminals of a 12v car battery and it won’t do anything to you.
What if I have a Gene Simmons-esque tongue that I can somehow manage to touch to both terminals?
Good question. I've put my tongue across a 9v battery a number of times to check them. Fully charged, it's uncomfortable but bearable. A 33% is pretty big, so I assume that 12V probably hurts enough that you wouldn't want to do it for long. I doubt it'd do much damage if it was brief though.
I looked, and it seems like the resistance of the tongue is between 10k and 1M ohms. Assuming the average value of 100k ohms, 12V is current limited to 0.12mA and 1.44 milliwatts. It takes like 10 watts to run the average LED lightbulb, which makes it about 7000x more powerful. Gene would be okay.
No the original poster, what about a shock from a pinched nerve or something from pressing these do hard?
I mean it could have been anything except the battery or also the event may not have happened.
I get "shocked" all the time handling electricity that could not have shocked me. It's usually a wire poking me and making me jump. More rarely it's a tiny muscle twinge.
I remember them vividly. My guess is you poked yourself with a piece of that plastic wraping. You wouldn't feel a shock unless you had two open cuts at each point of contact. Even still it would be hard to feel.
Doubt.
Um ok?
You can lick a 9v and get a little tingle, 1.5v isn’t going to do anything to you.
I loved these, not really cause it was useful, but it was exactly the direction I thought technology would go.
Dumb things becoming smart without just resorting to being mini computers.
I'd play with those and probably drained the batteries doing it. They would heat up if you held it on for too long.