Re: New ball lightning theory

On Sat, 2 Apr 2005 18:08:38 -0500, "Jerry G." <jerryg50@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>I know of someone else who also has seen ball lightning. He was over in
>Europe when he saw this.

When I was in the Air Force, one of my technicians made ball lightning
accidentally.

We had these massive power supplies - called Invertrons if I remember
correctly. Can't really remember what they did, but they had 3 phase input &
3 phase output, and each phase had 40 high power transistors on a massive
heatsink. I think it created very clean 3 phase power.

Anyway, one of the techs was replacing a transistor - they died reasonably
regularly. When putting it back in the 19" rack he wired the input to the
output & vice-versa.

At turn-on, a ball of lightning about the size of a tennis ball came straight
out of the front panel & floated around in the air a little for about 5 to 10
seconds, in front of about 5 technicians including some of the bosses. Quite
impressive.

The mistake also blew out all 120 power transistors which took quite a
rebuild! :-)

Dave

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