High voltage lines have the ability to ionize the air around them, and turn the air into a wire. If that area of ionized air can reach something that grounds the wire, you’ll get an arc. This is lightning.
And so if you get too close, the wire could ionize the air around them, and that ionized air touches you, and since you can ground the wire, it arcs to you, causing electricity to flow through you, potentially stopping your heart.
High voltage lines have the ability to ionize the air around them, and turn the air into a wire. If that area of ionized air can reach something that grounds the wire, you’ll get an arc. This is lightning.
And so if you get too close, the wire could ionize the air around them, and that ionized air touches you, and since you can ground the wire, it arcs to you, causing electricity to flow through you, potentially stopping your heart.
High voltage lines have the ability to ionize the air around them, and turn the air into a wire. If that area of ionized air can reach something that grounds the wire, you’ll get an arc. This is lightning.
And so if you get too close, the wire could ionize the air around them, and that ionized air touches you, and since you can ground the wire, it arcs to you, causing electricity to flow through you, potentially stopping your heart.
You compromise the spacing
High voltage wires are relying on the fact that air isn’t that conductive and takes a lot of voltage to breakdown and let a lightning bolt pass
If you get too close to them then instead of the electricity needing to jump through air all the way to the ground it only needs to jump through to air to *you* then pass through your far more conductive body and make the final hop to ground.
Air will block about 3,000,000 volts per meter of air. We don’t run it close to that limit but you might find a 300 kV line with a meter of clearance, but if you get less than 10 centimeters from the wire you’re now close enough that it can blow through the air and hop to you just like lightning hopping from the cloud to the ground.
Normally voltages you encounter are low enough that it can’t arc more than a millimeter, but transmission lines can get up to hundreds of thousands of volts which is enough for some sizable arcs
You compromise the spacing
High voltage wires are relying on the fact that air isn’t that conductive and takes a lot of voltage to breakdown and let a lightning bolt pass
If you get too close to them then instead of the electricity needing to jump through air all the way to the ground it only needs to jump through to air to *you* then pass through your far more conductive body and make the final hop to ground.
Air will block about 3,000,000 volts per meter of air. We don’t run it close to that limit but you might find a 300 kV line with a meter of clearance, but if you get less than 10 centimeters from the wire you’re now close enough that it can blow through the air and hop to you just like lightning hopping from the cloud to the ground.
Normally voltages you encounter are low enough that it can’t arc more than a millimeter, but transmission lines can get up to hundreds of thousands of volts which is enough for some sizable arcs
You compromise the spacing
High voltage wires are relying on the fact that air isn’t that conductive and takes a lot of voltage to breakdown and let a lightning bolt pass
If you get too close to them then instead of the electricity needing to jump through air all the way to the ground it only needs to jump through to air to *you* then pass through your far more conductive body and make the final hop to ground.
Air will block about 3,000,000 volts per meter of air. We don’t run it close to that limit but you might find a 300 kV line with a meter of clearance, but if you get less than 10 centimeters from the wire you’re now close enough that it can blow through the air and hop to you just like lightning hopping from the cloud to the ground.
Normally voltages you encounter are low enough that it can’t arc more than a millimeter, but transmission lines can get up to hundreds of thousands of volts which is enough for some sizable arcs
Contrary to popular belief, electricity doesn’t work like how most people believe it does, such as electrons don’t move through the wire and circuits don’t need to be connected to work, the reason this is taught is because that’s the simplest way to explain it
What happens is that electrons are accelerated and dump their energy into protons, then accelerated again by the magnetic field that forms when a power source and load are in a circuit, if you have an electric toothbrushes, wireless chargers
than that’s how they work without happening to having to be plugged into by a cable, that’s also how transformers covert a high voltage to a lower voltage since the gap between them the two circuits are insulted by enough air to reduce the voltage enough
In most cases, the air is a good enough insulator that this isn’t an issue, but once you get to a high enough voltage you do like with your example of high voltage lines or Tesla coils
Contrary to popular belief, electricity doesn’t work like how most people believe it does, such as electrons don’t move through the wire and circuits don’t need to be connected to work, the reason this is taught is because that’s the simplest way to explain it
What happens is that electrons are accelerated and dump their energy into protons, then accelerated again by the magnetic field that forms when a power source and load are in a circuit, if you have an electric toothbrushes, wireless chargers
than that’s how they work without happening to having to be plugged into by a cable, that’s also how transformers covert a high voltage to a lower voltage since the gap between them the two circuits are insulted by enough air to reduce the voltage enough
In most cases, the air is a good enough insulator that this isn’t an issue, but once you get to a high enough voltage you do like with your example of high voltage lines or Tesla coils
Contrary to popular belief, electricity doesn’t work like how most people believe it does, such as electrons don’t move through the wire and circuits don’t need to be connected to work, the reason this is taught is because that’s the simplest way to explain it
What happens is that electrons are accelerated and dump their energy into protons, then accelerated again by the magnetic field that forms when a power source and load are in a circuit, if you have an electric toothbrushes, wireless chargers
than that’s how they work without happening to having to be plugged into by a cable, that’s also how transformers covert a high voltage to a lower voltage since the gap between them the two circuits are insulted by enough air to reduce the voltage enough
In most cases, the air is a good enough insulator that this isn’t an issue, but once you get to a high enough voltage you do like with your example of high voltage lines or Tesla coils
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