Yes, but only if I touch it. I can light FL-tubes and lamps by holding them in one end and touching any part of my device.
You have currents in just about anything near by made of iron.
Well, your entire device IS the positive plate of a condenser, with the ground connection as the other plate. If the effect is strong enough, two object in close proximity will arc between themselves. Elihu Thomson wrote an article titled "Wireless Transmission of Energy" which contained details of this effect in 1876 (the experiments were performed in 1875). This is one of the effects that Tesla initially noticed in literature and his work led to his discover of radiant electricity, his magnifying transmitter, etc. Thomson used a Ruhmkorff Coil and connected one leg to a metal table and the other to a water pipe. He used a detector, which he attriuted to "Edison" (go figure...) which consisted of two electrodes in a box, creating a tiny spark gap. One had a metal ball in it that was outside the box. He turned the other until the gap was small enough to show an arc. He could detect excitation of (?) anywhere in the building, even several floors from the coil. I dabbled with this for a while several years ago. One thing I never tried was shaping two plates connected to the HV terminal so that they focused the field and then place a smaller capacitor (i.e. two plates) in the middle to see if you could induce more current in the smaller plates. Ideally, I think the field should rotate and you keep exciting it to build it up. EDIT: My take on this effect is that it shows that "displacement current", to use Maxwell's name for the current in the dielectric between two capacitor plates, either "induces" or is "converted into" conduction current when it encounters a conductor. How do we get some gain with this?
« Last Edit: 2012-07-30, 23:23:14 by Grumpy »
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