Techno-myths: cell phones for pyros

An unsuspecting customer at a self serve gas pump suffers grievous burns when the fuel pump explodes. He was using his cell phone at the time, you ve heard of this havent you? Certainly you have, self serve gas pumps paste the ubiquitous warning label at the pump: do not talk onyour cell phone will pumping gas. Trouble is cell phones cannot create enough static electricity to start a gas fire. In Anatomy of a techno-myth: The debate over the safety of mobile phones has little to do with science, Economist March 23, 2005, the Economist reports that even cell phone companies knew by the end of the last decade that cell phones could not cause enough spark to cause a fire. Trouble was at the same time, changes in automobile design and manufacturing caused automoibles to throw off more static electricity. Also the number of gas pump fires had at the same time increased dramatically. Conspiracy sites on the web put these coincidences together to create the "exploding cell phone myth." Curiously, cell phones are both increasingly "indispensable" also perceived as "vaguely dangerous." The Economist concluded "The safety of mobile phones would appear to be not so much the province of the hard science of physics, as of the soft science of sociology." Will the Products Liability "Torters" be retaining sociologists or engineers for their next liability cases?