Original poster: Terry Fritz <vardin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Hi Dmitry,
.... [...] Here is what is consistantly recorded with Keithley electrometers and or electroscopes: AT NO TIME,...EVER,... BEFORE, DURING, OR AFTER, FIRING OF THE TESLA COIL IS ANY COULOMBIC CHARGE COLLECTED ON A SURFACE WHICH IS NEGATIVE!!!!! No artifice performed upon the normal Tesla coil circuitry can yield a negative charge collection process on a remote isolated capacity!"so yeah, Terry - "It is well known that coils tend to charge up the surroundingsnegatively" - it is well known only to you i guess? or R.Hull was totally wrong again? :-D
Richard's meter really did have some kind of problem. But I don't think it would cause gross + - errors.... But this would:
"2. Used a DC supply reported on before. Impedance of supply 60k ohms (deliberately current limited). supply set for 5kv prior to gap breakdown in all experiments."If the first peak were significantly higher than the rest, one could simply change the DC supply's polarity to change everything... But Richard apparently tried that!!! Of course, if he ran longer at one polarity than another, the residual charge in the surroundings could last days... One needs a metal room that you know is grounded without odd objects messing things up from a theoretically perfect space. That includes the experimenter with synthetic clothing and rubber shoes... Fortunately, Tesla coils are pretty powerful so really small charge errors should get smothered.
One problem is that the electrometer was made to run in a low field situation. If a pc board happens to get charged up inside it, all bets are off... Tesla coils have really high fields so all the equipment has to be made and verified to work there. Today's "plastic meters" are a real problem as are LCD screens that really like to hold charges... Paul mentions this in his post. You really have to be careful. Trying to take DC electrometer readings near a Tesla coil is probably like try to paint with water colors under water...
So It might seem that if a Tesla coil spewed out negative ions it would charge the surrounds negative. However, if it made an ion cloud "out there" as Marco suggest, the surroundings would be induced positive!!!
It could go either way... It could also charge an object to say -100kV and another object to -200kV to get a positive +100kV "between" them, using only negative ions...
Sounds like we might need some new experiments to resolve that since the old and present data is a little too messy to go from... I would not be surprised to find that coils can charge either negative or positive depending an many things.... I thought this was all figured out in the past, but it appears that it is not at all...
Sorry about the antenna's name too :o))
Cheers,
Terry