The story of Philip Metzger, a former NASA planetary scientist who nearly lost his hearing after lowering a toilet lid, is perhaps one of the weirdest accidents that ever occurred, as reported first by VICE.
Metzger described how he dropped his toilet's ceramic lid while attempting to adjust its fill and flush valves in a Twitter thread he posted last Friday. The tank lid impacted the toilet bowl rim as it fell from his grasp.
However, the lid didn't crack, which should have been good news for Metzger. But strangely, it wasn't.
1. Wanna hear a weird but true story? (I have a few minutes to type, so here goes). I almost lost my hearing from the lid on the tank of a toilet. Noise-Induced Hearing Loss. You wouldn't think a toilet lid could be so loud, would you? Well, I learned otherwise...
— Dr. Phil Metzger (@DrPhiltill) March 30, 2018
Strange Accident in the Bathroom
"The sound stunned me," Metzger recounted in a tweet.
"I stumbled out of the bathroom and fell to my knees in the living room, wondering what had just happened. It was surreal. Then I got the idea to test my hearing because I noticed something seemed weird."
Metzger claimed that his voice had the quality of "talking through a kazoo" when he spoke. But the kazoo sound only seemed to occur at specific frequencies that were consistently spaced, which made the situation even stranger when Metzger hummed up a scale.
He was dumbfounded at how the toilet only fell about eight inches, yet it seemed to have damaged his hearing so badly.
Since Metzger is a physicist, he is determined to seek an answer to this strange accident.
According to him, ceramic has a similar sound speed to brick, or around 4000 meters per second. He then had to compute the wavelength of the vibration produced when he lowered the lid to calculate the sound's frequency.
Although the sound wave formed a standing wave because it was occurring in a limited medium, the frequency of a traveling wave is equal to its speed divided by its wavelength, so there were many elements to take into account.
A standing wave implies that the sound wave moves from one end of the toilet lid to the other and bounces back, according to VICE.
Determining the Frequency
To determine the frequency, Metzger had to divide the sound wave's speed by the length of the toilet lid. This frequency, according to Metzger, was 3.5 kHz, or 3,500 cycles of the wave per second.
The fact that the toilet lid didn't break when he dropped it indicated that all of the impact's energy was converted to sound, with some of it dissipating as heat in the lid.
The issue is that the concave nature of the lid itself makes it function like an antenna. This indicated that just a small range of frequencies was present due to the sound energy being directed directly towards Metzger's face (3.5 kHz and its harmonics).
This is comparable to the volume of a noisy concert or a 100-foot gunshot. On the other hand, this degree of sound power can be hazardous when it is close by and concentrated for a little period at a certain frequency.
"The energy was converted into sound in a very brief time making it very intense, and the fact that it didn't break or chip so more energy went into sound instead of breaking molecular bonds," the physicist tweeted.
The incident was definitely shocking for Metzger, but luckily for him, his hearing eventually improved after 48 hours.
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Written by Joaquin Victor Tacla
