When I was in my early teens I got a cb radio for Christmas one year. The cb was sitting on a table in our living next to a small artificial Christmas tree that was decorated with mini-lights. My cb had a small external antenna mounted on the back of the unit. Every time I keyed the mic to talk one of the lights on the tree would light up somewhat dimly....I believe it was the light closest to the cb. Would electro-magnetism be the cause of this?

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The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. ~ Ernest Hemingway ...

I know that works with Fluorescent bulbs. I'd never seen it work with anything else.

I would guess that Faraday/Maxwell is the culprit here. Radio waves are electromagnetic waves. The filament in the bulb makes for a nice little antenna that intersects the modulated and oscillating EM field and thus has an electric current (a very tiny current) flowing through it. Perhaps it was just enough to light the low-wattage bulb.

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

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WRT OP: After consulting my vast, expansive, and extensive (...oh, okay all those words mean the same thing) knowlege of electrical fields, I'd say, possibly. Hope that helped.

In seriousness, I'd be interested to see if you could reproduce the effect today. And what were some of the other variables? Were the lights plugged in but turned off via switch? Or were they not plugged in at all? Is it possible that there was a "transmit" light on the CB that might have been reflecting off the bulb, making it look like it was lit? (I.e., how well did you observe it?). Did you try moving the CB and seeing if any of the other bulbs would light up?

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.

A billion years ago I remember seeing a test device hams used to use to tune their antenna setups. It was basically a wire antenna and transformer hooked to a bulb and placed near the ham radio antenna.

You keyed the transmitter and then tuned until the bulb reached maximum brightness.....

I honestly can't remember (accurately). I do remember looking closely at the bulb and it definitely did light up and dim when I released the key. I don't think it was plugged in...this was around 1975-76, so I don't know if they made mini-lights with switches back then. It was a Tandy?/Radio-Shack branded cb.

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The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. ~ Ernest Hemingway ...

A friend of mine was trusted by the government to keep the grass cut at a tracking antenna site. He would also make sure the coax was in good shape and might have done some tunning. Mostly he cut the grass.

That site was on a small lake and across the lake there was a local watering hole with neon lights in the windows. Him and his geek friends would point a microwave dish at the tavern and broadcast. He told me they would do it after the place closed and no one was there. It would mysteriously turn on the neon.

The locals suspected ET was calling home.

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It's entirely possible, particularly with mini-bulbs. Wouldn't work with the older bulbs, though - they require too much juice.

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Does your property have a good earth ?

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Thank God for magnetism.

I come from Springhill, Nova Scotia (coal mining country) I think there was a lot of iron in the area as well

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The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. ~ Ernest Hemingway ...

Or more likely the long conductor wire of the christmas tree lights functioned as an antenna.

Back in school physics teacher carried out a demonstration with similar arrangent. Two dipole antennas: one attached to a radio transmitter and the other to a small light bulb. When the antennas were brought close to each other the bulb lit up.

Visiting a science museum one time I watched a demonstration where a long florescent bulb was held near an active Tesla coil and lit up. If I remember correctly the demonstrator told us that was how George Lucas made the light sabers in Star Wars, not sure on that so don't quote me.

Also try this Scientific American article on for size.

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None to speak of

As I recall, the actors held the light saber handle which had a long slim piece of flat metal coming out of it. By turning it into the light- the metal reflected the light causing it to 'appear' as if a light saber came out of the handle.

After the filming, the dazzling light special effects were added.

What is going there was an "electrodeless discharge" effect, caused by the relatively strong field RF near the CB antenna. This can be done with flourscent lamps. In fact, they make a tube tester device with an antenna that you touch and rub along the length of the tube. If you get a little glow, you know the tube is good. Those things are not cheap, and cost effective only if you're replacing and repairing a lot of fluorscent lamps for a living. But they're very nice to have.

This effect generally requires high frequency fields, and is not to be be confused with capactive coupling effects, such as can occur with tubes under HV transmission lines.

At the right frequency, a gas under the right conditions of temperature and pressure will be excited and produce a glowing discharge. The effect is complex and depends on a lot of factors.

Incandescent light bulbs have a small amount of inert gas at low pressure (protects the filament, amongst other things). You can initiate an electrodeless discharge in the gas itself with a microwave oven. However, you will quickly get that gas hot enough to blow that light bulb to smithereens in a short time.

You can actually get a full blown electrodeless arc going in a gas like this if you play your cards just right, and there are some lamp designs that do that, they just haven't been commericially viable.

For starting, very high voltage, high frequency field will be concentrated in a tube to get intial electrodeless ionization. One that's starts and you have a plasma and second circuit drives an arc at a much lower voltage by what amounts to transformer coupling. The arc itself serves as the secondary of a transformer, driven by a primary.

The advantage of this is there are no electrodes to burn out. Disadvantages are cost and complexity. The things have to be carefully "tuned".

-Richard

That works for me! It's not important to me, though it is interesting.

Thanks Publius!

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None to speak of

Absolutely it was the radidio that da-da-diddit...

We whipped together a multi-band dipole antenna out of steel Slinky toys one time...undo the clamps at the ends of the springs, connect, recrimp, and solder.
Two springs per side fed with ladder line makes a 40m dipole (there's a rope thru the spring to support it, and the spring is taped to the rope every X number of turns or so to keep it spread...).

Ol' Dave was the antenna guru, so we rigged the antenna INSIDE the building, hooked it to 5 watts of RF, and Dave ran a fluorescent tube down the length of the antenna...at the current (IIRC) nodes of the wavelength on the antenna, that bulb would perk right up...everywhere else, it just glowed dimly...

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