Serious electrick!.

[tony sayer]

A warning to show the children why they shouldn't play near power lines etc!.....

[BigWallop]

And you think the power is truly off, eh ? WOW !!! What a training video. :-))

[Grunff]

and these guys do it at the flick of a switch on a routine basis!

[Robert Irwin]

A mate of mine in an R&D lab used to have a miniature one of those with some jam in the middle as a flykiller. He didn't seem to think it was overkill....

[Jet]

Nicola Tesla... now there's a guy to spark the imagination, no mistake ! Grade A genuis, never appeared to get the recognition he deserved :(((

[Grunff]

[Grunff]

I think there's something about 'genius' which inevitably turns the person in question into something of an oddity. Just goes with the territory - the same brain mecahanims that makke someone very clever also make the a little strange.

There's no disputing that Tesla's undertanding and /intuition/ when it came to physics in general and electricity in particular was unrivalled.

[Jet]

Don't necessarily agree with you here Grunff, so I'm off to water the daffodils up the reindeers rectum... they came up early this year due to high concentrations of global warming in my gespacho soup...

[Steve]

Turned into a grade A fruitcake towards the end though.

Steve

[Jet]

More seriously though, Tesla was indeed a genius. A shame his knowledge of broadcast power wasn't put into practical consumer use... a cordless drill running off 240v, no battery would suit me down to the ground ;)

Some links for those that haven't heard of Tesla... amazing how much we owe to a man many of us know so little about...

[geoff]

In message , tony sayer writes

girders

[PoP]

Perhaps, just perhaps, the fact that Tesla spent his life in heavily magnetised and/or EMF fields caused a deterioration of his body cells? We do hear about people getting cancer if they live under a high voltage line (though I'm not sure those claims have been substantiated).

We shouldn't forget that when X-rays were first discovered they were used on the stage as magicians-type tools. Until some bright spark realised that X-rays were harmful to living organisms.

PoP

If you really must use the email address provided with my newsreader please be aware that the email is processed with spamcop. As a result your email to me might be treated as spam!

[Mike Tomlinson]

In article , Grunff writes

The one in the white hat seemed to me to be edging away nervously...

[Chris Oates]

they used to be in most shoe shops !

[Andy Hall]

When I was a kid, they had them in shoeshops - devices called pedoscopes. You stood on this machine in the new shoes putting them into a couple of holes at the back of the machine. The shop assistant switched on the machine and you could see where your toes were in the shoe on a green fluorescent screen in the top. There was a timer to limit how long the tube was on, but apparently the output was quite high.

However, it seems that the risk is not thought to be high unless you were a shoe shop assistant or Emelda Marcos.

Most of the shoe shops had those systems for transporting money across the store in little capsules on a wire, propelled by pulling a chain rather similar to that of a high level toilet cistern.

.andy

To email, substitute .nospam with .gl

[romic]

And if you want to download the file, there is a link from this page:

comments from sites are below

See what happens when a power station's 500 KVA switch is thrown! No enhancements or special effects were added to this live footage.

Gotta love it. This is the best arc'ing I've seen in a long time. Basically, they are opening the switch on a high voltage line, with No wind, and the humidity just right. The big switches open slowly on these systems.

Roger

[Dave Liquorice]

Quite. Amazing sound (bet it sounded better live!) and sight. I notice that it is the last of the three breakers to open. Wonder what the other two where like? I knew I should of gone into power distribution engineering not broadcasting...

[Kris]

They also had them in mens hat shops the power had to be regulated to avoid damage to the brain. One day a very shady looking guy walked into the shop and asked for a cap to be fitted. Being a little unsure about the customer the assistant decided to set the power at very high level,the customer had no idea what was happening as the hatometer didn't hurt. The customer left wearing his brand new flat cap,but within five minutes of leaving the shop the customer got lost he couldn't remember where he came from what is name was.A policeman spotted the guy just walking in circles with a vacant stare. To cut this rather long tale a little shorter it ended up with the guy being given a new identity and was from then on called:

" IMM the international man of mystery"

ATB

Kris

[tony sayer]

Some explanation here Dave and a few other's. Like the exploding transformer!...

http://205.243.100.155/frames/longarc.htm#Crane

[Andy Dingley]

Thankyou for mentioning that it was polyphase AC, rather than just AC (which he didn't invent).

Tesla didn't invent radio, didn't understand radio propagation, and his own bizarre idea was an obvious dead end for any sort of distance. Yet he pushed ahead with it it despite, leading to the financial collapse of the company and the need to invent Usenet and the web, merely as a means of cataloguing the multitude of Tesla-kook fansites.

I think Tesla _was_ a smart guy who invented lots of useful ideas about wired power transmission. Then he got into the conflicts with almost every other inventor or financial backer, and he went barking mad.

Tesla's biggest mistake was in preserving a vaguely decent haircut. One good photograph of him looking vaguely straggly and highly charged, and he could have been the iconic Einstein model (for the postcard and T-shirt market at least).

-- Do whales have krillfiles ?