This is a long exposure of an ionic spinner with green and blue “neon” fluoro pilot lights rotating on my mini Tesla coil. It shows the corona which is the purple ring of air ionised by high voltage that drives it.
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So what is an ionic spinner? High voltage applied to a wire will have a visible purple glow and fine sparks coming from the end. This is corona of ionised air. Being charged, it will stream away with a resulting small force. Balance a wire with a bend at the ends and it will start to rotate.
A long exposure of many rotations of the spinner with power applied shows a full circle of corona like a true “crown”
Now jazz it up with some coloured neon lights and this is what you get. Note the lights are on only when power is applied.
This shot is frozen with a flash which washes out the corona from the tips of the fine wires.
A medium sized Tesla coil does not work with an ionic spinner regardless of size (up to 14 feet) but plain DC at 60 kV DC works well. It is not clear why a large Tesla coil doesn’t work, however. Perhaps small points on a low power coil cause some rectification but large sparks which grow with each cycle have less clear charge cloud formation.
Ionic spinners (electrical whirls) have been described by Andrew Gordon, a Benedictine monk in 1745 who is also attributed with first describing Franklin Bells well before Franklin.
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Photo Date: April 9, 2012, June 1, 2009