Re: really cool link to so cool effect's

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

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

At 03:02 PM 5/14/2004 -0600, you wrote:
>Original poster: "Hydrogen18" <hydrogen18-at-hydrogen18-dot-com>
>I'm not trying to call anyone a coward, but the statement that it should not
>be done by some1 who has never done it before doesnt make sense. Someone did
>it and succeeded first. Whats the whole point of giving advice on how to do
>it then telling people to hire someone and just sit by and watch.
>
>---Eric

I'd venture to say that the folks who did this first did it 
accidentally.  How many of the list members have been standing a bit too 
close to their coil holding something conductive and had a streamer hit it 
or had streamers emerge from it.  With a NST coil, this isn't likely to 
kill or permanently injure you, but it still is a surprise, and it does, in 
fact, often hurt.

This stunt falls in the category of "not certain death, but still 
remarkably dangerous, with many traps for the unwary"...  I suspect that 
the most common bad side effect isn't death by electrocution (which 
requires serveral bad things to happen, simultaneously), but RF burns, 
which are sufficiently painful that it discourages you from doing whatever 
it was that caused them, and blunt trauma sorts of things (falling off the 
platform).

It's like various fire eating stunts.  Lots of ways to get hurt seriously, 
even more to get hurt in a minor way, and learn something from it.

So, to paraphrase Eric's statement a bit:

"Someone did it and didn't fail catastrophically first, and learned from 
their experience."