Field Of Fluorescent Tubes Powered By Ambient Current
A British artist placed 1,300 fluorescent tubes in a field directly below high voltage power lines. Although the tubes aren’t connected to anything but the earth, they are fully illuminated because of this phenomenon, “Powerlines are typically 400,000 volts, and Earth is at an electrical potential of zero volts, pylons create electric fields.”
The point wasn’t to expose the dangers of living near power lines, it was simply to create a neat lighting display. Nevertheless, it would be pretty awesome to “drive along the highway and glance into a field to see a giant array of fluorescent tubes lit wirelessly from the electromagnetic fields of power lines.” Check out more of the artist’s work.
Similarly, Bre Pettis demonstrated wireless electricity in his History Hacker show on Discovery Channel (above).
April 17th, 2009
if they can do that what else can light up or turn on other the the fluorescent tubes? maybe a type of thing that can harvest this energy! or maybe a hybrid car charging station??? always thinking green!!
April 17th, 2009
Actually I’ve heard that some people run cables from beneath these high voltage lines to their homes and get free electricity (illegal of course).
April 20th, 2009
Couldn’t they run these power lines next to freeways and get some free lighting?
If people can run cables under and steal the electricity why are power companies not using this to do something?
April 20th, 2009
Could be unstable power or something, who knows.
April 21st, 2009
It works by my house (colorado), but its nowhere near that bright. either the u.k. voltage difference or this photo is a time lapse.
May 15th, 2009
There is no such thing as a free lunch. If you can extract power from the electrical field around high voltage power lines, someone has to supply the power that you get. If enough people were to do this, the power company would soon discover that for every watt of energy they put into one end of the line that they would be getting less than one watt out of the other end. Of course this ignores the normal losses in transmitting the power in the first place. If you live next to an AM broadcast station you can extract some power from the signal being radiated from the stations antenna. Of course this will affect the radiation pattern from the stations antenna and cause problems for the Federal Communications Commission rules. Again there is no such thing as a free lunch, or power out of the air. If there was, then we should be able to extract power from lightning bolts. If you could extract power from lightning bolts, it would be like having a high speed highway bus hit a kid on a skate board to usefully move him ahead in a controlled manner. We call these types of incidents an undesirable accident.
May 21st, 2009
its not stray current.
its potential difference, Voltage, its not electrons randomly flying around but rather forces that induce movement in the electrons (current).
the headline here is misleading.
May 22nd, 2009
Being anchored in the earth or that the ground has zero volts potential is not a factor. The gas will glow (fluoresce) by being exposed to any electromagnetic field that is strong enough. Like a transmitting antenna as mentioned in replies.
Jaxsun, your are correct, reporters as writers do it all the time. It’s their way to get you to read the article. Literary license or cheep trick you decide. I vote the latter, they’ll never stop. SS