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X-Rays Emitted From Ordinary Scotch Tape
Maximum Prophet writes "When I was in High School, I built an X-Ray machine that (probably) didn't produce any X-Rays. I used an old vacuum tube and high voltage. Little did I know that simple triboluminescence would have enough energy to do useful work." The catch: you'll need to peel your tape in a vacuum, and have the x-ray film at the ready.
Um, X-rays don't hurt. Stupid-rays do, though. That's probably what you were feeling.
The article suggests Bremsstrahlung (note the 3rd paragraph of the linked article) of the electrons jumping from the non-sticky surface to the sticky surface of the tape - I guess the air present in a non-vacuum situation lets the electrons slow gradually or maybe have lower initial velocity - that part is unclear from the article.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
Typical X-ray machines use 50 to 200 kilovolts and milliamps of electrons slamming into a tungsten target. Nothing less will do.
It's kinda unlikely Scotch (brand) tape can bypass all the bottlenecks and emit copious X-rays.
It's much more likely they're getting electrostatic discharges in the film. The New Age loonballs call it "Kirlian Photography".
I'll be glad to eat a hat if this pans out. Until then I'll just wear it.
With the work Ive done with high power vaccum tubes (> 30 Kilowatts output), it has become standard practice for Eimac and other manufacturers to list dangers for them.
eg., the 4-1000 tetrode, with > 12 KV on the anode, will emit xrays. As will almost ANY other tetrode or triode in existance.
I'd say the person who wrote the article didn't understand that He'd need THAT much anode voltage to get the tube to emit.
That being said, I'd almost have to say that the scotch tape being used to emit the XRays would be doing so because of a HUGE electrostatic (static electricity) charge.
Most of the tubes I work with are a quarter megawatt can be seen on my old website, http://www.bigradios.com/tollfree
--Toll_Free
the first should result in the second failing to get a patent
No, it really shouldn't. There's a difference between describing a physical phenomenon and coming up with an application for it. Just because tape produces x-rays does not mean that it is intuitivly obvious how to create a portable x-ray machine out of it. Ask yourself if you could knock one together in your garage this weekend, knowing only that x causes y.
Please see a psychiatric professional for these imagined pains you have been feeling. It is far more likely that it has to do with abandonment issues than with some broken old CRT.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
...EVERYTHING in the universe is radioactive to some degree. Except for iron.
To be radioactive you have to have nuclei. 96% of the Universe is Dark Matter and Dark Energy that does not contain any nuclei. Of the remaining 4% the vast majority is in stable isotopes of hydrogen and helium and so is not radioactive. Additionally there are radioactive isotopes of iron. Iron-56 may be the most stable atomic nucleus but there are many other isotopes of iron some of which are radioactive.
Maybe I misread it, but it doesn't mention whether or not the Russian research took place in a vacuum, from the way it reads to me, I took it as not, of course I could be reading that completely wrong. If it wasn't, then that seems like a non trivial modification.
Though if it wasn't, I have a hard time believing no one followed that up in half a century. Honestly, even if the 50yr old research was in a vacuum and counted as prior art, (and there is no other research since), this is one time I wouldn't mind seeing a bogus patent stick, because at least it's in spirit of what patents are actually supposed to foster.
-William Shatner can be neither created nor destroyed.
There's an informative video in Nature about the phenomenom and the experiment: http://www.nature.com/nature/videoarchive/x-rays/
They even show how to take x-rays using scotch tape.
All Rights Reversed.
According to John T.M. Lyles, an engineer who works on megawatt and bigger amps and oscillators for the federal government at an installation in New Mexico, it takes > 8 KV to emit xrays that would be measurable or damaging.
contesting.com amps reflector has a nice email exchange on it, as does the Yahoo.com ham amps reflector.
NO, not every tube will emit xrays. EMITTING xrays is what's dangerous. Just because a ceramic / metal triode / tetrode is GENERATING them, if it doesn't escape the envelope, it's not emitting them.
Kind of like your microwave. It shouldn't be emitting microwaves, but it creates them.
Hope that makes sense, or at least makes my point.
--Toll_Free
I wonder if different kinds of tape would generate different amounts of x-rays depending on stickiness -- for example, duct tape or packing tape.
I suppose it's kind of hard to use tape in the vacuum of space since the cold also tends to ruin the stickiness almost immediately...
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