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Re: High Voltage Experiments



Original poster: FIFTYGUY@xxxxxxx

In a message dated 6/20/05 2:55:04 AM Eastern Daylight Time, tesla@xxxxxxxxxx writes:
We are thinking that secondary coils that tend to shock long after they are
apparently discharged are seeing an "electret effect". Coils coated with
insulators seem to really show this effect well. One can rub one's hands
all over the things or run a grounded wire all over them just to have them
recharge after a short time.


    I'm sure I've posted of this before, but it's relevant again:

Back in high school I used to draw arcs from my TC with my hand. Bad conventional wisdom at the time said it was essentially harmless. Today the "official opinion" is that this can be extremely damaging or lethal.
This was a 15/120 coil with a big homemade plastic plate stack cap, and somehow I managed about 30" streamers from a 2" ball topload. Not exactly comfortable to get zapped with (especially when the static gap sputtered), but I'd conduct the streamer for a minute at a time (holding a screwdriver to avoid the heat burn). "Just like Tesla used to do!"
I quit doing that when one day I realized that I could make a four foot fluorescent bulb flash by touching it... after the TC was turned off. My friends (who had NOT drawn arcs to themselves) couldn't do that. Same bulb, same place, same time, even with me standing there in the same spot next to them. I touched it, it flashed (in daylight), they touched it, nothing. IIRC the effect lasted only a few minutes.
Sort of thing that makes you think twice about spontaneous human combustion.
I am not going to repeat that experiment, but after reading the "Shocking Shampoo Bottle" article, I wonder how much charge migration and induction can occur within a human body...


-Phil LaBudde