why can you touch both sides of a 9V battery, you can even do it with a wet tongue and hardly get shocked, but a taser with that same battery can knock you out?
In: Chemistry
Capacitors are basically tiny batteries. When you put two capacitors in series, you get the sum of their voltages. When you put them in parallel, you get the same voltage as any one of the capacitors. So, you can wire a pair of capacitors in parallel, charge them to 9 volts, then disconnect them. They continue to hold their charge while disconnected. You can then rewire them in series, and get 18 volts between them.
Imagine you have a circuit that simultaneously charges a whole bunch of capacitors with the 9v battery by wiring them in parallel. Once they are charged (milliseconds) the circuit quickly switches all of them out of a parallel configuration and into a series configuration.
If you do that with a 9v battery and 100 capacitors, you can output a 900v arc (more, if you use earlier stages to charge later stages)
Inductors can perform a similar function. The way an inductor works is by passing a current through a coil of wire. This creates and holds a magnetic field around the coil. When you disconnect power, the magnetic field suddenly collapses back into the coil. The collapsing magnetic field induces a huge voltage spike across the inductor. Depending on the input voltage, coil, and several other factors, the voltage spike can be several hundred volts.
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