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If you've ever seen so much as one Road Runner cartoon, you're familiar with the old-timey plunger Wile E. Coyote would use to detonate his over-engineered and under-effective plots. While cartoons might be the most common surviving touchstone for the tech, these devices were plenty real, and their insides are actually quite interesting.
As Cody of Cody's Lab illusttrates as he disassembles his grandfather's working plunger (I hope it wasn't a valuable as an antique!), the most important part of the device is often omitted in cartoons where the metal rod is shown as smooth or cylindrical. Actually, this rod is covered in teeth because it is part of a rack-and-pinion system that spins a dynamo, generating a brief electric current used to detonate blasting caps attached to the device.
[youtube ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh8FbnZdhJg[/youtube]
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The spinning dynamo is just one half of the equation, however. The second, crucial part is when the bottom of the rod pushes one small metal pin into another, completing the circuit that sends the dynamo's charge out into the wire. It's a simple but brilliant bit of mechanical design, and one that's a bit more complex than the simple switch you may have imagined such a plunger to be when you were watching cartoons as a kid. Just be sure that you're careful if you ever see one in real life. With the electrical blast these babies put out, they don't need to be attached to TNT to be dangerous.
Source: Cody's Lab
