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van de Jack
This page contains Jack's attempts at electricity demonstrations, including
his garage-made van de Graaff generator. However, Jack shuns this traditional
name and calls his a "van de Jack" instead. His reasons are deep-seated
and two-fold: 1) He rebels against the lavishly careless use of double
letters in "Graaff"; and B), he is generally in a sour mood because there
is not a "unit" named after him.
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This is one of the neighborhood kids at ~100,000 V.
It's amazing that she's still alive. Her parents didn't seem to mind. |
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Volta
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Question: What do the names on the left
have in common?
Answer: They are all people who have had
some kind of unit named after them; and (most importantly),
none of them is Gaskella.
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Ohm
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Ampere
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Tesla
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Faraday
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Gauss
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Joule
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Watt
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F.Y.I. We had no idea how these things worked until we tried to make one
ourselves. It's amazing what you can learn from the internet, coupled with
a graduate course in electrodynamics.
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This is our van de Jack electrostatic generator.
The 21" diameter sphere is made from aluminum. On a good day we can generate
a potential of several hundred thousand volts. The only somewhat dangerous
part is the exposed terminal strip for the 110 V AC line current to run
the motor. Don't touch it! Some day we'll fix that up.
Below is a picture of the guts. The bottom roller (not
shown) is a plastic bed frame roller from the Home Depot. The top roller
is aluminum. The field ionizer is a small screen spot-welded to steel shim.
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It's pretty cool to make motors that run from high voltage. Here are a
couple of different flavors. Can you figure out how they work? To understand
them, you're gonna have to know how a lightning rod works.
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a person up we like to stand on a standard issue Igloo cooler. This is
a picture of ours. Not only does it provide excellent insulation from the
earth, but it also is a great place to store a nice picnic lunch or items
for a cookout. |
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Other things that Jack likes to do with his van de Jack...
Light up a florescent bulb
Put a cup of packing peanuts on top and watch them fly
out
Blow bubbles at it
Detect charge with two dangling pop cans
See how long of a spark he can make
Shock his butt
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