My Jacob's Ladder

Disclaimer: Every HV page I've seen so far has had some kind of disclaimer, so I don't want to break with tradition. Electricity can kill you. That should do it. Oh, wait. It can kill your friends, too.

The jacob's ladder is pretty straightforward, you need:

• a neon sign transformer (from a sign shop)
• heavy duty power cord (your favorite hardware store)
• heavy copper wire or copper tubing (I used 4 gauge copper wire, but it's a little bendy, if you're good at bending narrow copper pipes, that's probably the way to go.)
• something to make a box or frame to support the whole thing (of course, not metal), I used scrap wood.

Fortunately my wife is a great shopper and she called ten or so sign shops before she found one that had old ones, and ended up paying around $30. If it was me it would've cost more, but I had heard before that you could get them for $20 bucks, so there you go. I don't know the make of the transformer, it's pretty old. It has a piece of masking tape that says "Good 1/5/71", so it's been around awhile. According to the owner of the sign shop, it puts out 15kV.

After that, I simply used some scrap wood to make a frame to set it in and support the wires, and got a heavy duty electrical cord, and some four gauge bare copper wire to make the electrodes. The wire in front is a ground wire. That's all there is to it. The copper electrodes could probably use a little straightening.

Video and Sound

• Here's another animated GIF like the one above
• Here's a quicktime movie of the Jacob's ladder in action I cut the movie down to 651k, it shows one arc traveling up. I tried to sample the sound pretty well, I think that's half the fun.
• Here is a slow motion movie of a close up of one spark This ones 733k. Actually I think it's the same spark I made the animated GIF out of. The sound is slow motion too. I thought it was neat.
• Here is a 37kb mp3 and a 405kb wav of a few arcs (they are the same sound, just different formats). I got it off the video tape and I'm not very happy with it. Hopefully soon I'll record it directly with the Soundblaster card, I just don't want to zap my computer.

Garage Science Philosophy

• High voltage stuff is big - big heavy transformers, big ceramic insulators, big old four gauge bare copper wire.  Sure there's a few prissy integrated circuits, but there's also capacitors the size of plates and tanks of water for resistors.  There's a 'big science' feel to high voltage experiments, something we've lost in our microelectronic age.
• High voltage stuff comes from junk - old neon sign transformers, old TV fly back transformers, bits of PVC pipe, ignition coils from junkyard, and stuff from around the house like old wine bottles, motor oils.  I'm not some recycling nut, I just like to be able to make cool things out of things other people would just throw away.
• High voltage is dangerous - I admit there's something exciting about insanely intense electric fields setting up in your garage, about having to watch your apparatus from behind a metal screen 10 meters away, to risk your life to see plasma displays that few have ever seen.  OK, maybe I'm getting carried away, but there's something to this.

Links

• Greg's Garage - this guy lives by the garage science philosophy and has made some great stuff, has some great photos and gives plenty of details
• Bill Beaty's Tesla Page - A great collection of Tesla links.
• Charles Brush's Electricity Page - Check out the 'Cooking with High Voltage' section, very funny.
• Send me an email - via web form, can be anonymous if you like