Chain Gang on a Fence

1. Myth

Dining last night with some neighbours, one of them came with the following story. “When we were kids”, he said, “we used to give hands to each other, left to right, in a long chain and then the first one used to touch an electric fence. None of us would feel any electric current or shock, but the last one felt it all!”

I reacted that this could not be the case, but he replied: “It is surely the case, since we did it and we all experienced it!” I then asked him how it could be the case ‘scientifically’ because surely, the current the last person felt should come through the arms of the previous people and he replied that this is/must be the case because “any but the last person is ‘just a conductor’.

2 Refutation

Depending on the amount of science one understands, one may use different techniques to convince people that the conclusion that the last person suffers the most as well as that the other persons would not feel anything is just wrong.

Read this article on Medium on how some people believe this and how to best refute it in different ways, using almost no, a little or a lot of science, mathematics and engineering.