The Electrical Experimenter

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These are covers from the early 20th Century magazine Electrical Experimenter. As you can see from the covers many of their ideas were preposterous.  Regardless, the artwork is interesting. 

The covers are from the Electrical Experimenter section of the website MagazineArt (with a HT to Retronaut). There are more after the jump, and of course more at the MagazineArt link.

It is interesting that, even at this early of a date,
flying saucers were already being imagined as alien craft.

Lightning trapped in a block

In the above video they've charged an acrylic block by aiming an electron beam into it and injecting it with high speed particles. These particles slow down and become trapped in it, eventually building up a negative charge of millions of volts. When sharply tapped with a conductive object this voltage will discharge, leaving a pattern known as an Lichtenberg figure or an electron tree.  The sparks you see after the original discharge are secondary discharges that can continue to occur for several minutes.   

Click to enlarge

As you can see in the picture to the right, Lichtenberg figures can appear on the skin of people who have been struck by lightning.  Fortunately, assuming you're lucky enough to survive the lightning strike, the Lichtenberg patterns on the skin are not permanent, they will disappear in a few days if not sooner.

Lichtenberg patterns can also be found in the grass at the point of a lightning strike. I live in Florida and I've heard of them being seen on golf courses in the area. Finally, sand at the point of the strike can be fused into underground and the resultant fragile, glass-like structure is called a fulgurite.  
  

Popular Science archive

Online tool for searching the back issues -- Click to enlarge

Now that you're done with your Thanksgiving turkey you may just want to relax and do some reading. If so you might want to check out the online Popular Science Archive of its magazines. The archive includes all of its old issues starting with their first in 1872. 

Popular Science worked with Google to create the archive. The Archive Explorer (pictured above) allows you to either browse the covers or enter a search term to see how many times it appeared in an issue. The image above used 'Radio' as its search term, and you can it started being written about in 1916 and quickly became a favorite topic.

The issues are fully digitized. You can go any one and read all of its articles, as well as look at all of the old ads and whatnot. I've collected some samples of old Popular Science illustrated covers. There are more after the jump, and of course many more at the archive itself.