Generator fish, or “living” electricity
In wildlife, there are many processes associated with electrical phenomena. Let's consider some of them.
Many flowers and leaves have the ability to close and open depending on the time and day. This is due to electrical signals representing an action potential. You can make the leaves close with external electrical stimuli. In addition, damage to currents occurs in many plants. Slices of leaves, stems are always negatively charged in relation to normal tissue.
If you take a lemon or an apple and cut it, and then attach two electrodes to the peel, they will not reveal the potential difference. If one electrode is applied to the peel, and the other to the inside of the pulp, then a potential difference will appear, and the galvanometer will notice the appearance of amperage.
The change in the potential of some plant tissues at the time of their destruction was investigated by the Indian scientist Bos. In particular, he connected the external and internal parts of the pea with a galvanometer. He heated a pea to a temperature of up to 60 ° C, while an electric potential of 0.5 V was recorded. The same scientist investigated the mimosa pad, which he irritated with short current pulses ...
Corona discharges or the lights of St. Elmo
Corona discharge, electric corona, a kind of glow discharge; occurs when there is a pronounced inhomogeneity of the electric field near one or both electrodes. Similar fields are formed at electrodes with a very large curvature of the surface (tips, thin wires). In Corona discharge, these electrodes are surrounded by a characteristic glow, also called the corona, or corona layer. How the end of the world came in the USA
In the United States, the end of the world was already - in August 2003. It all started on August 14, at 16:10 Eastern time, the same for parts of the USA and Canada. It was at this hour that recording instruments in the energy ring surrounding Lake Erie (one of the five Great Lakes) recorded the first deviation from the norm: three power lines in northern Ohio failed. In the next three minutes, voltage was removed from several dozen lines, 21 power plants were decommissioned, and the vast territory that covered part of North America, including pieces of the USA and Canada, was left without electricity. According to various estimates, from 30 to 50 million people were in the disaster area. The Western press unanimously dubbed the incident "the largest energy accident in the history of North America."
America really still did not know anything similar in scale. Huge traffic jams (traffic lights do not work), metro that got up, stopped plants, factories, shops, quiet offices. Canceled and delayed departures from all civilian airports in the disaster area ...
The most powerful electric current
The most powerful electric current was generated at the Los Alamos Science Laboratory, New Mexico, USA. With a simultaneous discharge of 4032 capacitors, combined into a Zeus supercapacitor, for several microseconds, they give twice as much electric current than that generated by all the power plants of the Earth.
Highest voltage
May 17, 1979 at the National Electrostatics Corporation, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA, the highest electric potential difference was obtained in the laboratory. It amounted to 32 ± 1.5 million V.
The highest frequency that the naked eye perceives is the frequency of oscillations of yellow-green light, equal to 520.206 808 5 terahertz (1 terahertz - one million million hertz), corresponding to the transition line 17 - 1 P (62) iodine-127.
Highest frequency measured with instruments ...
All truth and fiction about ball lightning
Before us is one of the many meetings with a curious natural phenomenon - ball lightning.This phenomenon has not been recognized in science for a long time. They said about ball lightning that it was an optical illusion and nothing more. The French physicist Mascard called her "the fruit of excited fantasy." And in one of the German physics textbooks at the end of the last century, it was argued that ball lightning could not exist, since it was a "phenomenon that does not meet the laws of nature."
Scientists, as we see, can also be mistaken when confronted with the mysteries of nature. Moreover, they are often mistaken not because they have a "bad character" that does not allow them to be condescending to new scientific ideas or to agree with facts that contradict their ideas. The reasons here are much deeper, including, in particular, the desire to preserve in integrity and completeness the system of views prevailing in natural science on the structure of the world. However, cognition is a process that cannot be stopped while humanity exists. The basis of this process is the principle: I do not know today - I will know tomorrow. A principle that is directly opposite to the religious one: I don’t know and it’s not supposed to know, because everything that is incomprehensible, wonderful is from God, confirmation of his being, and it’s impossible to know. Ball lightning can perhaps be considered a classic example of how, under the pressure of facts, the attitude of scientists changed towards them. Gradually, a lot of material was collected, indicating that ball lightning is also a reality ...
They don’t save on ingenious brains!
In 1910, the famous American automaker Henry Ford built a huge car factory in Detroit. A powerful electric generator was ordered for the plant, which was supposed to provide electricity to all the machines in the plant. The generator was brought in, mounted, but when it was started, it turned out that it was very buzzing, heated and did not give up half of the required power. For many days, experts were busy with the generator, but could not understand anything.
The situation for Ford was critical: the delay in launching the plant threatened with huge losses. And he decided to take an extreme step - he invited Professor Charles Steinmets to the factory of one of the leading American electrical engineers. The professor arrived, walked around the generator and ordered that they bring him a cot, a piece of chalk, a notebook and a pencil — he wanted to work at night. All night, Steinmets walked around the generator, put mysterious marks with chalk, then lay on a cot and calculated something in a notebook.
In the morning he said that they removed the generator cover and wound 16 turns from the induction coil. After that, the generator was started and it worked silently and began to give off power even more than that for which it was designed. The enraptured Ford thanked the professor and asked for a bill for the work done. Soon a bill came in for $ 10,000. The sum at that time was enormous, but Ford's enthusiasm had already passed. He began to look for an excuse not to pay money and sent Steinmets a letter asking him to detail the account, to make costing. Such a calculation Steinmets sent.
This is how she looked ...
The introduction of scientific and technological achievements into everyday practice often encountered such opposition that the advocates of the new sometimes had to use the form of the trial with prosecutors, defense attorneys and judges to prove the advantages of the new technology.
Surprisingly, the fact that through a lawsuit had to prove to the general public the seemingly obvious advantages of electric lighting.
To this end, in March 1879, the English parliament established a commission that was supposed to put an end to the rumors and absurd rumors spread by opponents of electricity - gas companies.
The commission had significant powers: it had the right to call all the witnesses that it considered necessary, and with the same rights on which they were called by the court. The inquiry was carried out in the same way as a judicial investigation. The defendant was electricity ...