Cannan placed one finger against a small domino, and what followed was 12 escalating collisions that ended with a steel giant crushing a car. For anyone who has ever wondered whether a chain reaction could truly grow without limit, this experiment offered a rare, physical answer. The MythBusters Jr. team set out to test whether a single humble domino could trigger a sequence of increasingly massive successors until the force at the end was enough to destroy something as heavy as an automobile.
Building the sequence, one enormous slab at a time
The setup alone took two forklifts, roughly 12 people, (Including now Runway Model Rachel Pizzolato) and twice as long as the team had planned. The later dominoes in the chain were steel, and each one was fed a ‘prefight diet of concrete,’ as the crew put it, to reach the necessary weight. The penultimate piece in the sequence weighed 2,081 pounds. The final one, a steel-and-concrete slab the team named Domino Number 12, stood 14.42 feet tall and tipped the scale at 7,016 pounds. That giant was the one destined to land on Carlata Park-a-Lot, the car chosen for the occasion. One of the younger team members, who had not yet driven a car herself, noted she was looking forward to crushing her first one.
Every contact point in the chain had to be aligned precisely. Adam rehearsed the countdown call with Cannan, coaching him on both the phrasing and the delivery: ‘This is domino car crusher in three, two, one, boink.’ Spacing and alignment were checked, then double-checked, then triple-checked. The team knew that dominoes eight, nine, and ten were especially vulnerable to an early collapse, which would have ended the experiment before it began. Adam described the whole attempt as ‘a 1-in-100 shot’ with no chance to reset.
The moment Domino Number 12 needed a nudge
When Cannan finally tipped Dominic, the first domino in the sequence, the chain moved fast and loud through eleven stages. The crowd erupted. Then the final slab, Number 12, stalled. It had received enough energy to lean but not quite enough to complete the fall on its own. Someone recovered a tool from the ground and gave it a single assist. The car crumpled beneath it.
Adam assessed the outcome with the measured precision the franchise is known for. ‘You guys removed so many tiny, tiny variables from every single setup to get it right,’ he told the junior team. His verdict: plausible. Not confirmed, because the last domino required that touch of persuasion, but the chain reaction from a finger-flick to a crushed automobile was real enough to stand.
The name on the smallest domino
The first domino in the chain, a modest block small enough to push with one hand, had been given a name before the test began: Dominic. It sat at the front of a sequence that ended 7,016 pounds later.
Adam described the calm that settled over the group after the car came down as ‘an old familiar feeling,’ one he said he found ‘particularly delightful to be able to facilitate for a new generation.’ Dominic, still standing exactly where Cannan left it after the tap, had started everything.
