Late at night you get a little lazy and maybe you’re soldering, clipping off wires and don’t feel like wearing safety glasses, but after a close call I always wear eye protection, this photo is a good reminder. Modern Mechanix 1932 – Link.
22 thoughts on “800-lb. magnet treats eye injury”
Comments are closed.
Yikes! It’s the honking big (that’s a technicasl term) magnetic field of an MRI machine that has the techs asking you if you are sure – as in really, really sure – that you have no steel parts inside because they are coming out no matter what they have to go through to get out.
Last time I had an MRI they asked if I had ever done any metalwork (grinding, etc.) and when I answered “yes” they made me get a head x-ray before I could get an MRI.
Urgh, now I’m imagining iron filings being pulled out of my eyeball by a giant magnet.
And old machinist once told me, “if you don’t think eyes are worth protecting- go price a replacement.”
I just have to say this, after reading the text, yes safety goggles are WISE, I just had a friend tell me a story of how he got molten solder into his eye this past week. To make you cringe even more, remember the natural instinct of a person when something is in ones eye is to close it, so no only did he sear his cornea, he blistered his eyelids whilst clapping shut on the foreign object.
For the curious, he was desoldering some wires and pulled one towards himself, which made it flick the solder into his eye.
That (preceeding comment) is another reason I wear glasses and eschew corneal surgeries. The worst injury I’ve ever gotten while soldering is the words KEEP AWAY FROM FACE that were embossed on the plunger of a solder sucker, embossed on my forhead.
Here’s the scary part: That’s not the magnet. It’s the steel cylinder being extracted from the patient’s eye.
lol sylvester, good one!
We seldom use magnets to remove intra-ocular foreign bodies any more. Micro-instrumentation now makes it safer to enter the eye,remove the foreign body, and make necessary repairs to the injured intra-ocular structures.
a “220 volt current” eh? :)
If you want to see a big ol’ eyemagnet in the flesh, come visit The Bakken Museum in Minneapolis on Lake Calhoun. Don’t try removing ferrous metal from your eye with a permanent magnet (like a neodymium magnet) as someone on BoingBoing suggested–these eye magnets work with electromagnets (hence the coil reference) for good reason. The idea is to position the e-magnet (while it’s off) to pull the metal out of the same hole in the cornea that it went in and THEN turn on the e-magnet. http://www.thebakken.org