ELECTRICITY FROM AIR

Hawera Star, Volume XLVII, 9 June 1928, Page 11

ELECTRICITY FROM AIR

jVJT ILL lONS of volts of electricity x drawn. from the stormy air may soon provide physicists with the power necessary .t-o dinis'tegrnte the atom and transmute one chemical element into another, if experiments made iby Gorman seiontis-ts continue sueeess'f ul ly, writes the Berlin correspondent of Science Service. Electricity of nearly two million volts, .capable of jumping gaps nearly loft., has been obtained from the air by Drs. A. Braseh, E. Lange, and C. Urban, three members of the staff of the Physical Institute of the University of Berlin.

Mount Generoso, ‘in 'Switzerland, near Lugano, was the scene <of these experiments. This mountain is noted for .the frequency of electrical storms upon it, and also it has the advantage of being easily accessible.

It was found impossible 'to .intake use of kites for the purpose of collecting the atmospheric electricity, because use was made of a wide-meshed wire net having tin area of several hundred square’ yards, ft. was out of the question, they found, .to suspend this from kites or balloons, because such mc’ans would bo particularly undependable fluting a storm, when the experiments were made.

In order .to get the not as far as possible above the earth, they 'hung it on a cable between two mountain peaks. The span was about ISOOft. and 4lie height of the net above the ground about lid Off. At eh eh end were chains of insulators capable of withstanding as much as 3,000,000 volts. Another problem whs t'o prevent What, are c'alled brush discharges in the conductors which carried the current from the net. to .the 'measuring instruments. The intensify of these discharge's is less, the greater the radius of curvature of the conductor, so fh'at. the discharges would be less from a largo hollow cylin. der than from a smaller solid wire, with the same amount of metal. As .long cylindrical conductors would have been

HUGE SCALE EXPERIMENT

difficult to transport to the mountains', Dr. .Bra soli and his associates made use of a string of short, round-ended cylinders.

From a lightning-proof metal house the observations and measurements wore made. The spark gap, under the lnr*t of t‘ho short evTindeTS, eould 'bo regulated from this posit, and, from the length of* the gap acro'ss which the spark woidd jump, the voltage was determined.

' As the chief electrical storms of .the neighbourhood arc in the summer, and as the apparatus Was not completed until last August, the best storms had to go unused. One storm occurred after it was completed, ‘and indicated 'the sue. cess of the method. The spark gap could not be made larger .than about Lift., .but the spark easily jumped across it at the rate of about one per second, and continued for 30 minutes at a time. Also, it was found with an auxiliary collecting antenna, and with distant storms that affected the main station, that a discharge of once a second 'Was ‘possible -at all times. During the winter .months, the experiments were, discontinued, but the apparatus was left in place. The scientists are now'preparing 'to return to take full advantage' of the storms this season. With the antenna about three hundred feet above the earth, n height that could . easily be obtained, voltages as high ns 30,000,000 would result.

Dr. Brnscli and his colleagues credit Benjamin I‘Ynnklin with being 'the pioneer experimenter in. the field in Which they are working. One possible use of these huge voltages, they say, is to generate, extremely rapid cathode rays, .similar to those .formed in .the tube recently developed by Dr. W. D. Goo lid go, of the General Electric Co. These are similar to one of the principal it dilations from radium, but with 30,000,000 volts the artificial rays would travel even 'faster .than those emanating from radium itself.