Re: About the skin effect in humans

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

Original poster: "Jim Lux" <jimlux-at-earthlink-dot-net> 


----- Original Message -----
From: "Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>
To: <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>
Sent: Friday, May 21, 2004 6:19 PM
Subject: Re: About the skin effect in humans


 > Original poster: "mercurus2000" <mercurus2000-at-cox-dot-net>
 >
 > It also depends on if the current flows thro many areas of the body at
once
 > or thro one single channel, Tesla used to easily hook himself up to 3MV
 > tuned properly many times in his life, and he lived quite long, the only
 > real accident when was when he was nearly killed by his colorado springs
 > setup, which was quite large indeed.

It's unlikely that Tesla ever made 3 Megavolts....
And while he lived quite a while, who's to say whether his mental state in
later days wasn't adversely affected by a few zaps.




Anyone here hooking themselves up to
 > there large coils the way you guys design them is definately a bad idea,
 > most of the coils I seen being built are very low in frequency compared to
 > tesla's stunt coils, 200 khz and below, if I remember correctly tesla used
 > something around 2-3 mhz on the coils he hooked himself to. Which was
 > probably a big factor.

2-3 MHz still has a very large skin depth on people.. 1/3 the depth of what
it would be at 200 kHz, however, still many, many cm, if not meters.


  I'll try to find these references to the skin effect
 > tests, I think alot depends on the type of RF current flowing thro the
 > person, most tests were probably done used undamped RF while Tesla coils
use
 > damped waves which might factor in on how the current travels thro the
body.

Damped wave or CW, it matters little.  You're talking about putting RF power
through the body, and average power is probably the significant thing.  RF
burns are no fun.

 > Best advice of course is down mess with anything over a few hundred watts
 > damped wave. You should probably research old oudin coil setups and tesla
 > coils from the early 1900s that were used in electrotherapy, if you wish
to
 > design something you can use "hands on".

I would hardly use practices from 1900 as a guide to safe operation.