4" Pancake Coil - 500 turns of wire in the
secondary.
Insulated in a 6" ABS drain pipe filled with paraffin wax and oil.
This is an electric autograph - an electrograph - on film that shows faint
Phantom Streamers.
They appear as white misty threads that extend from the terminal in all
directions.
They have little sensation on the body other than a static breeze, are
unaffected by nearby objects, and
strobe from the terminal inwards and outward when fluctuations in the circuit
occur. They produce an
enormous amount of ozone, at least equal if not more than with a purple silent
thread (effluve) discharge.
Producing the discharges is difficult to explain. They appear best with
Pancake Coils operating at low frequencies (200 kHz or less) at low power
levels.
I've seen them appear with as little as 20 watts, though regularly employ
circuits of 100 - 300 watts or more with success. I've also seen them
appear
for no apparent reason, and then disappear only to reappear again after some
time. No logical differences in the circuits were noticed.
They appear easier with low voltage tank circuits, such as kicking coil
outfits, or with quenched spark gaps of large surface area where the circuit
is charged and discharged very rapidly.
The also seemed to appear in more abundance when the terminal was dipped in
wax and built up to .25" thick around the ball terminal.
The discharges will not show up by photograph. They can be exposed
directly to film however. Normally the "Phantom Streamers"
appear as much as twice as long as the actual spark discharge of the coil.
Here only a brush can be seen, several inches long, but the 5/8" diameter
wax-covered discharge terminal was strobing phantom streamers over 6" in all
directions, making a one-foot sphere of these discharges.
The sparks accompanying the phantom streamers occasionally resemble static
electric sparks.
Small pinholes appeared in the wax-dipped terminal.
Brush discharges began to form...
And later sparks...
A series of Phantom Steamers made on film.
