Has to be a hoax but it sounds a pretty elaborate one. The link below leads to an image of an article from an unnamed American newspaper dated 25th September 1929.
I give the text for those who would prefer not to click links.
Can’t find a trace anywhere else on the net. The BS about divining is way over the top but is it all possible for people to have an electrical charge that, however small, interferes with electrical appliances?
It is possible to have such a charge, until the first time you touch something grounded. Then you lose the charge, and in the process get a shock. There’s no way to maintain a charge and shock repeatedly with it.
“Newspaper Is Charged With Bullshit, Can’t Be Taken Seriously”.
“If it’s in the Newspaper, it MUST be true - they wouldn’t print it if it wasn’t true!”
“Fake News” is not new - it just gets a world-wide distribution to a subset of people who desperately WANT it to be true.
The newspaper in question seems to be the Oakland Tribune of Oakland, California. Its last daily edition as a separate paper was April 4, 2016, so it may be too late for a stern letter of complaint to their editor.
Tabloid news is not the same thing as fake news. Tabloid news was obviously fake. They’re closer to the parody news sites than anything. They also limited themselves to shit that didn’t matter, like some alien being found or celebrity gossip.
The worry is that fake news was posted about something important–the election. And that people don’t seem to be able to spot it.
Though I do wonder if this was already happening anyways, but we just didn’t know about it before everyone was on social media. The only new issue are sites specifically set up to make fake news, which honestly shouldn’t be a hard problem to stop.
New site? Verify with older, trusted sites. Earn your reputation to be trustworthy.
I thought this thread was going to be about me. When the weather gets cold, I get shocked so often I think I’m turning into a mutant supervillain.
It’s a story in an American newspaper about a man in rural England, written when people could still personally remember the invention of the telephone and the introduction of electricity. No need for it to be a hoax, just a tale the grew in the retelling by journalists far away.
It could be accurate (albeit credulous) reporting of some fakir doing his stuff. Even (especially) with the advent of video recording, there are still people who make claims about their bodily ability to control electricity, and there are still people who believe them.
For example, this guy:
There are a number of reports about this man in local papers in the British Newspaper Archive online, from the Hull Daily Mail, and the Nottingham Evening Post, in August 1929, and the Taunton Courier a couple of weeks later. Rather a lot of “it is said” reporting, but you have to pay to read the whole articles, so I don’t know what the source is.
What looks like the same person was in a court case in 1934, and described as a water diviner, and apparently chose to go to prison rather than pay a fine in some dispute with a local garage owner.
Doesn’t help with any science involved, if there is any, but it might be of interest.
I was once charged to 345kV.
I got over it.
The article is BS. People can briefly hold a static charge. We do it all the time when we catch a shock from the carpet and then touch a door handle.
My first line in this post is true. While wearing a Faraday suit (metal mesh sweatpants and sweatshirt) in a high voltage lab I climbed an insulated fiberglass ladder and barehanded a high voltage line. But then I released and the charge dissipated as I climbed back down. I survived for the same reason that birds can survive while sitting on a power line.
There’s no way I could have continually kept a constant charge and neither could the subject of that article. It’s fiction.
Given that you were isolated from ground when touching the line (and your charge dissipated before you stepped off of the ladder), why was the suit necessary?
In case it for some accidental reason dissipated all at once?
