Olympic Cyclist Vs. Toaster: Can He Power It?

The Toaster Challenge · 24.4M views · 2015-06-03 · 3:14

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Overview

Olympic track cyclist Robert Forstemann tries to pedal hard enough to power a 700 W toaster and toast a slice of bread. The film frames it as a comparison of how much energy people consume versus how much they can generate.

On Hacker News

HN uses it as a vivid illustration of how little sustained power a human body produces, even a champion's.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2015–2023

Topics

Sports & athletics Everyday physics & science demos

What people said

toss1 · 2022-10 · Recommendation
Olympic cyclist working to toast a slice of bread. Insanely impressive effort by a maximally trained professional, and he's definitely toasted. This is like a cartoon technology — the general concept is right, but the scale is just waay off... Anyway, worth the look [VIDEO] [LINK]
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michaelt · 2020-10 · Recommendation
Here's a neat video of an olympic cycle sprinter powering a toaster: [VIDEO] 1800 watt-hours, or 1.8 kilowatt-hours, is 20 cents worth of electricity. Using a cycle to power things makes for a neat demo, and might be good for educating people about electricity and suchlike, but anyone who expects to notice it on their energy bill or carbon footprint, or even for the installation to pay for itself, is off by a few orders of magnitude.
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virtue3 · 2020-10 · Recommendation
that's not a bad sustained! Check this out: olympic (cyclist) sprinter powering a toaster! it's intense. [VIDEO]
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Sources

Video by The Toaster Challenge, played through YouTube.

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