We’ve touched on this before, but hopefully putting an end to the urban legends once and for all, a television show in Britain has demonstrated that using a cellphone while filling up at a gas station doesn’t cause fires:
Gas stations have long been displaying warning signs that handsets shouldn’t be used while filling up a gas tank. The reasoning behind these warnings appears to be videotape evidence of one gas station accident that had pointed to a customer using a handset at the time. So, to test the theory, Sky One’s Brainiacs team filled an old caravan with petrol and petrol fumes then placed six mobile phones inside it. Calling all the handsets had no ill effects whatsoever. By contrast, when the Brainiacs team then connected a man dressed in nylon clothes to a copper wire (the other end of which was inside the caravan), the static electricity discharge he generated was sufficient to cause the caravan to explode.
