I am planning on travelling back in time to the olden days and I’m thinking of taking a taser for personal protection.
However, I’m worried in case I meet a fully-armoured knight. Will the taser turn him into a giant foil-wrapped roast chicken, have comparable effect to tazing a regular human, or just make him angry?
Also, recharging options? I’m considering solar panels or a Gilligan-like bamboo bicycle generator operated by serfs. Thoughts?
My first thought is faraday cage, so the knight would be fine. But I’m sure there is a more nuanced answer.
Probably just make him confused. The electrodes of a Taser dart have to touch the skin for it to be effective. I have read of police Taserings that failed because the victim’s winter clothing prevented good contact. There just aren’t enough watts (V x I) there to roast him in his armor.
Don’t know enough about them to comment on charging.
Your taser won’t do much of anything to a guy in plate armour, or for that matter, probably won’t even breach leather armour. The electrodes were designed to just pierce light clothing and a little bit of skin.
Quick google searches are showing tasers operate from 1,200 to 50,000 volts, at milliamp ranges. Power output is anywhere from 5 to 180 watts, let’s say, for a very brief amount of time. There’s so little energy output you won’t even heat anything meaningfully. For reference, my 1000 watt microwave needs 30 seconds to make a slice of pizza warm.
So in short, anybody wearing armour won’t be affected by your taser if you hit even the weakest armour possible, and will just scoff at your feeble, irrelevant weapon if they even notice your attack in the first place.
A trained cyclist can generate a few hundred watts during a multi-hour ride. Factoring in losses, you’re gonna need a fair bit of serfs pedalling away to recharge your (relatively inconsequential) weapon.
Solar panels are rated at roughly 150 watt-hours per square meter. Or, let’s say, a quite big solar panel can recharge you one shot per hour of perfect sunlight.
Since a taser passes a high voltage current through the skin, if you don’t touch the skin, nothing happens. I wonder if it would short out the unit badly enough to make it explode? Obviously a hand-held unit can’t pack enough power to do more than a small local hot spot. I’ve often wondered also what an aluminum foil suit would do to this equipment, whether it would foil (sorry) an attempt to paralyze the wearer?.
There are the contact stun guns, and the type of taser which shoots out two needles attached to fine wires. These are meant to contact (such a polite word) the skin and the current flows between these two needles. The contact stun gun simply has two protruding electrodes which when touched to the skin have the same result. The concept is that high voltage, low current electricity flowing through the body causes the nerves to stop working for a while, and you also then lose muscle control.
Also note that despite Taser company propaganda tasers can be lethal and have been quite often. Repeated application can increase the risk. The company has sued assorted coroners to attempt (and sometimes succeed) in altering autopsy results and police reports when a taser was responsible for killing someone.
Like the times when a suspect died during an arrest (as happened to several BLM victims on arrest) with or without tasers, often the excuse used is “excited delerium” but real medicine recognizes no such condition.
A taser is nothing more than a slightly amped up cattle prod or Tens (ems) unit, with needle like electrodes, as others have described. You’ll need 9 to 12 volts, and not more than 200mA or so. 3 to 4 AA batteries should do the trick. In a primitive environment, you could probably pull that much voltage and current from potato batteries hooked in series.
Well, since I was going back slightly before 1492 that does not help, unless cabbage has the same electro-magical properties as spuds. I am heartened though that if I had enough serfs I could generate some serious electricity, and improve their cardio-vascular fitness, which I’m sure they’d appreciate as being better than being paid.
No. Tasers use about 50,000 volts and very small current. a few milliamps (typically either 5 sec. or while the trigger is held down). It runs on small batteries because the electronics use either a transformer or voltage multiplier circuit to provide the required voltage.
you can check the voltage on a 9V transistor radio battery (remember those?) by touching the terminals with your tongue. The tingle will tell you how strong it still is, but even a fully charged battery is harmless. The spark from static electricity is in the thousands of volts which is why it can jump air gaps, but incredibly small current, so it only stings a little bit.
I’ve accidentally touched a partially out regular power plug (120V, quite a bit of amperage) and it hurts like hell and your arm buzzes for a minute afterwards - but it all depends. Apparently, some electricians with a warped sense of humour will hold live wires and then grab a passing co-worker because it’s absolutely hilarious. YMMV.
Of course, if you attach a salt-water soaked sponge terminal to your head and terminals to your arms and legs, and run a few hundred volts through it, you can simulate the effect of an electric chair. Edison, who was in an argument with Westinghouse over DC vs AC, would put on demonstrations (IIRC once in Central Park) where he would grab a stray dog and electrocute it with AC to demonstrate that Westinghouse’s AC was much more dangerous than his DC service.
Apples, lemons, beets, radishes carrots or pumpkin/ squash would probably all work if you insist on using an old world crop. Cantaloupes are old world, but only made it to Europe in the 1740’s.
Of course the voltage will vary by fruit.
Used to make cattle prods out of Model T ignition coils, and a square wave generator. You get a huge voltage spike as the coil discharges. Nowadays, it’s easier to just find and re-purpose an old electronic Xenon camera flash.
I’ve measured my Tens unit, and get 120 mA output.
Edison wanted to call executions by electrocution being ‘Westinghoused’.
Poor Topsy was the elephant in the room!
I got a nasty shock once (hurt like hell) fiddling with a large electrolytic capacitor. I had hooked it to a battery a few times trying to get an oscillator running but failed, then I accidentally touched both terminals. Ouch.
My dad told me the physics story about a prof that loved practical demonstrations. He would charge up a Leyden jar (big capacitor) then have everyone hold hands in a circle and each end touched a terminal. this discharged the contents through each student in series, and because of series, each only experienced a very small voltage (resistors in series). Then to demonstrate the RC circuit properties, he would take the jar and hold one terminal with a finger and touch the other close to his nose creating a spark from the residual charge. One time a student persuaded the one next to him to not hold hands. The spark in the next step apparently was quite a bit larger, and the prof was unconscious for a while.
Well, I DO insist, because I want my time-travel knight-tasering to be as authentic and factually correct as to period as possible. This is science, not some Bill and Ted adventure.
I suppose if I got some bananas, admittedly out of period as well, I could just eat them and throw the peels down, and watch him go flying [with a hilarious overdub of a swanee whistle followed by cascading tin cans from ye phone appe].
I’ll note that the knight would be wearing some sort of padded undergarment, so very little of his skin would be touching the outer metal shell. I’d imagine that would insulate him pretty well, even leaving aside the other considerations.
If your priority is verisimilitude, consider a voltaic pile instead.
The original voltaic pile were repeating discs of zinc, copper, and brine-soaked felt. Hook that up to a circuit and you have current. As long as the current is changing (as in from your brief spikes of electrical discharge), you can run it through a transformer to get the voltages you need (at the cost of amperage), but then at this point, you can probably eschew tasers altogether–with a bigger pile, you can make much more impressive electrical discharges.
Zinc will be very difficult to get in the 1400s, though, but not at all impossible.
Also @galen_ubal, if the knight in question was full armour, it wouldn’t matter if he was butt-naked inside and so corpulent he was touching all the metal with all his flesh. A full metal shell protects you from electricity, full stop. The very short version is that current tends to take the path of least resistance (the metal) and the electrons self-repel, so they take the route that gives them the most spacing from each other (the outermost edge of any curve).
It’s the same reason why you’re totally safe from any amount of electricity on your car, so long as you stay in the car.
That’s why I went on about heat in my previous post. It’s the only thing the knight might notice, because the steel isn’t a perfect conductor, and electricity through a resistor generates heat. Except steel is a decent conductor and the power is so low that no meaningful heat would be generated, so even that’s a tangent.
What I’m trying to express is that, literally, a taser is about as useless a modern weapon as could be against any armoured foe.
Tasers do NOT require the probes to be in contact with skin. I can vouch for that from the experience both watching, and on the receiving end.
That large variance has a purpose. The Taser automatically adjusts the voltage to control the current flowing through the target. Buried in flesh the voltage is near the low end. By pushing up the voltage the resistance of small air gaps can be overcome.
The Training Support Battalion I finished my Army career in specialized in, among other things, non-lethal weapons / crowd and riot control. When we trained people on the Taser there was a voluntary exposure portion to make sure people understood the actual effects as opposed to what Hollywood shows. For that exposure we used an already fired cartridge that had been modified. The probes were cut off and replaced with soldered on alligator clips. We clipped the ends to clothing without contact with skin. I can speak from experience, painful personal experience, that just having the wire clipped to the outside of my boot was enough to complete the current path. Our trainers did a lot of the exposures with 2-3 people with linked arms. The taser was still powerful enough to push the required current through three people even with alligator clips connected to clothing not flesh.
So the good news is having the probes stick in clothing or soft armor is probably enough for the Taser to work.
There are a couple big problems though:
For the Taser branded weapons a rechargeable battery was not available until 2018. It only works with the new model. It was not backward compatible with the older models. Pick wisely if you plan to recharge. The non-rechargeable power module was good for hundreds of 5 second exposures, though. (Cold temps and not making skin contact reduce that number.) A spare module or two might be your preferred option.
Just in case someone is unaware of it, the power in a fruit or vegetable battery doesn’t come from the fruit or vegetable, the come from the oxidization of the zinc electrode you stick into it. The fruit or vegetable only serves as a holder for the electrode and supply an electrolyte.
As I understand it, veggie and fruit batteries are simply using the acidity of the fruit to drive the battery. As you may recall, batteries are dissimilar metals immersed in an acid medium.
Higher voltage (much higher voltage) will jump through air. So I have to ask, when a taser will cause a reaction without touching the skin, is that because it is therefore running at the higher voltage and sparking across from electrode to skin? And analogous to the suit of armour - what happens if the two electrodes of the taser are shorted to each other but touching the skin? (Actually, I’m going to guess if the taser’s electronic smarts detect zero resistance they will not put out any voltage?)
There is a very small chance of serious health issues including death especially with repeated exposures. There needs to be a “now what” in mind for after they are tased if they do not just choose to give up.
The Mounties who were fired and charged after a subject was tased and died in the Vancouver airport - apparently one of the things they did which was not acceptable, they stood around for about 17 minutes waiting for the ambulance instead of attempting first aid. Plus, due to infighting, they called an outside ambulance team which took longer, instead of the local airport first responders. Perhaps CPR could have saved the guy.