Added: 4 years ago
From: wbeaty
Views: 90,707
Sort by time | Sort by thread (beta)

Link to this comment:

Share to:

All Comments (142)

Sign In or Sign Up now to post a comment!
  • Did you open it up and examine the metal's surface?

  • > open it up and examine

    @notexactlyIO Not this one. I should do it again, but with a bit of tape in one spot. Peel the tape to compare the unaffected surface.

  • I'd googled it, it was Jean-Pierre Petit MHD propulsion system, a vacuum thrust propulsion system that decomposes air in the desired direction of travel. When I'd read about it years ago it suggested that the vacuum created would only be a couple of milimetres thick and that atmospheric air pressure would push the craft from below to fill the ever ending void of air. My reasoning was that air pressure from above would be enough to fill the void therefore it wouldn't work.

    What do you think?

  • Isn't there a french guy that came up with a vacuum thrust propulsion system similar to this process that decomposes air in the desired direction of travel. Apparently magnetic fields on the perimeter of the disc controlled the direction of flight. I'd read about it ages ago and thought it was all shit. The top of the disc was I think constructed of Teflon and the craft supposedly used microwaves or excellerated electrons in a vacuum

    Do you think the cathode ray propulsion legend is a myth?

  • @glutinousmaximus Never saw an experimentalist in action? Worked in a lab? One rapidly discovers that "The Scientific Method" doesn't exist, it's an invention of grade school teachers, and today even in grade school it's removed from books and replaced with chapters on "Nature Of Science" NOS.

    "king of Klutz"

    like the sound of your own voice""

    New here, eh? Trolls blocked immediately, zero tolerance.

  • Oh that's cool, I'm currently at Bellevue College, just a few minutes from you and have a stainless UHV system for 70KeV D-D neutron generation and always wondered but was never sure what caused this effect within the chamber. This seems to works best with more reactive metals and the effect I was seeing in my system was likely from the outgassy (non-stainless) contact and connections I had on the HV lines like silver and tungsten. Regardless, that's very cool, thanks!

  • @U235hexafluoridedude Actually the effect is harnessed in professional sputter-ion pumps for UHV systems where turbopumps can't reach, 10e-9 Torr and below. I wanted to see if Tesla could easily have observed it accidentally and perhaps early-on harnessed this to achieve high vac needed for X-ray tubes, even before any others designed pumps to reach those values. No good explanation for Tesla's pre-Roentgen 1895 x-ray shadowgraph of a human foot inside a shoe, recovered from March 1895 lab fire

  • I'm not exactly sure what you did but it seemed pretty cool

  • Where did the space matter between the plates go to allow the ink to flow.

  • @teslaandlyne Plasma turns the oxygen in the air into aluminum oxide. Maybe the nitrogen gets turned into aluminum nitride.  Also, high voltage drives individual air molecules into the metal surface. So even argon or helium pressure might start dropping.

  • gotta try this. "pretty cool", like you said :)

  • Tesla Coil GO !!! ... Bzzzzz.... It works!!!

  • This was neat..

  • How and where do you get a tesla coil? I'm assuming you need a special license or something similar right?

  • > How and where do you get a tesla coil?

    @triggerman73 $175 (price new) for the same model, open the video caption above for links.

  • @triggerman73 Ebay - search for Voilet Ray, I got mine for 75.

  • Awesome experiment, and very well explained!

    If you don't already, you should get a professional (or semi-pro) to produce these.

    You seem to have a knack for getting people interested in science...we need more of that.

  • Get a video man dont do it urself

  • @wbeaty i am working on using conductive thread + ultra fine ss wire to make a "flat plate lifter" between two sheets of salvaged glass from a pair of broken all in one printers.

    fwiw if you'd like some you can email me on testing underscore h at the y@hoo

  • oooo...

    nice. A scaled up version would be invaluable for those who lack the finances to buy a proper pump.

    Might also work using a defunct or salvaged touch screen, or LCD with ITO front glass.

    could probably use a sheet of copper PCB material precoated wiyth a reactive metal such as magnesium or barium.

  • @conundrum2007, lots of things to try. Imagine tiny vac chamber (or DIY vacuum tube) exhausted by a stack of alternating plates, like a capacitor stack w/plasma dielectric. Also see the Shawn Carlson version in SciAm: gas scavanged up by zeolite cooled with liquid nitrogen. Maybe plasma against Al powder from art store does better? Large surface area. Buy a Hastings gauge tube and meter.

  • Hi,

    A great video which inspired me to try this for myself. I used a sort of home-brew CDI circuit to produce around 120 sparks per second. Two aluminum electrodes fitted into a 3 mm I.D. 20 cms long glass tube would happily pump around 4 cms of coloured water into the tube in less than an hour.

    However it would never do any better than to fill the tube to about one fifth of its total height with H2O which seems to imply its only the oxygen thats being converted to Oxides. Still great fun :-)

  • @M0AYF VERY COOL. Ozone appears above a certain e-field threshold, nitrogen compounds at higher field. So O2 should trap first. At some low voltages the N2 pressure wouldn't change at all. Also I've wondered how much the initial Al2O3 layer slows the rate. Perhaps initially sand Al surface under dry N2? Real ion pumps designed to use ion beams, plasma never touches metal, otherwise surface is etched by 'plasma polishing' and gas released again. To try: layer of fine metal mesh above plate

  • Many thanks for your response and for taking the time to explain whats happening. I now have a much better understanding of Ion-pumps. No doubt I will come back to this again in the future but next time I may try higher energy levels to see if I can pump some of the other gasses.

    Thanks again.

    M0AYF

  • man im so jealous of you u got an awesome job just outta intrest do u have a PhD?

  • > PhD?

    Nope, BSEE only, and only do research in my own basement.

  • Why does your camera get all fuzzy when you turn the Tesla on, does it somehow affect the camera?

  • EMF causes something in the circuits of the camera i think

  • the EMF (electromagnetic field) affects the camera audio and sometimes makes the camera go fuzzy

  • > get all fuzzy

    That's the stupid autofocus. It goes fuzzy on all the closeups in this vid. No fixed-focus allowed during macro mode. But the radio wave impulses from the tesla coil are showing up on the sound track.

  • Damn, that is just nice, wbeaty ! Congrats !

    Implementation of the BiefeldBrown effect for ink sucking action.

    Google videos has the following vid on the subject:

    Dr. Tom Valone Interview: The Biefeld-Brown Effect

  • Actually that was pretty cool...

    Wasn't expecting it to work, seemed like one of Tesla's more silly ideas. But that was awesome. I especially like your nifty little hand held Tesla coil. Favourited.

  • Why is the air getting solid if you apply a current?

    I mean you don't cool it down, right?

  • > Why is the air getting solid

    It's not the current that does it, it's the high-voltage plasma. Plasma is chemically reactive.

    All the oxygen in the air gets slowly converted into oxidized aluminum, a white solid powder. The nitrogen in the air gets converted into aluminum nitride, also a solid. The remaining few percent of Argon might be left behind. Or maybe the high voltage will charge up the argon atoms (create ions,) then impact them with the aluminum so they burrow inside it.

  • very intresting thxns for the vid .......like the handhold COIL.....homemade ? ? ?

  • > thxns for the vid

    It shows how Tesla could make x-rays in 1892, years before other physicists could reach that hard vacuum.

    > COIL ....homemade?

    Nope, that's a "vacuum tester" Tesla coil, costs around $180 new, see the vid text caption. I got mine on eBay for $30. Some of those are very old and not reliable (like from pre-1920s.) Old ones are smooth, or have large flat facets. Buy the later-model ones with the close parallel ridges on half the bakelite handle, called "BD-10" type.

  • great vdemo

  • Anyone can buy tesla coils, right? You dont need... a license, or something... I don't know. They look like they could be used... dangerously.

  • weapon use was one of the goals, but it failed.

  • > weapon use

    Tesla's "death ray" was published in the 1980s. Plans depict a giant VandeGraaff machine with a belt of charged air, (pumped by a Tesla turbine of course.) The sphere was covered with glass/vacuum insulated bumps.

    Inside the sphere was a many MeV particle accelerator in vacuum which launched mercury atomic clusters (nano-droplets) through the center of a multi-stage aspirator pump. In 1930s NT claimed building a successful prototype. I've not heard of anyone trying this.

  • > Anyone can buy tesla coils

    Yep. They produce "static" sparks, can be painful, but no visible blisters. Just steer clear of using the narrow glass urethral probe from Violet Ray quack medical kits. Ouch.

    On eBay, the really old antique ones with flaky wiring might burst into flame and trip circuit breakers. You have to disassemble those and repair/test. New ones cost $180 or so, check out the vid text caption to the right, under the yellow "subscribe" button. Click on (more info)

  • when the gas passes through the metal isnt it called super critical, meaning the gas atoms are moving so fast they just kinda fall in the tiny space in between the atoms?

  • my friend I just want to bring up how important is what you have demonstrated , a biological vacuum is what viktor schauberger uses in his repulsin now you have backed up such claim , the latest must be make and tuned up which it is not easy but it will be selfsustained .great work

  • this is an ion pump, right?

  • Yep. Tesla's 1892 lecture describes the phenomenon, and uses it to pump down a cold-cathode x-ray tube. But the guy was too secretive and didn't let on what he was actually doing. Modern ion pumps use magnets and screens to pump much harder vacuums than this simple version.

  • thank you

  • God, you have so much cool stuff. Wish I could afford it!

  • Camp out on eBay quack medical. Those handheld Tesla coils often sell for $50. Or buy new from teachersource com

  • Pretty cool eh? (luigi)

  • interesting because the device which reduce the racket this used a low profile alco permanent magnet which were separated and dialed away from the the plate... noise reduced light increased... M.J.H.

  • Where did you get that tesla coil?

  • They're about $175 new, see links on tinyurl com / mvbmqh

    On eBay you can get them down below $50 if you spend enough time watching.

  • wow! that was really interesting! I like how the Tesla interfered with the camera, could the camera get "fried" if the Tesla gets to close?

  • i like science =p, but i h8 biology lol

  • you need something like a MOT or an NST to output more current and actually make some plasma.

  • Don't use a jackhammer, when jewelers screwdrivers are the best tool.

    Hobbyists who are trapped in the "two-meter sparks" mindset won't have as much fun. Gotta experiment with these little girly-man handheld coils. Playing with these effects is like playing with film plates and uranium ore. You never know whic odd phenomena observed is going to end up with trillions of military spending and cities being incinerated.

  • Dude i love your videos - they're fucking awesome.

    Also that tesla thing makes some nice electrical interference. What are those things used for?

  • They still exist as high-volt car ignition, and as the high-volt power supplies in CRT monitors. But their originally they were the first high-wattage radio transmitters. Marconi used Tesla Cois (also called "spark transmitters") to broadcast across the Atlantic, and Marconi's patents were invalidated in 1944 in favor of Tesla's. So, who actually invented radio; the patent thief, or the one who actually came up with tuned high-volt spark transmitters?

  • So you mean that they used electrical interference from an arc to transmit information over long distances?

    And is this thing also a transformer of some sort?

  • No, it was a radio transmitter using a pulsed arc in place of transistors or tubes (since even tubes hadn't been invented yet.) Easily puts out thousands of watts.

    A Tesla coil is not really a transformer, since in theory it should step up the voltage perhaps 100X, but in practice the voltage is far higher. It doesn't have a step-up ratio, instead it stores radio energy in an EM resonator. If you keep on pumping in more energy, the voltage keeps growing higher until something breaks down.

  • Oh....gee that's intense. I wish i had one : /

  • The world needs teachers like you! Great!!:D

  • I tried to use an Ion pump once, It didnt work, it just burnt my penis, no actual size increase.

  • how many ions psi did u use in your 1st xperiment? im thinking, 2.2 gw.

    u need at least 11.7 tw's.

  • Tök jó nem is tudtam volt ilye irányú kísérlete(i) is (O.o)

    Awesome , I was not knowt that Tesla was experiment like that

    5/5:))))))))))))))

  • Tesla invented the ion pump (discovering the phenomenon before 1892.) He used it to achieve low pressures for x-ray tubes, pressures not attainable by the other pumps of that era. But as with many of his discoveries, he didn't patent it.

  • why did you use aluminium?

  • I had a thick aluminum disk in my box of junk. For better results, commercial ion pumps employ titanium and others.

  • that was awesome

  • i love these crazy little home experiments =)

  • ever considered being a phisics teacher? i think those kids would love u as a teacher:P

  • you making physics nice

    i never tought i would said that

  • you better be getting paid to do this stuff XD REALLY cool! I've never been all that into physics, but this grabs my attention more than the professor ever could!

    Note: I didn't take physics class because I can't pay attention that long lol...damn ADHD...

  • Comment removed

  • LAWL Mad Scientist

  • Isn't that, in all actuality, an Oudin coil? At least, that's what I thought violet wands were...

    Anyways, great video. It taught me quite a bit.

  • > an Oudin coil?

    Tesla in the USA invented a huge number of coils, including small handheld coils, and all possible connections of primary/secondary. Oudin in Europe invented a coil with no primary which was a large vertical spiral (like 1ft across, several feet tall.)

    Over years people wrongly started calling them by the name "Oudin coil" if they were vertical with high-volt tip. If the coil was horizontal, with two HV ends, people called it "Tesla Coil."

  • wow um that sounded like ALOT of electricity lol seeing it blurred out the sound.

  • na... the electricity just messed up the cam a bit

  • love your videos

  • Wow great !!! thanks for sharing.

  • Love it - mmm electricity

  • i heart this guy.

  • Pretty neat

  • he died

     (='<

  • i never new it

  • It's an experiment dumbass, it proves the theory. Any final product would be much larger and take MUCH more power to be efficient.

  • the damn reply button never works on mozilla... that was replying to iranian6 below

  • that's just bs. you can drive this kind of a thing with 25w no problemo

  • You know, you're right; you can drive this thing with 25 watts. Likely, that little thing he had was only running on, say, 50 watts. The way it works isn't the amount of power, it's the voltage. You can turn 25 watts into five million volts if you know how to do it.

  • Genius!

  • I think it is primarily because the O2 is turned to O3, ozone, which has fewer molecules.

  • no.

  • I want a Tesla coil just to shock myself with =)

    you almost killed your camera

  • > almost killed your camera

    Everyone should always use an old cheap camera for youtube. Then you'll take risks and never think twice about worrying.

    Hold your camera outside the moving car 1" above the road? Zap it with 30KV? Stick it in a sandwich baggie underwater in sand and surf? No problem!

    :)

  • That was awesome, Good Work. :)

  • Man you really have great experiments man!

  • Fun!  Love science experiments!

  • did he just kill his camara?

  • Wow. The tesla coil messed with the sound signal on that camera. XD

  • you are in need of a tripod!!

  • put it back in macro there we go...lol

  • How can this method be used for evacation of roentgen and lenard tube type set ups? What books or referrence material could I be referred that contains this kind of information based on this type of vacuum. Must say amazing and I want to know more!!!

    Thanks Bud

  • > How can this method be used for evacation of

    As with diffusion pumps, ion pumps are for high-vac and UHV. But suddenly I got it in my head that it might still work at 1atm. It does, but it's very slow (and best for tiny volumes.)

    OTOH, for larger volumes, if you pumped a rough vacuum with a rotary pump, perhaps you could get to the x-ray realm just by running a big glow discharge with a tesla coil for hours. No diff pumps or turbos needed!

    PS have you found "technique of high vacuum"

  • lol thanks for the 'fast' reply any ways i figured i would not be that good

  • thanks for the reply Bud!!! Appreciate the help!

  • very cool all your stuff is all you need is some freestyle motocross and you'll have all my fave things :)

  • hi would it be able to be done with a jar as the spacer and the lid as the electrode and another andode athe bottom would there be a vacuum

  • > hi would it be able to be done with a jar as the spacer and the lid as the electrode

    Yes, but it would be incredibly slow. That thing only worked for very small volumes of vacuum.

    Why not a "Tesla Vacuum Pump?" If a jar was full of close-spaced metal plates hooked to a tesla coil, it might pump down much faster. Perhaps use thin glass spacers to prevent direct arcing. Then use plumbing and a short hose to hook that "pump jar" to another empty jar to pump a vacuum.

  • yea that is real. i read his experiments on making special light bulbs, one was the force of the gases out of the glass making a vaccuum in the bulbs. besides that, he also did ruby lasers, xrays, and led technology. its a great article, he really has given us soooo soooo much technology.

  • you followed 'the scientific method' lol

  • > how much voltage

    Those things run at 20KV to about 50KV

  • Woah, RF interferance.

  • There was some static from the coil...how much voltage was runnnin through it?

  • Thats cool !!!

  • isn't that handheld coil also called an oudin coil?

  • > isn't that also called an oudin coil?

    Tesla invented a "health device:" a high-volt coil and a glowing vacuum tube held against the skin. Today these are called "violet ray" or "violet wand" coils. At about the same time, Oudin in France invented a large table-mounted coil for different health purposes.

    Tesla didn't take credit for his health devices or patent them, "giving them to mankind" over objections of his partners. Today this sometimes causes confusion: which coils were Tesla's?

  • yeah, tesla invented so many things its hard to keep track of them. Hope to see a new video from you soon!

  • could you ever put this to real use, say, with putting a vacuum on a vacuum tube?

  • > could you ever put this to real use, say, with putting a vacuum on a vacuum tube?

    It's already being used, search on "ion pump". But those things are used at ultra-high vacuum. I wanted to see if the pumping effect might even work at 1atm pressure.

  • But I mean COULD you take something from 1 atmosphere down to hard vacuum with this?

  • > But I mean COULD you take something from 1 atmosphere down to hard vacuum with this?

    I'll try that eventually, when I figure out how to measure pressure in tiny volumes. A standard gauge has way too large a volume for such slow pumping.

  • an oudin coil is similar to what has today become known as the tesla coil.

    The only real difference is the fact that oudin coils have one end of the primary and secondary grounded.

  • > oudin coils have one end of the primary and secondary grounded.

    Nope, that's a myth. Tesla patented all sorts of coil configurations including the single ground. I've seen people insist that conical coils are "Oudin coils," yet Tesla patented them too. I think the real issue is an old battle between Tesla supporters and Oudin supporters, and they fight over types of coils. The original Oudin coil is a grounded *single* helix with a movable tap that determines "primary" and "secondary."

  • Well, without going into a battle about this, I'm going to incite one and then, like, run away.

    The tesla coils we know of today are of a design perfected by oliver lodge.

    Tesla used all sort of weird crap... high pressure spark-discharge tubes filled with nitrogen, carbon wires, carbon toroids, bimetallic electrodes on his spark gaps, and he really did invent oil filled capacitors and litz wire.

  • > The tesla coils we know of today are of a design perfected by oliver lodge.

    No no no... ELIHU THOMPSON!

    :)

  • I might give that to you, since I haven't heard too much of him

    as long as we agree that marconi was a blatant plagarist who just went behind people and patented their stuff and took credit for it.

  • I like the reference to our pal, "Nickky T." in the About This Video!

  • very good

  • > are you sure there were no bubbles in the ink?

    No bubbles. Some ink was in the tube at the start, and it immediately started moving in. I expected bubbles, but then again the plasma is between thick slabs of glass and aluminum and could be cooled by conduction. From ion-pump literature, plasma is well known to create low pressure as it converts non-noble gases into solid compounds.

  • my facts to support this is -that it did not flow immiedatly and you said it was "sucking" the air did go somewhere - we can agree with that... but going somewhere by expanding and then collapsing is what i wonder about. are you sure there were no bubbles in the ink?

  • i looked at this again...

    you mentioned heating it up to drive the ink out.

    couldnt you cool it and draw a vacuum with an icecube? liquid nitrogen, dry ice and supercool it?

    or how about this? heat it up before you connect it to the ink.

    as it cools to room temperature it will draw a vaccum. OR the tesla coil-outputs energy as heat. drives the air out like blowing into a straw,

  • part II - but eventually the metal dissapates the heat more than the tesla coil puts out (radiators get more efficient with higher temerature diffarentials)

    i thought this was cool till i gave it some real thought. this could really be anything.

  • > where did the air in the chamber go?

    Plasmas cause chemical reactions. I expect that the N2 nitrogen molecules and O2 oxygen got split and combined to form solids: aluminum nitride and oxide. The small amount of Argon in air might be left behind... or it might be ionized and get driven down into the metal surface.

  • Do you mean that they combined with the metal to make rust?

  • > Do you mean that they combined with the metal to make rust?

    Yes, corroded aluminum (rust).

  • where did the air in the chamber go? A vacume was created but the air in the chamber had to leave. but there was no way for it to leave.

  • iron nitrides are very hard maybe this is a new way to surface harden iron ?

  • > maybe this is a new way to surface harden iron ?

    Yeah, or put a silica film onto silicon. Now if a silicon film could be sprayed onto a mandrel, and then exposed to gas and high voltage, you could rotate it and build up sequential layers of oxide or nitride or carbide. It might resemble mylar film, yet be bulletproof and un-creasable.

  • hahaha, "It worked, it worked!"

  • Dude!

  • : )

  • Very good!!!

  • Man you really have great experiments man!

  • So what does the air turn into? I mean what kind of nitrides and oxides etc :) thanks

  • > what kind of nitrides and oxides etc.

    The plasma is against aluminum on one side and glass on the other. Plasma is chemically active, so the air molecules should combine with the solid surfaces.  But glass is relatively inert, so the pumping effect seen is most probably caused by formation of Aluminum Oxide and Aluminum Nitride.

  • Thanks for that :)

  • How can you prove that it's truly a vacuum effect and not something unpredicted and "electrostatic" in nature?

    Use a metal tube and conductive ink, and look for it inside the chamber after an extended run?

  • Allow me to fix a typo...

    "the last bits of ionized GAS"

  • Hey Bill, neat trick! I seem to remember that Tesla used a high voltage to give the highest vacuum for his equipment. Evacuate a glass tube as much as possible with a pump, then run a very high voltage (DC?) to an electrode inside the tube. Let the streamer actually penetrate the glass to an exterior ground. The streamer would make a microscopic molten hole in the glass and simultaneously propel out the last bits of ionized glass. When the voltage was stopped, the tiny hole would self seal.

  • > The streamer would make a microscopic molten hole in the glass and simultaneously propel out the last bits of ionized gas.

    Weird, but check again. Once the hole appears, Tesla says the pressure rises... his point being that it happens slowly, as if "cathode rays" can slow the inrush of air as well as keeping the hole open. The pressure inside a tube with a visible hole should not rise *slowly.*  Tesla believed that chunks (we'd say 'atomic clusters') were being flung through the glass.

  • Is that a Homestarrunner shirt? :)

  • > Is that a Homestarrunner shirt?

    Strongbad! I bought both SB, and the archetype of all Nerds: Strongsad. But my daughter claimed the Strongsad. D'oh!

  • brill

  • It works!

    I really like your experiments.

  • INTERESTING

  • This is the most fun way to learn - thank you.

  • well i did actually mean a slightly modified experiment so as not to over voltage the dielectric but you say it might work that is good enough for me to try it thank you mr beaty

  • this is cool , would this work with hdpe ?could this be used to evacuate home made end foil type caps , just make it, ground one terminal, and zap it with a small tesla coil, could it really be that easy !!?

  • That might work, but only for high-volt capacitors, since initially the dielectric would have to survive tens of KV. If instead the capacitor was first pumped down in a vacuum chamber as the glue seals hardened, internal pressure might be low enough for low-voltage glow discharge. Then just use a solid state high-freq power supply, not a 50,000 volt tesla coil.

  • another thought arises concerning this ..would you still get the same effect if both terminals were connected to a small tc ?? this would eliminate the stress on the dielectric but would it still pump it out

  • When I have time, I'll try it out with one of those tiny 1500V fluorescent tube drivers. I suspect that the volts would be too low to get any corona, but that would depend on the thinness of dielectric, which in this case is very thick (1/4" glass mirror)

  • Hi, I really like your videos. Question about this one though - if the plates get hot when you zap them - at least the top one - wouldn't it expand and create a vacuum too? And then wouldn't the air expand and push the ink back down. Hmm. Thanks again for the cool vids.

  • It didn't expand. I thought it was going to expand, and said as much, but instead the pressure started dropping right from the start.

  • You know anything about Dr. Robert Bussard's research in Inertial Electrostatic Confinement fusion? It also goes by the name Polywell Fusion sometimes?

  • It's not his, as far as I know. It's Farnsworth's, from the 1950s. It was ridiculed as fringe science for decades, but then a couple of Tesla Coil hobbyists built one in the early 1990s and got the ball rolling. It still remained ridiculed fringe-science though, until they started injecting Deuterium and detecting neutron output. Search on "+fusor +bussard" or "farnsworth fusor" to find all sorts of hobbyist sites.

  • I like these videos, you learn the most interesting stuff!

  • how many volts was that?

    Cool video, keep them up!

  • Haven't measured it. But it does jump about an inch between relatively sharp electrodes.