Growing up, my dad had a shirt with acid holes. My mother said he blew up a battery while working on it. My dad was a DYI guy, but didn't regularly work around anything caustic. This would have been early 1980's.
I have seen car batteries explode, always due to bad charging rather than shorting though. (Over charging generates hydrogen and oxygen inside the battery in precisely the correct stoichiometric ratio to go "BOOM!")
(I also had a friend wake up to about $500 worth of dead tropical fish, the morning after plugging a charger and car battery in on the shelf under his tank. Not entirely sure what the mechanism was, but the pH in the tank dropped enough to kill all the fish. )
(I also had a friend wake up to about $500 worth of dead tropical fish, the morning after plugging a charger and car battery in on the shelf under his tank. Not entirely sure what the mechanism was, but the pH in the tank dropped enough to kill all the fish. )