Little Pop or will hand get blow off if I plug this in?

[TheKeymeister]

I prefer this stuff

 

[SimonH2]

Electrolytics tend to go off quite nicely, but messily. The inside is a tightly wound spiral of thin aluminium foil and wet paper - and if it fails in the right manner then it blows the can off and sends shredded foil and wet paper bits all over.
My guess is that connecting a small 16V direct to the mains caused an internal short that prevented enough energy being dissipated before the MCB tripped. A bigger cap, and perhaps some current limiting (perhaps an old fashioned incandescent light bulb), might do better

 

[john4703]

This thread brings back memories of college, probably ONC or it might have been HNC. We were told to slowly charge a capacitor, slowly increasing the voltage and carefully keeping records of time, temperature, current, voltage etc. Once we had it up to something like 2KV. We were then to connect a variable resistor across the wires and slowly discharge the capacitor, then go for a tea break. We decided that it would be quicker, and a longer break, to simply touch the bare ends of the cables together, I can't remember the size but the imperial equivalent of 16mm at a guess. We touched them together, there was a massive bang and the cables were about 150mm shorter. Very satisfying especially as the notes from the first part were marked as excellent.