What You Need
- Wool sweater
- Fluorescent light bulb
- A comb
What to Do
- This experiment needs to be conducted within a darkened room.
- Start the experiment by rubbing the plastic comb vigorously against the woolen jacket. This experiment requires a little extra static electricity, so you might need to rub the comb vigorously for one whole minute.
- Now, hold the light bulb in your free hand and gently touch the comb to the metallic base of the bulb.
What Happens
The fluorescent light bulb glows.
Why It Works
The friction creates a static charge strong enough to cause the gas inside the tube to fluoresce.
Bizarre Facts
- On the 1960s television show The Addams Family, electrically charged Uncle Fester makes a light bulb illuminate by simply placing it in his mouth.
- The fluorescent bulb is more economical and energy-efficient than the incandescent bulb, which wastes up to 80 percent of its energy generating heat.
- While Thomas Edison is credited with inventing the first incandescent lamp using carbon for the filament, English inventor Joseph Swan patented his incandescent lamp using carbon for the filament in 1878, a year before Edison.
- When cartoon characters get an idea, an incandescent light bulb goes off over their heads – never a fluorescent bulb.
- Thomas Edison, nicknamed “the Wizard of Menlo Park,” was expelled from school in Port Huron, Michigan, after the schoolmaster incorrectly diagnosed him as being mentally retarded. Edison was actually partially deaf, the result of about with scarlet fever.
- Lightning travels between a hundred and a thousand miles per second, generating a temperature up to 54,000 F, six times hotter than the surface of the sun.
Enlightenment
American park ranger Roy Sullivan was struck by lightning seven times between 1942 and 1977.