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Phantom Arcs
wierd, very long, extremely dim, white arcs
A long time ago, when I first began experiementing with Tesla coils, I
noticed something unusual from one of my experiements. Strange, dim,
very profuse, thick, white arcs visible only in the dark that gave no
sensation when touched. I thought is strange, but I didn't think that
much of it as I knew very little about the effects of tesla coils, and
had no experience to compare the results of the experiement to. The
setup was powered, to the best of my memeory, with a flyback transformer
rectified through one diode, with a single salt water cap (large
champagne bottle, probably ~1000pf) connected in parallel accross it,
using a ceramic knife switch as a variable spark gap, a near-cylindric
primary consisting of 14 gauge insulated stranded copper wire wrapped
around a plastic Coolwhip container, and a secondary of a 3" cardboard
form, maybe 16" long, wound with 22 gauge magnet wire from the windings
in the back of two old b&w TV's. When the gap was set so there were
on;y a few breakdowns per second, hot, snappy sparks ~1.5" could be
drawn from the 1.25" steel ball terminal, while a thick, tree-shaped
swath of the pale white "phantom" streamers could be drawn with no
sensation to my outstretched hand as far away as 7". If I removed my
hand, only a few short, thin examples of the phantom arcs would remain
visible, and no other dischrges were apparent.
I recently read about similar arcs in a book regarding a variety of
Tesla's experiments, and the mentioning was in a part written by Tesla,
concerning his high-frequency experiements. I can't, for the life of me,
remember what the name of the book was.
Grayson Dietrich
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