?

[el-taco]

Doesnt work on mine.

BTW: I got one on Sunday, my school gave me a voucher to a scientific sort of shop. Spent it on one ;D ;D

 

[mikeeey]

i have one, is there a way to properly remove the glass ball? or do you have to break it? And I thought there was a certian type of air or gas inside that glass ball that made the electricity flow like that, I thought that once you let that air out your electricity goes byebye.

 

[RA_pierce]

i have one, is there a way to properly remove the glass ball? or do you have to break it? And I thought there was a certian type of air or gas inside that glass ball that made the electricity flow like that, I thought that once you let that air out your electricity goes byebye.

I took the whole thing apart.
The ball on mine just unscrewed.

 

[pullbangdead]

And I thought there was a certian type of air or gas inside that glass ball that made the electricity flow like that, I thought that once you let that air out your electricity goes byebye.

Yes, kind of.  What you have in these is a high-pressure plasma.  They put in certain gases to get certain colors (like how argon lasers are different colors from, say, nitrogen or HeNe), and get the pressure and electrical inputs right to get it to go into a streamer discharge (each little line we call a streamer).  Streamers are pretty easy to get, the harder thing to get is a uniform glow discharge.  It's still not too hard to get one, but hard to get a GOOD glow discharge.  Kindof.  Well, it's complicated.

You can ionize any gas to get breakdown into plasma.  The trouble is getting it to work the way you want it to in the container you want it in.  So you have to have the right gases in the right physical space and the right electrical supply.  In these, they put gases in to make them pretty colors and to make the streamer-type breakdown happen, which is really pretty.  For science, you want a glow discharge, which is even and uniform throughout the space.  The other kind, which I'm sure we're all familiar with, is lightning, or an arc discharge.  Arcs can also be useful for science, but they are a completely different kind of plasma, a "hot" plasma.

So yes, if you let the gases out, you won't get the same kind of pretty streamer discharge that is close to a glow discharge. In air, instead it tends to not like being a glow discharge and wants to be an arc instead. A lot of it depends not only on the gases though, but also the power supply - you can still get a glow discharge in regular air, it's just tougher and depends more on your electrodes as well.