This sounds like the beginning of a joke, but, given GQ standards, it’s deadly serious.
There’s a sole 60-watt light bulb that must be turned on for a minute or everyone will die of fear of darkness. You have insertable single head-plugs, luckily made of lithium, and you have a ton of connection wire. The head of each plug is 2 centimeters in radius.
You decide everyone must chip in and give their electroconductive best, and be plugged in in series to generate their share of amps. How many people would be needed to save the day?
I don’t really understand your question, but are you sure you mean series here? Connecting them in series would give a higher voltage, with the same amps, if they were power sources. Connecting them in parallel would give you more amps, with the same voltage. Actually, you’d probably need both parallel and series, to get enough voltage, and enough current without electrocuting someone.
I remember some experiment in elementary school with a hand-cranked generator of some sort connected to a small lightbulb. Two people touched contacts on the generator, and the rest of the class held hands with them in a big circle. More people = dimmer lightbulb.
Very cool. Is this guy using up energy from those lines? Should the power company send him a bill? Would enough tubes like that cause a black out to the people on the receiving end of those lines?
No, there’s vastly more power going along the transmission lines than he’s sucking out. Possibly the resistive losses in a short section of the transmission line wires are larger than the amount of power he’s using.
ETA: You can see the tree line though the person in the top photo, so that’s a long exposure or a multiple exposure shot. The florescent lights are pretty dim.
No, the energy transmitted by the power lines flows through the air surrounding the lines, not through the wires. The lights are tapping into this energy, not energy that’s being radiated.
I’m going to go the battery power route. Assuming a 60W incandescent bulb we need 120V and 0.5 Amps. Each human cell would consist of lithium/human/copper hook-up wire. Assuming each cell could produce 1.5V we would need 80 people to get 120V. The 1.5V figure is totally made up since I have no idea how much voltage a lithium/person/copper battery cell would have. Now we need current. From Sage Rat’s link I think the best we could hope for would be 100 microAmps per cell. That means we would need to have 5000 people to supply enough current. I’m not an engineer or scientist BTW, so my logic and math are likely wrong. Still that’s my best guess. Also isn’t lithium highly reactive? Could people hold it in their hands or have it plugged into them?
