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Chapter Six
Special Effects: High Voltages

Here is your first quiz on electricity Answer the following question. Where is the safest piece to he daring a lightning storm? Is it:

A.) In an airplane flying through the middle of the storm?

B.) In a dungeon giving/taking a whipping?

or

C.) Spread-eagled naked at the summit of a barren hilt with a hard-on that won’t quit?

If you chose either A or B, you’d be correct If you answered C boy, are you ever into serious kink!

Remember the part about voltage? I said that, “It’s not voltage that kills, but it helps.” Let’s take a look at that a little more closely for high voltages – like the voltages in a violet wand.

Something strange happens to air when the voltages start getting high enough. As the voltage gets higher – say around 10,000 to 20,000 volts or more – the gas molecules in the air start breaking down. The voltage is high enough to tear electrons out of the atoms and molecules. With alt those electrons and ions floating around, you can now start moving them when they have some place to go. The same thing happens when the positively charged pans of molecules (called positive ions – atoms with less than their needed supply of electrons) move. Humm! Moving electrons – that’s current, isn’t it? Why, yes, it is.

When voltage gets high enough, it can break down the molecules in air and move through open space – thus creating a spark.

When gas molecule breakdown occurs, you usually see a luminous color in the gas. Air, for instance, turns blue. Neon turns orange-red. Mercury vapor turns violet. This is what happens in a neon sign and a fluorescent light. (Fluorescent lights, which often use mercury vapor as the gas, glow white because of the coating on the inside of the glass tube. Without the coating, you would see the bluish-violet of the mercury.) It’s also what happens in a violet wand.

“OK,” you say. “But when do we get current?”

Your start getting an actual current flow when you have a sufficient voltage difference across the intervening gaseous space and a potential of zero within the localized electric field.

“Huh?” you ask.

Oh, sorry! You actually get a current, i.e. s electrons moving, when the conditions of voltage, distance, and gas are correct. The gas molecules will start breaking down and you’ll get a spark. For dry air it takes about 10,000 volts to spark across 1/8th of an inch.

Figure 13: The Carpet-Shuffle Zap

A real experiment now. On a winter day when it’s nice and dry inside, shuffle your feet across the carpet and then touch the doorknob. Nasty shock, eh?

When the air is dry enough, just walking across a rug causes an excess of electrons to collect on your body. This activity can generate a potential of 25,000 volts on your body. You don t feel anything as you have all these electrons crawling over the surface of your body – there’s only a billion or so of them. If I put a static voltmeter (an expensive, special voltmeter) from you to a grounded object (more about grounding later) like a doorknob, you’d show a voltage of about 25,000 volts. When you touch the doorknob, all those little electrons rush across your skin and concentrate at the finger closest to the doorknob. When you have that 25,000 volts of potential a quarter-inch from the doorknob, the air breaks down – becoming a conductor – and all the electrons on your body now have a conducting path to ground. Result – z-a-AP (with a pretty blue spark) followed by the words, “Ouch! Shit!,” if you’re a top, or “Ouch! Ahhh!,” if you’re a bottom. The static voltmeter will now show that there is 0 volts between you and the doorknob.

What have we learned from this experiment?

Is it ever dangerous to do this? Yes, under certain circumstances. Some years ago hospitals wondered why some patients, who were on external (outside the body) cardiac monitors and pacemakers, were dying. Sometimes the answer was that the nurses wearing nylon uniforms or panties would slide off plastic-covered stools and touch the electrical wires that were connected to the patient’s heart. (If the nurse was cute, what a way to go - but a little extreme.) That is why special electrical precautions are taken for cardiac patients now. Special thought, therefore, should be also given if you plan on doing this to someone with heart problems – especially if they are wearing piercing jewelry. (More about this in Chapter 10.)

Lightning is a supreme example of this high voltage phenomenon. Here voltages are in the millions of volts, and we’re talking about billions and billions and billions (e.g. a helluva lot) of electrons. When the spark happens, shit happens. Thousands of amps of current are generated. There is enough heat generated that trees explode, houses catch fire, and sand melts into glass. Very few people survive a direct lightning strike. The ones who survived either had the bolt strike next to them, or something else (like a nearby tree) got most of the current.

Some of the more astute of you are asking, “But what about the sparking I see in a switch or a motor of an electric (child’s) toy?” “That’s only 1-1/2 or 2 volts.”

Good question! I’m glad you’re thinking.

Remember I told you that sparking happens if the conditions of gas, voltage, and distance are met? As a switch – even a low-voltage one – opens or closes, the contacts bounce several times (for about 5/1000ths of a second). The distances the contacts bounce are about 1/1000th to 2/1000ths of an inch. If current flows through them. It generates enough heat to temporarily melt some of the contact material and turn it into a gas - a contact gas, if you will. Since the contact material is already a conductor, it has a lower breakdown voltage. For small toy motors, the same idea holds.

Some electrical devices, such as household switches, work by generating enough heat to break down the contact material and turn it into a low-resistance gas.

Practically all of the switches in your home do the same thing. So for God’s sake, if you smell gas, don’t turn on or off any lights or other switches.

I hope some of you are asking, “Why am I safe in an airplane, car, train, metal ship, or properly protected building if it gets hit by lightning?” The answer is that all! of that current will go through the low-resistance conductor that surrounds or protects you rather than through you. (Aha – Model Four on p. 34 now makes sense.)

Lightning and the static spark from the rug follow the same physical rules. The big difference is the number of electrons available for the current. In both cases only enough electrons flow from the body, with the excess of them heading toward the deficiency of them (just as if a conventional current flowed from the doorknob to your finger), until there are an equal number in both bodies. Then the voltage difference goes to 0 volts and the current stops. See figure 13 to see what’s happening.

Before we leave it for now (we shall look at it again in the “toys” discussion), there is one final thought about high voltage in general. You might be able to do S/M with the lightning-like discharges and high voltages generated by such things as Winshurst machines, Van DeGraff generators, and Jacob Ladders, but here you would need to be a rocket scientist. All electrical engineers have studied a little about sparks in school, but only those who have received special training really know how to work with it safely. Most electrical engineers do not.

As a matter of historical interest (with some kink content), Nikola Tesla, the pioneering electrical scientist who performed most of the early experiments on the phenomenon, did invite friends to step on his apparatus for entertainment, His friend Mark Twain said he enjoyed the experience, but he had to go to the potty afterward.

Unless you can show me that you work for some company that deals with high voltage phenomena, stick with violet wands, TENS units, and the other toys I recommend in Chapter 14 for play Otherwise HI not be nice.

Some Special Electrical Effects – High Frequencies

All of us have heard about radio and television and radar and microwaves. You can send small amounts of AC electricity through the air or far out into space without wires or other conductors. Heinrich Hertz first experimented with this phenomenon more than 100 years ago. Using a spark generator (opening and dosing a high voltage contact – like in the electrical system of your automobile), he could induce sparks in the gaps of small metal rings at various distances from the generator without wires to the rings.

Hummm! Let’s see – small metal rings (like piercing jewelry) with gaps in them, and sparks jumping across the gaps. I wonder if that could be done in a scene?… Sorry, I digressed there.

What Hertz was doing was setting up high frequency AC voltages with the generator. The generator was a transmitter, and the rings were radio receivers.

This action at a distance is characteristic of high frequencies. Here when we talk about high frequencies, we generally mean anything over 100,000 Hz (Hertz).

Some S/M players use high frequencies in interesting ways. I particularly like the one about the radio controlled shocking dog training collar strapped to the inner thigh of an otherwise “at loose” submissive. A variant on this was the radio-controlled, clitoral vibrator on another submissive. (Now that was fun to watch.) Some players use diathermy machines, medical machines used for the treatment of arthritis and physical therapy: a direct use of high frequencies for electrical play.

We shall look in more detail at the physiology of this phenomenon later, but there are a few cautions about high frequencies. People who work around radio transmitters, radars, and microwave transmitters are particularly concerned about safety – and for good reason. For one. there is the cooking effect. Enough power at high frequencies can cause severe internal heating in humans and other water-containing material. (We II look more at this in the Physiology section.) Also, if any part of your body comes in direct contact with a high frequency conductor of sufficient voltage, a severe, deep, penetrating burn can occur. Such burns take a long time to heal.

A special caution for electricity players has to do with the possible effects of high frequencies – such as those generated by violet wands - in close proximity to cardiac pacemakers. In general, I’d avoid using a violet wand on the upper body of anyone wearing a pacemaker.

Enough power at high frequency can “cook” water-containing material (like human flesh). This is the principle behind microwave ovens.

One other thing you should concern yourself about with working with high frequencies is EMI or Electro-Magnetic Interference – especially if you’re using older radio gear or diathermy machines. This equipment can generate signals that interfere with radio or television broadcasts or navigation radio. Pay attention when your neighbor tells you, “You know, I don’t mind the sounds of screaming and the slapping of leather coming from your basement at night, but I do mind when I get wavy lines on my TV during the ‘Christian Gospel Hour’.” EMI is one of the things that federal law enforcement people are interested in, too.

You can also ask about the link between cellular phones and brain cancer That link has not been proven either, and I haven’t felt compelled to rush out and buy the copper hair net that one ripoff artist Is selling to cash in on these fears.