Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
You could hear it with each approaching vehicle, the sound of metal dragging on the ground. No, it wasn’t a muffler hanging from a broken bracket, it was there for a reason. The chain tied to the rear bumper of a Model T Ford, or a Dodge Pickup wasn’t loose either, it was dragging the ground to prevent electric shock.
We play with static electricity as kids. When I was in high school, corduroy pants were popular for girls, along with nylon jackets. The combination on a dry, windy winter’s day could be deadly if they reached up behind you and touched your ear or said something so you’d turn around and flicked your nose with a finger.
It wasn’t life-threatening, but the static pop hurt, and it quickly got your attention.
Static electricity has been around forever as a natural phenomenon. In the United States, there was no worse time than the “Dirty 30s” of the American Dust Bowl.
Stories abound in North Texas, Oklahoma, Southern Colorado, and into Southern Kansas, the heart of the destructive dust storms that earned the name, Dust Bowl.
Children rushing home from school after a long walk in the dirt-laden winds ran up to their waiting mothers for a hug, and both woke up several minutes later after being knocked unconscious by the huge spark generated by the dirty wind.
Farmers learned to hook a piece of wire to a barbed wire fence and touch it to the door handle of their trucks, or to the metal seat of their tractor if it had rubber tires.
The Fordson Tractors of the 1930s often had steel wheels, these didn’t shock the user since they were firmly grounded by the metal contacting the ground.
One afternoon, as I was replacing the flyback transformer on an Apple MacIntosh computer, I experienced the worst static shock of my life.
In removing a flyback, you have to pry the prongs off the CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) of the Mac. I had a special screwdriver I’d soldered a wire to, with the other end soldered to a grounding lug that fit in the ground plug of a standard 120-volt wall outlet.
Plug in the ground lug, touch the metal part of the flyback prongs under the protective suction cup, and discharge the energy from the tube. It was a simple process I’d done dozens of times.
This time I was distracted by a phone call. As I touched the flyback, I thought I’d heard the distinctive pop of the static electricity discharging. It wasn’t. It was the sound of the grounded screwdriver hitting the glass of the Macintosh CRT.
I hung up the phone, lifted the suction cup, and started to squeeze the prongs to release them.
I hit the wall across from my workbench a second later. It was only 12 feet, but the charge tossed me easily. Both of my hands were numb, and it hurt in the middle of my chest. I’d discharged the CRT with my right hand, and my left was still holding the screwdriver. I’d created a circuit right through my upper body.
I wasn’t hurt, but I paid a lot closer attention to the process after that.
I’d discharged about 170,000 volts of static electricity.
If you see the static spark when you touch a doorknob or a car door it’s a minimum of 4,000 volts of static electricity. Yes, you can see it, and you can feel it too.
These old memories came to mind last week when the early morning temperature dipped below zero.
I like to walk in the early morning, and if the temps are high enough, I’ll take a headlamp and truck down our paved road to North 8th West and then out into the darkness.
If there is a chance of ice, I walk 40-yard laps around our living room, dining room, kitchen, and main hallway.
It’s monotonous, but it gets the job done.
One morning I turned our wall mounted big screen TV as I walked past, and the dim light of the pre-dawn was illuminated by a big spark. Yep, I said a few words then wondered why it was so charged.
The wind blowing outside that morning was the reason. Wind generates electricity when it goes over something, if there’s a little particulate in it, or a lot as was the case with the Dust Bowl, those bits of dirt generate even more electricity.
I started touching the corners of our walls when I walked. When I built the house in 1995, I used metal strips on all the corners before finishing the sheetrock. They ground nicely with just a light pop after four or five laps.
Mariners in the days of sail experienced something similar. They called it St. Elmo’s Fire. St. Elmo was the patron saint of Mediterranean sailors.
It was most evident at night, when blue sparks filled the masts and sails of vessels on dry, windy nights, or while sailing into low-moisture snowstorms.
There is no evidence that it ever caught a ship on fire, and ancient mariners of the Roman and Byzantine eras regarded it as a positive sign from God that they were protected.
Modern researchers refer to it as “contact electrification.”
It can be manifested in many ways. If your cat or dog gets Styrofoam peanuts clinging to their fur, it’s contact electrification.
If you rub a balloon on your head, and then stick it to the wall, that’s contact electrification.
If you scuff your feet on the carpet on a dry or windy day, while wearing a nylon jacket, then touch your sleeping sister or brother on the couch, that’s a hilarious example of contact electrification.
Scientists and researchers have spent a lot of time trying to understand the phenomenon and see if it has possibilities as a future power source, but as of yet, they haven’t discovered a useful application.
Imagine, guys and gals with doctorates, wearing white lab coats, walking around shocking each other and labeling it research. We can only hope that happens.
There may be a future application of the energy this process produces. If it’s powerful enough to knock someone unconscious, or knock men down when they shake hands, that’s a powerful force.
During the Dust Bowl, observers could see sparks of blue electricity in the approaching black dust clouds. They could see the same blue light dancing along telephone lines and on barbed wire fences. It wasn’t regarded as the good sign, that the early Christians thought was the protective force of St. Elmo.
On ships, the presence of St. Elmo’s Fire was benign, but its presence often brought much more dangerous lightning strikes if a storm was approaching.
We don’t worry about that. Just scuff your feet and surprise your significant other with a little gift. You’ll soon learn the after-effect of a little “St. Elmo’s Fire.”