Page "Burning glass" Paragraph 5

The pop science TV program MythBusters attempted to model Archimedes ' feat by using mirrors to ignite a small wooden boat covered with tar, with only partial success — they found it too difficult to focus light from their hand-held mirrors onto a point small enough to ignite the boat.

However, an episode of Richard Hammond's Engineering Connections relating to the Keck Observatory ( whose reflector glass is based on the Archimedes ' Mirror ) did successfully use a much smaller curved mirror to burn a wooden model, though not made of the same quality of materials as in the MythBusters effort.