High Voltage Management

[tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)]

At 1:34 AM 7/20/96, Igor Chudov @ home wrote:
>jim bell wrote:
...
>> I've had a substantially better idea.  Hang carbon-fiber bundles from the
>> ceiling, which are charged to about 10,000 volts when an intrusion is
>> detected.  They'll glom onto anything conductive within their range, and
>> anyone with the bad fortune to be breaking into the house at that moment
>> _might_ live to regret it.  (resistors could be added to limit the current
>> to non-fatal but exceedingly painful levels.
>
>It the voltage is 10000 volts, it is always fatal, right? And if you set
>good enough resistors, then the voltage for the human body itself would
>be much less than 10000V -- most of the voltage will be taken by resistors
>themselves.
>
>Right?

Right! 10,000 volts is always fatal.

In fact, I died many times during my high school days, playing with 20,000
volt neon sign transformers, 100,000 volt Tesla coils, and (gasp) 250,000
volt Van de Graaf generators. (By the way, the neon sign transformer was
actually pretty dangerous, and my handling of it was careless, I now see.
Be careful when you convert one of these into a Jacob's Ladder, or use it
for plasma studies.)

However, maybe the a.c. nature of some of these voltage sources revived me
on the "reverse" cycle. (The V.D.G. is not a.c....so this blows this
theory.)

--Tim May

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