lightning a light bulb with one wire

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Original poster: William Beaty <billb@xxxxxxxxxx>


Hey, has anyone here tried this one below?

Get two identical flyback transformers.  Build a small SSTC using one of
them.  Hook its HV output to a couple feet of 40KV HV wire, and connect
the other end of this wire to the HV terminal on the second flyback.  Add
a short capacitive load by clipping an alligator cliplead to the ground
terminal of the 2nd flyback's secondary.  Don't ground the coil, just
leave the cliplead dangling.

When you now run the SSTC, the other flyback will see a voltage becaause
of the potential difference between the HV wire and the dangling
cliplead.  The coil will resonate, produce an off-phase HV output, and
will start sucking EM energy out of the SSTC.

If you now wind a few turns of hookup wire around the ferrite core of the
second flyback, you can use it to run an LED.  Add more turns and you can
run one of those 40mS 1.5V incandescent bulbs from Radio Shack.  Add a
diode (and a few more turns) and you can run a tiny solar-cell motor.
It's a power distribution system, but with only one wire!

I made mine with 5ft of wire between the two transformers, and it worked
sometimes even without the cliplead.  I don't know the ratings on the
flybacks.  They were larger than those 5KV units common on monochrome PC
monitors, but not so large as the kind found in old console color TVs.

Note: sometimes a pair of identical flybacks won't have closely matched
frequencies.  In that case, first figure out which transformer has the
lower frequency and use that one for the SSTC.  Then reduce the frequency
of the 2nd flyback by connecting a few-picofarads trimmer across its
HV secondary and tune it to resonance.

Future plans:  make the SSTC tunable, then put TWO flybacks having two
different frequencies on the same HV wire.  That way I can activate either
one depending on the transmission frequency.

Tesla coils used in the way Tesla himself did, with no sparks visible.


(((((((((((((((((( ( (  (   (    (O)    )   )  ) ) )))))))))))))))))))
William J. Beaty                            SCIENCE HOBBYIST website
billb at amasci com                         http://amasci.com
EE/programmer/sci-exhibits   amateur science, hobby projects, sci fair
Seattle, WA  206-789-0775    unusual phenomena, tesla coils, weird sci