HUMANS AND SPARKS
The Cause, Stopping the Pain, and
"Electric People"
"Static electric" sparks can be irritating and their cause sometimes
seems mysterious. Most people have encountered painful car-door sparks, as
well as those wintertime sparks from doorknobs and large metal objects.
What causes these? What can be done to stop them?
As children, most of us learn the trick of scuffing our shoes across
the carpet in order to charge our bodies. Then we go to search for victims
to "zap" with our electric fingers. Sparks from rug-scuffing are familiar.
If you scuff your feet on the carpet, you expect to be zapped by the next
doorknob you touch. But why do our bodies sometimes become charged from
simply walking around?
"Static" electricity ( more correctly called "net electric charge" )
appears whenever the normal quantities of positive and negative
electricity in a substance are not perfectly equal. Remember that
everything is made of atoms, and atoms in turn are made of positive and
negative electric charges. In other words, your body is just a collection
of positive and negative electrical particles. Normally the positives
cancel out the negatives, and everything behaves electrically "neutral."
No mysterious sparking. But if you ever end up with more negative than
positive, or with more positive than negative, then you have a
charge-imbalance on your body. You will get zapped the next time you touch
a large metal object. Exactly how can this imbalance occur? Whenever we walk, the soles of
our shoes steal some negative charge from the floor. We leave behind
electrified positive footprints, and our bodies aquire an overall
imbalance of negatives. (Or sometimes vice versa with the negative and
positive, since polarity is determined by the type of shoe soles and the
type of rug.) After many footsteps, our bodies attain a high level of
electric charge and a high voltage. Body-voltage can easily rise to
several thousand volts, and the next time you touch someone else... ZAP!,
the imbalanced charge gets shared between you and the other person. The
spark is painful because it's extremely hot. It drills into your skin like
a white-hot needle, creating a microscopic burned area. However, nothing happens as long as you remain seated. Just keep
yourself in one place and you won't get zapped.. As long as the surfaces
remain near each other, the positives and negatives cancel out, and no
overall "electricity" appears and no sparks are possible. But when you
open the car door and step outside, you take just one polarity of charge
along with you, while the car seat has the opposite polarity. At the same
time, the charged-up car seat causes the whole car to become charged (by a
process called "Faraday's
Icepail Effect.") As you step out of the car, the voltage between your
body and the car becomes huge, up to 10,000 or even 20,000 volts. Your
shoes are probably insulating, so the charge has no opportunity to leak
into the earth. You reach out to close the car door and ZAP!, the
opposite polarities rejoin by leaping through the air while giving you a
tiny, deep burn on your fingertip! How to prevent this? One possibility: change the surface materials.
Identify and avoid the specific clothing which makes the problem worse.
These materials are usually wool sweaters and pants, certain manmade
fabrics, plastic raincoats, etc. Or, replace your cheap plastic car
seat covers with cloth (stains easily!) or with leather (expensive dead
animals.) Another method: mix up some anti-static solution and spray your
car seats. This solution remains slightly damp for weeks, which halts the
contact-charging process. The formula: a teaspoon of fabric softener mixed
in one quart of water. This tends to work well at first, but after days it
wears off and needs a re-coating. Another sillier method: always drive
barefooted, so the charge will leak away when you step outside the car.
Not good in winter! You could cover your car seats with a conductor such
as aluminum foil, which screws up the contact-charging effect. Have a
tailor make some custom clothing out of black conductive carbon cloth? Or
you could eliminate the problem by eliminating your clothes. Skin is
fairly conductive, so it doesn't create charge-separation when held
against plastic. Driving while nude might cure the sparking problem
(unless you are a very hairy person!) A less frivolous method: the car-keys trick I mentioned earlier.
Develop the habit of holding your car keys as you leave the car, then grip
the keys firmly and touch the metal car door with the tip of the key. The
spark will still jump, but it will not be painful, since it blasts a
little hole in the tip of the key instead of in your finger. Or simply
grasp the car door as you climb out, and this will drain off the
charge-imbalance faster than it can build up on your body. DANGER: GASOLINE FIRES. What happens when you climb out of your car at
the gas station? Usually you'll zap yourself on the car door, or on the
gas pump handle, or on the metal door that covers your gas cap, and
usually nothing bad happens. However, suppose your passengers climb out of
the car just as you're unscrewing the cap, or just as you jam the gas pump
nozzle into your tank? The whole car becomes momentarily charged. ZAP! Or,
suppose you turn on the gas pump and then climb back into your car. When
you climb out again, you body is highly charged from the car seat. The
very first thing you do is to reach into the cloud of gasoline vapours to
grab the metal handle of the gas pump. ZAP! FOOSH! This obviously is a
very rare event. However, it does occur sometimes, especially in the
winter. See the PEI site
on static hazards. A research paper: The
Control of Body Voltage Getting Out of a Car, from JCI Safety issues:
ELECTRIFYING CAUSES
Actually, no friction or rug-scuffing is
required in order to electrically charge your body. The need for friction
is a widespread misconception. While
it's true that the friction can increase the charge-separation process,
friction isn't the cause. Whenever two different insulating surfaces touch
together, opposite charges within the two surfaces become separated.
Simply walking across certain rugs or plastic flooring will cause
your shoe soles to touch the dissimilar material of the rug. This is
enough to separate the negatives from the positives and create imbalanced
electric charges on the bottoms of your shoes.
ARTICLE:
Measuring the "Static Electric" Voltage on your Body
SOME CURES
The simplest cure: before touching a doorknob, a car
door, etc., first touch it with a metal car key. The fiercely hot spark
will blast the tip of the metal key rather than blasting your sensitive
fingertip, and it will painlessly discharge your body's charge. (Grip your
keys firmly so no spark appears between the keys and your skin.) Once
you've been discharged, you can safely grab the doorknob. However, if you
walk around some more, or if you sit upon a plastic car seat, you'll again
need to use the keys discharge yourself.
To prevent sparks entirely, we must somehow stop the charge separation
process. This can be done by:
As with the car keys, the problem can also be prevented by discharging
your excess body-charge in some way that doesn't cause pain. This can be
done by:
The sparking problem is usually found in
low-humidity locations, such as in air-conditioned office buildings. High
humidity prevents the charge-separation which causes sparks. Raising the
humidity in the environment stops the sparking. High humidity makes the
surfaces of shoes and rugs slightly conductive, so the separated charges
can instantly flow back together. Usually all of the "static electricity"
will vanish when the RH is above 60%. If you live in a single house or
apartment, use a room humidifier. Or just boil away a few quarts of water
on your kitchen stove. Or, if we spray the floor with antistatic liquid, this can do the same
thing as raising the humidity. Antistatic liquids aren't magical, they
simply make surfaces slightly conductive so the charge-separation cannot
occur. Make your own antistatic spray by mixing a teaspoon of liquid
fabric-softener into a quart of water.
Electronics manufacturers use balanced-polarity air ionizers to
eliminate sparks. These make the air itself into a conductor, but also
they're expensive ($300 is typical.) NOTE: C&H IS SELLING ONE OF THESE
STATIC ELIMINATORS FOR $50, # MI9957 (3/2004.) ANOTHER NOTE: there's a
wearable ionizer advertised by NPA, but
no price given.
Manufacturers also sell conductive shoe-straps and ankle cuffs which
connect your body electrically to the floor. These are meant to be used
with special conductive carpets, and they won't work well (or work at all)
if the floor surface is made of wood, plastic, cloth, or other good
insulator. Shoe soles create the charge imbalance, so you can reduce the sparks by
avoiding particular types of shoe soles. For example, rubber soles usually
cause significant charge separation, while thin leather soles cause far
less. Damp salty leather is best. Or wear sandals made from old tire
treads (the black rubber is conductive.) Or wear no shoes at all, only
wear thin socks or go barefoot. You might consider coating your shoe soles with heavy adhesive aluminum
foil. The foil halts the sparking because contact with metals can only
generate a tiny amount of imbalanced charge. Unfortunately the foil makes
your shoes dangerously slippery, and it leaves black scuff marks on
plastic floors. Simple solution: whenever sparking is possible, carry a metal object
such as a pen or a set of keys. Hold them firmly and use them to touch any
large metal objects. If the spark is blasting the end of your car keys,
then it isn't burning a hole in your finger. And right after the spark has
occurred, you can grab that metal without a problem. For car-door sparks: if you touch the metal shell of the car as you
climb from your seat, there will be no high-voltage build-up and no painful
spark. This is good news for the passengers in your car who might not be
carrying any keys or coins. Another solution: always knock your knuckles against doorknobs before
grabbing the knob. This won't stop the spark, but the spark is less
painful when it bores into your knuckle rather than into your delicate
fingertips. If you whack your knuckles hard, you barely feel the spark at
all. After all, you're EXPECTING the small pain of your knuckle impact,
and you are controlling the impact, so the pain of the spark isn't
uncontrolled and unexpected. For some reason, unexpected sparks hurt far
more than the ones you produce intentionally. If you REALLY hate sparks, you might consider wearing a metal sewing
thimble upon one finger at all times. Touch the thimble to the doorknob
(or to other metal objects) and you'll feel no huge "zap." The spark will
still occur, but the pain is gone. Note that the metal of the thimble MUST
touch your skin, otherwise you won't stop the spark. If you want to
experiment with thimbles in the ends of gloves or mittens, put the
thimbles INSIDE the fingers of the gloves.
If you keep getting zapped at work, or if you keep crashing your
computer, consider wearing a wrist strap with a wire connected to an
electrical "ground." These are inexpensive on ebay.com,
typically less than $10, just search for keyword "electrostatic" and
you'll find some. While you wear a grounded wrist-strap, your body cannot
charge up at all.
CAR DOORS
The cause of car-door sparking is well known:
contact-electrification between insulating surfaces, followed by
separation of those surfaces. But what does this mean? Well, *YOU* are one
surface, and THE CAR SEAT is the other. When you sit on a plastic car seat
in dry weather, the contact between your clothes and the seat's surface
causes the electrical charges within atoms of the material to transfer
between the surfaces. This is our old friend "frictional" or "contact"
charging. One surface ends up with more negative charges than positive,
and has a negative charge-imbalance. The other surface has fewer negatives
than positives, so it has a positive imbalance. This is nearly same thing
as rubbing a balloon upon your hair: both surfaces become electrically
charged. But rather than rubbing just your hair, instead you're rubbing
your entire back, but, and legs upon the car seat surface.
List of gasoline fires
caused by static sparks.
Sparks
and gasoline.
MYSTERIES: Electric People
The source of some human-body sparking is a mystery. There are reports
of rare people, "Electric Humans," who develop high voltage on their
bodies and suffer the continuous problem of "static" sparks. Their
sparking occurs regardless of footwear, clothing, humidity, or even
motion! Electric people are forever getting zapped when they touch others,
or when they touch large metal objects. For the rest of us, "static
electric" sparks can only occur after we walk across certain carpets when
humidity is low, or when we wiggle around while sitting upon certain
chairs. And for the rest of us, the problem vanishes when the humidity is
high, or when we go barefoot or avoid wool or nylon sweaters/pants, avoid
plastic seats, etc. But the bodies of "Electric Humans" instead seem to
become electrified all the time, all by themselves, without involving the
friction or the contact/separation of differing surfaces. R.A. Ford mentions two cases in chapter 13 of his book HOMEMADE
LIGHTNING (1991 Tab Books). In one case from 1837 a woman could repeatedly
jump sparks 1-1/2" long to a metal object while she stood still on a thick
carpet, or she could continuously create 1/16" sparks much faster (once
per second.) Another case took place in 1920, when prison inmates in
upstate New York suffering from Botulin food poisoning were found to be
"electrified." They were able to attract paper, create sparks, etc., even
when partially submerged in a bathtub. (Obviously the bathtub must not
have been attached to grounded pipes, otherwise the excess charge would
have vanished instantly.) In modern times an Electric Human would have additional problems
besides irritating sparks. Computers, stereo equipment, digital watches,
etc., are easily damaged by high voltage and spark discharges. All sorts
of electronic appliances would not survive very long under the
electrostatic barrage. An electric human would be advised to buy
mechanical watches, and to avoid buying any appliance which contains a
microprocessor. Unfortunately, scientific scepticism is currently at an all time high,
so if a person with this sparking problem was to seek help, they would
probably be ridiculed and their sanity questioned! Scientists don't
believe in "electric people." Reputable scientists "know" that Electric
Humans are mere superstition and cannot exist. There for anyone claiming to
have this problem is irrational, perhaps deranged! At least the internet
is there, giving opportunity for 'charged humans' to tell their stories
(for example, at: REPORT YOUR UNUSUAL
PHENOMENA)
ARE YOU AN "ELECTRIC HUMAN?"
What could cause the "Electric Human" problem? First, shoe sole
material and clothing material needs to be eliminated as a possible cause.
Maybe you aren't an "electric human" at all. Maybe you simply have
electric shoes! If sparks are ALWAYS a problem, regardless of wearing
various conductive clothing (cotton) or various shoe soles (leather, metal
foil, etc.), then perhaps the problem isn't from "frictional" charging,
and it's something mysterious. In order to create a static electric imbalance on our bodies other than
through "contact" or "frictional" methods, we would have to be sending out
ELECTRICALLY CHARGED AIR (and so our bodies would take on an opposite
charge.) Perhaps the skin does this somehow. Or maybe the membranes of our
lungs can somehow emit air which is electrically non-neutral. If a person
were to constantly be breathing out negative ions (charged air molecules),
then, unless their body was electrically grounded to the earth, they would
rapidly accumulate a positive charge-imbalance on their body, an imbalance
which is equal and opposite to the charged air being breathed out. But why
would our lungs be producing electrified air? One possibility: when
microscopic bubbles burst, the natural surface-charge of the water will
cause the spray of tiny droplets to have a negative charge. If the liquid
on the inner surface of alveoli should be full of micro-bubbles, then our
lungs might become VanderGraaff generators. Another possibility: certain
viruses grow outwards from cells using long filaments. Smallpox does this.
If you catch a virus which spreads through the air because it launches
"spores" from your lungs, those spores might carry enough of an electric
charge that they will stick to any surfaces that they encounter (such as
other nearby humans.) Evolution might favour such a capability. But the
spores would also act as charged air, and as you breathed out, your body
would acquire an opposite charge. In other words, the "electric human
syndrome" might be an actual disease that you could catch from another
"electric human!" NOTE: In private communications M. Foster mentioned that if you blast a
hair dryer through a PVC pipe after first wetting the inner surface of the
pipe, the pipe becomes highly electrified. The cause is unknown, but it
might involve the bursting of micro-bubbles (which are known to launch
negative water droplets into the air.) This might indicate a mechanism
whereby human bodies can becomes mysteriously electrified WITHOUT scuffing
any shoe soles on carpet. If the wetted PVC pipe is replaced by human
lungs, and if the hair dryer is replaced by the act of breathing, we have
an analogy for the infamous "electric human."
DOES YOUR BODY PRODUCE HIGH VOLTAGE? A SIMPLE TEST
Are you an unexplainable human oddity? Here's a possible way to test it: first see if
you can create sparks without moving around and rubbing against things.
First, put on some thick shoes, hold a metal object in your hand, then sit
on a non-conductive chair that's within reach of grounded metal. For
grounded metal, plumbing, radiators, and the screw on an electric outlet
all are examples. The best "insulating chair" would be a plastic-resin
lawn chair, or perhaps an upside-down plastic waste basket. If the chair
has metal legs and metal bolts on the seat, then it is *not* a good
insulator.
Next, turn off the room lights, sit down, take your small metal object, and slowly touch it to grounded metal. Watch closely. Was there a spark? If so, then your body is no longer charged. As long as you don't rub your back or butt against anything, YOUR BODY SHOULD NOT CHARGE BACK UP BY ITSELF. Sit there for a couple of minutes without moving. Don't lean back in the chair, since you don't want your back to touch/peel from the plastic chair back. Now, touch the metal object in your hand slowly to the grounded metal again. Watch carefully. There should be no spark. If there WAS a spark, then something very weird is going on. Wait another minute or two and try again. If you can keep on creating sparks in this way, then you are an "electric people."
REPORT YOUR UNUSUAL PHENOMENA
http://amasci.com/weird/unusual/unusual.html
Another way to test yourself. Get a flourescent tube and find a
darkened room. Connect the pins on one end of the tube to a ground
connection such as a metal faucet. Turn off the room lights. Hold the tube
in your hand and touch your fingers to the OTHER pins, to the ungrounded
ones on the other end of the tube. See any flashes? Wait for a few minutes
and try touching the pins again. A true "electric human" should be able to
make the tube flash repeatedly by touching the pins. A normal human can do
it too, but only if he/she is scuffing maniaclly on a rug while the
humidity is low.
Another, more exotic possibility: maybe it's not static. Maybe it's
something else, Torsion
Fields for example. The Russians believe that Torsion Fields explain
telepathy, psychokinesis, hands-on healing, and many other "paranormal"
phenomena. If the human aura exists, then Torsion Physics might explain
it, and the "electric human" effect might come about because of a
super-strong torsion effect which surrounds a particular person.
Possible cures: buy some conductive ankle-straps that lead to adhesive
conductor foot-pads attached to your shoe soles, then walk only on
conductive mats which are electrically grounded via a wire. These products
are used in the electronics manufacturing industry and are available
through "ESD" abatement companies (perhaps search for "ESD", "static", or
"wrist strap" on the WWW.) ESD stands for "Electro-Static Discharge."
Simple but crude cure: wear a thimble on your finger, then constantly touch grounded metal objects during your travels. The painful "zap" will be eliminated, since it doesn't blow a pinhole in your flesh when the spark jumps. An un-tried high-tech cure: buy an "ionizing blower" from an ESD-abatement company. Expect to pay $200 or $300. (Don't mistake these for "negative ion generators", you instead want a "balanced polarity" blower intended for stopping ESD in electronics manufacturing.) These blowers send out large quantities of both + and - polarities of charged air. This adds neutralised yet movable charges to the air which make the air itself become conductive. The air then silently discharges any charged objects in the room (including any "Electric Humans".)
LINKS
-
Electric Humans
tell their stories
- SLI: street light stories
- Forum: people with electrical hypersensitivity
- UK Scientists take "electricity sickness" seriously
- Tribo Generation: getting charged
- NPR Car Talk: your car is a VandeGraaff Generator
- NPR Car Talk: zapped by Honda Accords
- Car seats and sparks
- Static Electric Experiments for kids
- Measuring your body voltage
- Static Eliminator companies
- Electric Girl [comic book series]
- Swedish Assn. for Electrosensitive
- Electrical Hypersensitivity Syndrome (EHS)
- Mysterious People
- EHS and "static" elect.
- Electrically Hypersensitive People: studies
- World of The Strange: Electric People
- World of The Strange: Switched On and Shocking
- World of The Strange: Live Wires and Loose Connections I
- World of The Strange: Live Wires and Loose Connections II
- World of The Strange: The Weight of Evidence
- World of The Strange: Human Glow-worms