GE Takes “Spring Break” Literally and Destroys Things for Science Today With Their #SpringBreakIt Campaign

GE’s #SpringBreakIt campaign launches today, and we think it’s exactly the kind of thing you’ll love, Internet-people. To promote their next-generation “Super Materials,” GE is showing you what it looks like when they put boring old regular materials to the same smash, crush, and blast tests. Hint: A lot of stuff gets broken.

If you want GE to send you a video of an everyday object like a rubber band ball, rubber duckie, watch, bowl, toy truck, gumball machine, or more get completely obliterated, tweet to @GeneralElectric with the #SpringBreakIt hashtag, and they’ll reply with a video where things get destroyed. You can also check out their #SpringBreakIt Tumblr for quick previews of all the items poised for destruction.

We love watching things get destroyed, but there’s also some really interesting science at work here. You can learn more about that by heading to GE’s Advanced Materials section of their site. A representative for GE told us in an email that they think advanced materials affect everyday consumers more than they might realize, so they want to shed some light on the area of material science and get people excited.

What better way to get people excited than by breaking stuff?

Want to learn more about the tests that are bringing these things to their ultimate doom for the #SpringBreakIt campaign? GE’s released some interested videos of some of their Super Materials withstanding the smash, crush, and blast tests. Watching them, it’s easy to understand why everyday items don’t hold up so well to extreme heat, pressure, wind, and erosion.

Here’s the Metal Forging Test where things are heated to temperatures comparable to an active volcano:

What does 5,000 lbs of force do to objects? Find out in the Drop Test. Spoiler: It doesn’t go well for the CD:

To simulate longterm desert conditions, they blast things with aluminum oxide particles at 150mph in the Erosion Test:

The campaign is running today only, but we kind of wish this was a service that ran all the time. Watching stuff get destroyed is so very satisfying.

(via GE #SpringBreakIt)

Meanwhile in related links

• “Das Breakroom” is a business where you pay to smash things
• I spoke to GE’s Global Marketing Director Linda Boff on the podcast
• GE sent SoulPancake’s Kid President to their facility to learn about invention