For 33 Years, A 'true Story' About The 'resonant Frequency Of A...
Borland C++ Turbo, you've got some explaining to do.
Earlier this year, we relayed a story about how Janet Jackson's song Rhythm Nation just so happened to include the resonant frequency of 5,400 RPM 2.5-inch hard drives commonly used in laptops for many years. When played on (or even near) those laptops, the song would cause the drives to malfunction—and it was such a widespread problem that Microsoft incorporated code into Windows XP to filter out that particular frequency. Sounds unbelievable, but it's true! Audio experts, laptop makers and Windows developers all worked together to confirm the story—so when I was re-reading the 2022 Microsoft blog that first made the story news, I suddenly found myself wondering what other damage precisely the right (or, I suppose, wrong) sound frequency could do.
For example: Could you cause a chicken's head to explode with just the power of sound?
A comment on the 2022 blog casually suggests that perhaps such a thing is possible. "There is also the story of the resonant frequency of chicken skulls from the old Borland Turbo C++ documentation," it says. And it's not the only place on the internet you'll find reference to this story. In 2009, a Redditor on r/programming also linked to it, asking "7 Hertz Hurts? Is the Borland Turbo C++ documented story a myth or fact? Where are the Mythbusters when you need them?"
Another poster links to three now-dead Mythbusters forum threads where the question was raised. And it turns out this exact story has been going around for decades. Here's a thread on Stack Exchange from 2018. A debate on Hacker News from 2016. A Quora question from 2011. A programming forum post from 2001.
How the heck did the documentation for Borland's Turbo C++, a set of programming tools for MS-DOS, spawn an internet legend before the days of the internet? What, exactly, did it say? Just to make sure there hadn't been any hanky-panky with the spread of this story online over the years, I went looking on the Internet Archive to see for myself. I found an emulated copy of Turbo C++ 3.0, released in 1991, and dug through the help file. And in the help menu's explanation of the "sound" function, there it was:
"True story: 7 Hz is the resonant frequency of a chicken's skull cavity. This was determined empirically in Australia, where a new factory generating 7-Hz tones was located too close to a chicken ranch: When the factory started up, all the chickens died."
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Source: PC Gamer
