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The video above has been floating around various sites the past few days, all of them excited about the fantastic idea of using graphite from an ordinary pencil as an emergency lantern. The claim is that if your car breaks down in the middle of nowhere and you don’t have a flashlight, you can use a pencil connected to your car battery as a light source.

The number of ways that this idea fails to be a good one is astounding. Aside from the obvious (at least to me) danger of playing with bare wires connected to your car battery, people seem to have failed to actually think this through. To make one of these lights, one must split a pencil down the middle, remove the graphite, break said graphite into small pieces, and then use the pieces to complete a circuit with your car battery. How they expect people to do this in the dark is beyond me, and actually sounds a good deal more difficult than fixing many common causes of car breakdowns. This is all of course assuming one has the necessary tools to complete the project just sitting in their car.

Wouldn’t it be easier just to tell people to put a flashlight in their glove-box and be done with it?