Re: Ball lightning ?

["Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>]

Original poster: "Jim Lux by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <jimlux-at-earthlink-dot-net>

If anyone is interested, I have a fair amount of experience generating
stable ring vortices, which might have some relevance for ball lightning.
Certainly, folks have proposed combining a ring vortex generator, a source
of carbon black or powdered metal, and a tesla coil as an effective ball
lightning generator. Most of my work in this area was with pulsed
discharges, rather than the sort of steady state thing you get with a TC.
If there is interest, I can post some info, either on the list or on the
web.

For what it's worth, I also have a fair amount of experience and information
on creating artificial tornadoes  (see US Pat 5,971,765, for instance, or
the Volvo Commercial ("Twister") that aired in the UK about 5 or 6 years ago
or the Twister attraction at Universal Studios Florida), but I don't know if
that's as useful for ball lightning. However, combining tornadoes and
lightning is always an attractive prospect.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>
To: <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>
Sent: Friday, January 04, 2002 5:13 PM
Subject: Re: Ball lightning ?
> I think you also need to get a swirling vortex thing going.  Sort of like
a
> smoke ring or tornado.  That will feed the flame and keep it going.  Some
> of the Russians have worked a lot on the air current part of it.  This is
> probably really hard to get going.
>
> Then it appears that you need some extra chemicals like water, dirt, wood,
> carbon, etc. to help it burn.
>
> So with all three parts mixed together, one may indeed get this ball
> lightning stuff going.  Your tests are a vital piece to such a theory.
>