Many years ago when I was a child, I remember large TV screens (CRT screens) that had been switched on for a while would accumulate a layer of “fuzzy air” that you could feel if you put your hand very close to the screen. I’m not talking about dust or anything material like that. The layer was maybe 10-15 mm deep - you had to approach your hand quite close to the screen before you would start to feel it. But the act of putting your hand there would dispel the fuzziness - you could “wipe” it away with your hand. Presumably it would build up again after a while but I don’t remember ever testing this.
What was this effect? Does anyone else remember it?
Yeah, static electricity. Parts of the tube interior are charged to a high voltage, which ends up slowly forming a layer of charge on the surface of the glass. Fairly weak as far as static charge goes, but it would lift fine hairs.
ETA: Because glass is an insulator, charges aren’t very mobile. So unlike static charge in metal (like with the top electrode on a Van de Graff generator), you can’t discharge the whole thing by poking in one spot (and getting a spark due to the high current). You have to “wipe” the whole surface to discharge all of it.
That makes sense.
My memory is that it felt like a fuzzy or crackling (not tingling) sensation on the skin - my hands were quite hairless as a child so I don’t think it was the feeling of hairs being lifted.
At a guess, probably lots of small electrical discharges happening, but too dim to see in light. I never tried it, but I’ll bet if you did it in a dark room and let your eyes adjust a bit, you could see it. I’d get a similar cracking when petting my cat in wintertime… and could see it if it was very dark in the room.
I used to shock people via TV screens. It was usually my dad, in the winter, in the TV section of a department store. I just held my hand close to a big color TV screen and then touched him. The shock was a bit weaker than a carpet shock. Later we got a color TV at home, and finally when I was a senior we got carpet that worked. I was elated. ZAP ZAP ouch!
What you were feeling was love. The “boob tube” or “glass teat” loved the user deeply. Touching the “fuzzy air” was an excellent source of vitamins and minerals (especially riboflavin). Your CRT was making sure you would grow tall and strong. Does an LED screen love you? No, it does not.
Though the accumulated static electricity will quickly accumulate dust that happens to be floating by. There’s electrostatic air cleaners that use this exact principle to filter air with charged high voltage wires and metal plates to attract the dust.
In the days of CRT monitors one quickly learnt not to pick up a recently turned off monitor and carry it with the tube face bearing on your torso. If you touched any metal part of the chassis - which of course was where you were lifting it - you got enough of a jolt to know never to do it again.
And, if there’s anyone you can trust on this topic, it’d be a person named @DocCathode. 
Brilliant!
My Dad used to fix TVs (yes, you read that correctly) and liked to tell whoever would listen about how many service calls he made to “fix the color” that were completed by wiping a quarter inch of nicotine off the screen. 
I remember the static from TVs, and I also remember that it had a certain smell. As a kid, I thought that was the smell of electricity, but now I think it rather had to do with heated dust. I couldn’t tell now if that smell came from the very surface of the screen or from dust that gathered on the tubes inside the case of the TV.
Most folks just can’t get enough of that “new dust smell.”
Is it also ozone, or is that only something you smell when something is electrically awry with the TV? I thought I remembered a faint smell of ozone with our old Zenith.
I also remember the very high pitched whine it would produce, which you can’t hear past a certain age.
Oh yes, you’re right, it was also probably ozone.
Dad The TV Fixer used to say it was the transformer, which was about the size of a toaster, hot as Hell and encased in some sort of plastic resin which was slowly burning away. 
And that static charge in part was what made the Winky Dink and You* possible.
*One of my childhood unicorns, the screen not the show.
Hehehe, the smell of transformers, big and small meeting their end - that’s the smell of electricity, to me. Ozone, too, but that’s only part of the smell of transformers dying.
And the title of this thread keeps making me think of the opening line of this song. Partly because the thing it’s talking about is impossible to do without an old analog TV that is a rarity now. I’ve done it more than once, and it kind of makes me sad that it can’t easily be done anymore. There’s more than one reason to that, but I’ll leave that up to the reader/listener.
