Garage light on, through me!

Return of the Jedi..or in this case Chris Bacon. :-) Static from your body is the cause

-- Sir Benjamin Middlethwaite

You can do the same by holding a fluorescent tube in the air under EHV distribution lines.

Its one of the standard van der graff demonstrations as well IIRC

;-)

I posted this a couple of years ago:

Just read that post - I don't undestand why/how the neon screwdriver lit up?

For the same reason they light up in the microwave. (Don't try this at home as some microwaves can be damaged by doing it!)

I expect it would light even when not connected to the tube - just being in the beam and the chap presenting an earth by touching the end cap.

was taken in the Bristol area and shows a whole field lit up with fluorescent tubes.

This is a poor copy

May the force be with you. :-)

A bit of leakage under a 475 kV line and thats a "field" now is it?....

Some hilarious dodgy old science there.

Dave

Oh, I see (at last). He was serious and meant some microwave *ovens* can be damaged.

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember tony sayer saying something like:

Isn't there just. Be bringing back phlogiston next, I shouldn't wonder.

In article , Grimly Curmudgeon writes

Yes but I suppose they didn't know any better then....

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember tony sayer saying something like:

It probably made sense in the day. Must have been quite frustrating, I'd imagine, knowing there was a helluva lot of stuff they didn't know and having to grope blindly towards it.

I bet they'll be saying something like that about us in a few centuries.

Chris Bacon formulated the question :

Perfectly normal....

The voltage at the still connected end was passing through the tube and through you to ground. Similar to one of those mains tester neon screwdrivers, where touching the end grounds it and allows it to light up.

someone decided to play this joke....

Some bloke's headlamp bulbs were removed and replaced with a shorting penny under the terminals. A radar set was then pointed at the car and switched on - thereby lighting the headlamps. When the owner finished work that evening, he was upset to see that he had apparently forgotten to turn off his lights when he had arrived in the morning. However, when he fiddled with the light switch he blew the fuse. When he got out to try and find the fault, the lights were still on! And when he moved around the lights went on and off as he passed in between the car and radar set. When he inspected the bulbs, he was greatly surprised to find the shorting pennies. I'm not sure how he eventually found out.

Sorry that this is somewhat OT ('cos this is not the same sort of physics), but there are different ways of getting the same effect - or nearly. I have no idea what his long-term health turned out to be. These days, the perpetrators would have been hung, drawn and quartered.