[fecal_henge]

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.

[ASalazarMX]

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.

[cf100clunk]

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.

[thomassmith65]

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.

[freedomben]

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).

[NL807]

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.

[iberator]

This can be deadly :/ just wow

[account42]

Many fun things can be.

[torginus]

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 :(

[ASalazarMX]

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.

[account42]

That doesn't match my experience of deliberately dropping an old CRT monitor off the roof. Implosions are unfortunately not as exciting as explosions.

[jlokier]

Some recent HN comments about CRT implosions people have experienced.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46355765

"I still have a piece of glass in back of the palm of my right hand. Threw a rock at an old CRT and it exploded, after a couple of hours I noticed a little blood coming out of that part of hand. Many, many years later was doing xray for a broken finger and doctor asked what is that object doing there? I shrugged, doc said, well it looks like it's doing just fine, so might as well stay there. How lucky I am to have both eyes."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46354919

"2. Throwing a big big stone to an abandoned next to the trashcan CRT TV while I had it placed normally because it didn’t break when I threw it facing up and the next thing I remember after opening my eyes which I closed from the bang was my friends who were further down the road looking at me as it I were a ghost since big big chunks for the CRT glass flew just right next to me.

CRTs were dangerous in many aspects!"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46356432

"I'll never forget the feeling of the whoosh when I was working as a furniture mover in the early 2000s and felt the implosion when a cardboard box collapsed and dumped a large CRT TV face-down on the driveway, blowing our hair back. When the boss asked what happened to the TV, I said it fell, and our lead man (who had set it on the box) later thanked me for putting it so diplomatically."

[cf100clunk]

The ''tube'' was indeed extrememly fragile and thus extremely dangerous. I'm talking about only the unguarded ''tube'' itself. Repair and manufacturer technicians had to deal with that on a regular basis. Later, consumer protection laws and other standards came into effect that made TV and monitor superstructures more capable of guarding such a dangerous internal component. Your experience was clearly with those much safer, later types.