Hey what's up guys? We are back in the lab today with another random experiment with high voltage
Electricity for this experiment today. I'm bringing back my 12,000 volt neon sign transformer as well as this thing. This is the Jacob's ladder
I built for my mad science Minion project
And it allows an Arc of electricity to flow upward over and over and over again
Now if you go back in time and consider the electrical genius of Nikola Tesla
He didn't have access to solid state capacitors and relays like we do today instead
He used things like glass aluminum foil and saltwater to build capacitor banks for his experiments for this experiment today
I thought it'd be fun to build a simple saltwater capacitor bank and for that
We're just going to need a glass bottle like these glass bottles of coke I picked up from the grocery store and some aluminium foil
we want to get started by taking the caps off the top or moving the liquid from inside and
Replacing it with water salt water to be exact after that we're just going to use a little bit of aluminum
Foil or some aluminum tape I got from the hardware store to wrap around the outside and our capacitor is basically going to be complete
So let's gather up those materials and get to work
These bottles aren't really the best bottles because they've got an abnormal shape it would be better to have straight walls, but whatever
So here's what we've just done guys these bottles didn't actually have any labels on them
So there are no labels to remove so we just took a simple piece of aluminum
Foil wrapped it around and then crushed it down
So they're molded to the shape of the glass now the smoother you can get the aluminum the better
This is going to work, but I think these are going to serve our purpose very well
I took another sheet of aluminum, and I folded it over into strands to form these makeshift aluminum wires
They're going to go right down into the center of these bottles
It looked like a nice little metallic soda
Ready to go so I'll have to do now is put the liquid inside and for that
We're using water with a little bit of salt now to mix up our saltwater concoction
I just filled up this little glass dish with some water and picked up some of this real sea salt
We could use the sea salt from a previous experiment if we wanted to we're going to do is take some of this we're going
To dump it into the water we're going to mix it around for a couple of minutes and tell as much that salt has been
able to absorb into the water as possible
They're just important to our bottle is until it comes up and relatively matches the top line of the aluminum foil here
That should be pointed
Now just refined. I took all these glass bottles and turn them all into capacitors well
And all looks exactly the same except for this one
The foil is a little bit lower, but that's not going to make that big of difference
This is the basic capacitor because on the inside the saltwater itself acts as the capacitive plate the glass is the dielectric on the outside
The aluminum foil acts as the other plate to help build up that electric charge
Now capacitors have so many wide range of uses in electronics
I'm not going to get into the theories about why capacitors are important instead
I want to show you what kind of difference these simple little devices make when we hook them up to our Jacob's ladder
So let's talk about the Jacob's ladder for just a second
When we take our two high voltage electrodes and connect them to the terminal the electricity will Arc at the path of least resistance?
Which is right down here at the bottom where the two points are closest?
Now as our keeps up the air around it the Arc will naturally want to travel upward and as it does
Electricity will continue to flow through it because that Arc is the path of least resistance
Until it gets high enough to get stretched out so far a snap at which point it starts again at the bottom and repeats that
process over and over again now just for fun
Let's go ahead and hook up our little saltwater
Capacitor in parallel with the system and see what kind of a difference it makes of that arc, so here's the quick setup
I've got for a parallel circuit
We've still got our high voltage electrode running to this one terminal
But now you can see an alligator clip joins it and runs through this wire connecting the wire that goes down inside the bottle
Now on the other side we have a second alligator clip that's not connected to anything the high voltage wire that's not connected to anything
We have the outside of the bottle that's covered in the aluminum foil the idea is that if I connect these together?
We'll see the same reaction
We did before but the second we touched them to the outside of the bottle that reaction should change just a little
We have our high voltage line connect them together
And we have the same reaction. We saw before that's great
We connect to the outside of the bottle here
We get some cool Corona
That looks pretty sweet by itself, but nothing happens with the Jacob ladder until we make contact with the other alligator clip as well watch
That's a little bit of a different reaction isn't it we go from the beautiful Arc that travels upward to a very very sharp arc
that stays down near the bottom
That smell we're smelling right now is ozone. We are literally generating Ozone right now
Which is actually poisonous, but not in small concentrations. So we're good
the other thing you might notice about this is it's
Incredibly loud in fact this reaction is so loud it might be a good idea to use earplugs because my ears are ringing
This is literally like mini lightning bolts shooting off on our workbench here, and it's not only happening on the Jacob's ladder
But you can see when I get close to the bottle itself
We can shoot both of lightning between the electrodes and the aluminum foil on the outside
It's amazing to think just a little bit of salt water a little bit of aluminum foil
And a coke bottle can have such a dramatic difference
But what happens if we take it to the next level and connect all the bottles together?
That's going on next
(laughs)
We've done it guys we've taken our six coke bottles
We've lined them up in parallel so all six bottles are connected on the outside and the interiors as well, alright guys
I've just hooked my system up in parallel let me show you how I've rigged it
I've got two alligator clips with the high voltage terminals going into them. So we turn on the system
We should see the Jacob's ladder perform as normal one alligator clips runs to the top
Which is already in place the second one is waiting to be touch to the side so as the system is running
We'll be able to touch this in real time with one hand behind my back and see exactly what difference. It makes here we go
So you can see the Jacob's ladder is performing as normal now when I touch this to our capacitor bank
It's going to energize the capacitor, and we'll see what difference that makes here we go
That is loud
And you can see I can actually touch any of the bottles, and it has the same effect
No matter how high that arc is the second I touch the bottle it jumps back to the bottom
and
That's because there's so much power that the air current can't lift it. It's driving straight through the point of least resistance there
Now the reason I have one hand behind my back is because if I accidentally touch this there is enough electric potential it could stop
My heart we're jumping up into higher voltage and higher amperage and that is a dangerous combination
If I hold this to the constant distance you can see it takes a second for the charge to build up
But then it will start sparking when that charge is high enough to jump the gap
That's actually very similar to how lightning works. You've got the clouds and you've got the ground that acts as these capacitive plates
You've got the air in the middle. That's the dielectric and when the breakdown is enough
You have a bolt of lightning that connects the two and equalized the charges
So very dangerous stuff to be playing with so you can see it's very mesmerizing
And now my whole workshop smells like Ozone
Which is the smell you smell after a thunderstorm after all the lightning strikes. So there you have a guy's very cool experiment
You can do with some glass bottles and some aluminum foil to build yourself a simple electrical
Capacitor not very practical this day and age but they are the kind of technology that was used by Tesla
Thanks for joining us for this mad science experiment today. I'll be looking for in the next video talk to ya then
This is the Jacob's ladder. I built for my
This is the Jacob's ladder. I built for my a mad. This is the Jacob's ladder
I built for my mad science minion project and it allows an arc of electricity to flow upward over and over and over again
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