Someone made a real 'Thor' hammer that only he can pick up

Ben GilbertOct 15, 2015, 00:01 IST

If there's only one thing to know about Thor, aside from being the Norse god of lightning and thunder, it's that only he* is deemed "worthy" of being able to wield the legendary hammer Mjölnir.

All the Avengers have tried, and failed, to pick up his legendary hammer:

Though replicas exist, there are no ancient Norse powers in our world that govern specific objects. We do have magnets, though. And fingerprint scanners. And batteries. And, you know, science stuff. And that's exactly what YouTube user Allen Pan used to create his own version of Mjölnir: four 12-volt batteries powering electromagnets that are only de-activated with Pan's own fingerprint. It's all powered by a small processor, called an Arduino Pro Mini:

Allen Pan

As his video's description says, the hammer is "pretty much unliftable unless you've got my fingerprints." He means that literally - there's a fingerprint scanner on the handle:

Allen Pan

So Allen took his version of Mjölnir out into the wild - specifically, the sunny streets of Venice Beach, California - and attached it to various metal objects lodged in the ground. A massive metal sheet and a manhole cover were the two spots that worked especially well for making the hammer unmovable.

Many tried: