Doctor Who: 15 Science Lessons To Build Your Own Sonic Screwdriver

7. Overload Or Short Circuit

5 Short Circuit 3 The Mutants Say a villain has a machine ready to destroy... something. With a wave of the wand, I mean screwdriver, the Doctor causes the device blows up or short circuit due to a massive overload. How would the Doctor create such an effect. How could sound be used to overload an electrical circuit? The Third Doctor, in The Mutants , shorts out a door's electrical circuitry and it opens. The Fourth Doctor short-circuited a communications panel in Genesis of the Daleks that resulted in a shower of sparks and useless equipment. The Tenth Doctor and River power up and then overload spacesuits in Silence of the Library . Using an electro-mechanical amplifier sound transducer, acoustical waves are converted into amplified electrical waves using the vibrations from the transducer that acts as a diaphragm in the conversion. Yeah, that does sound complicated. Easier to just say the screwdriver can make electricity out of sound waves. This would affect any device run by electricity creating an overload and possibly short-circuit any electrical device.
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Contributor

An artist and a computer geek before the two became synonymous. Combined them into data visualization which just seemed natural. But my real passion is Doctor Who. I write for the magazine Whotopia with my colleague Jürgen. Presented on my blog, The Doctor and Me, are essays and data analysis of Doctor Who. Working to amass large Doctor Who datasets allows for the analysis of the show unlike anything else. The most recent dataset is every use of the sonic screwdriver which is currently approaching 900. And every time an old episode comes on, there is a chance of spotting yet one more use that was tucked away.