Electric eel wallets?

Question

I just had lunch with a buyer for a departmen store who said she could not order electric eel wallets because people said that they experienced loss of information on their credit cards due to residual electricity in the skins. I can not believe this. Has anyone ever heard anything like this?

Answer 1

I have heard the urban legend that electric eel wallets somehow 'demagnetize' credit cards and bank cards.

There are numerous ways in which this myth is mistaken:

1 - Eel skin wallets are not made from electric eels. In fact, they aren't made from eels at all, but usually from the skin of a hagfish - a disgusting, mucous coated scavenger, which I have no idea why anyone would have ever tried making leather out of in the first place to discover it made good wallets. Hagfish have no remarkable powers of magnetic field generation.

2 - Because eelskin wallets are thinner than cowhide leather wallets, they often have magnetic clasps for some reason.

3 - A powerful enough magnet can erase some of the data from the black strip used on credit cards. Most wallet clasp magnets are not even remotely powerful enough, but there was one Korean manufacturer that briefly used a very powerful U-type magnet in their clasps (for unknown reasons), and those particular wallets were connected to as many as half a dozen cases of cards being erased.

The Mythbusters did indeed do a story about this, back in their first season. The first poster mentioned this, but also inexplicably included a bijillion lines of spam in their answer which caused me to Thumbs-Down his answer.

EDIT - I agree that hagfish are fascinating creatures, but it's hard to say they're not also disgusting. I just can't imagine what was going through the head of the guy who looked at a hagfish and thought "Hey, let's make a wallet out of that!"

Answer 2

The electric organs of an electric eel are formed by specialized muscle tissue, not by the skin. In addition, "eelskin" products are actually manufactured from hagfish skin (completely unrelated to the actual electric eels).

This is an urban myth. Check this page:
http://www.snopes.com/science/eelskin.htm

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Edit: As usual, Haysoos gave a fantastic answer. But what's that about hagfish being disgusting? They're fascinating creatures!! ;-P

Edit 2: LOL! I would still keep one in a fishtank if I could...

Answer 3

yes I have heard of this-the eel skin supposedly affects the magnetic strip on the back of credit cards-I don't know if this theory holds water but I have heard this rumor-may want to check with your credit card company