[Image above] Helium gives you a squeaky voice, but does it do so in the way State Farm shows? Credit: State Farm Insurance, YouTube
Even if you dislike American football and actively avoid the Super Bowl, you might still secretly look forward to it each year because of what accompanies the game—ads.
Super Bowl commercials are almost as highly anticipated as the game itself, but over the past few years, many people have voiced the opinion that these ads just aren’t what they used to be. Some companies have decided the price tag is not worth it, and a shallower pool of creative talents craft the commercials each year.
I personally miss the days of cowboys herding cats. But even if recent Super Bowl commercials are a letdown, some individual companies are taking the reins and providing us with hilarious commercials that restore our faith in advertising.
In these first two months of 2019, one commercial that stands out as particularly notable is the one released January 2 by State Farm Insurance. Take a look below:
Considering it’s the International Year of the Periodic Table, I could not pass up the chance to dig into the science—and see what State Farm did or did not get right.
✓ Right: Helium does change your voice
When you speak, air from your lungs rushes up through your throat and causes your vocal cords (two small flaps of mucous membrane) to vibrate. The motion of your vocal cords breaks the flow of air from your lungs into smaller “puffs” of sound, and as these puffs travel up through your vocal tract, the sounds are amplified and eventually leave your mouth with a certain timbre (your distinctive sound quality).
Compared to the air we breathe—mostly nitrogen and oxygen—helium molecules are a lot lighter. While sound travels through regular air at about 344 meters per second (1,128 feet per second), sound travels about 927 meters per second (3,041 feet per second) through helium gas.
So, when you breathe in helium and then speak, sound travels much faster through your vocal track than before, and the higher frequencies are amplified over the lower ones, causing the timbre of our voice to change and sound higher.
In contrast, when you breathe in sulfur hexafluoride—a molecule much heavier than regular air—sound moves slower through your vocal track, and your voice ends up sounding deeper than it did before.
Never heard someone inhale sulfur hexafluoride before? Check out this video of someone beatboxing after breathing it in!
So, helium does change your voice, but…
✗ Wrong: Helium does not change your voice that quickly
If you blow up a balloon with helium and then breathe that helium in, you will notice an immediate change in your voice because you flooded your lungs with helium gas in a concentrated dose. However, for the people in the State Farm commercial, they are standing in a large, open area into which helium is slowly leaking.
In the State Farm case, the helium would not be breathed in as a large, concentrated dose, and so everyone’s voices would not immediately jump up several octaves between one camera shot and the next. If their voices really did experience such an immediate shift in such a large area, the concentration of helium would have to be astronomically high—and all the people would be astronomically dead.
Additionally, helium is rarely transported as a gas—it is much more efficient to transport it as a cryogenic liquid. And when liquid helium turns into a gas, it expands by over 750 times. If the tanker in the State Farm commercial was carrying liquid helium (as would more likely be the case), it would not just casually leak but explode out and flood the area with super cold helium gas.
What would that rapid expansion look like? A good example of rapid liquid-to-gas helium transformation is during an MRI quench. When the magnetic coil in an MRI rises above the superconductivity threshold, the circulating current faces resistance in the coil and creates heat, which causes a sudden, explosive boil-off of liquid helium. Take a look below at the amount of gas released during an MRI quench at Stanford Hospital.
I think my favorite part about the State Farm video, though, is one of the posted comments. While most people were debating the realism of the helium, one person was much more concerned about the realism of the tanker.
