Inspiration
This week's idea comes as a suggestion from Rob Carroll who found a video on a homemade light bulb. It also tied in well with another geeky thing we did this weekend which was to get together with friends to watch a Lord of the Rings marathon while eating like hobbits (~7 meals in a day) during the 12+ hours of fantasy goodness. The girls liked that the Shelob (the big scary spider monster from the 3rd movie for the uninitiated) was terrified of the magic light-bulb vial and so we set about making our own magic.
Materials
8 C-Cell batteries - to provide the juice
1 pack of 0.7mm pencil leads - to act as a filament
2 alligator clips - to hold the filament
3' of wire - to complete the circuit
electrical tape - to hold it all thogether
1 glass jar - to reduce air flow and protect against shattering filament shards
1 small tub of play dough - to seal the jar/bulb better
Notes
I found that the clips I bought at the hardware store were a bit too strong for the 0.7mm leads and tended to snap them prematurely so I would recommend some weaker spring flips from a more small scale electronics place. Lana thought of adding clay to the bottom of the jar to get a better seal to keep air out of the chamber which worked great. Varying the length and diameter of the filament along with the number of batteries and volts will be ways I plan to further explore the electrical and combustion principals that we illustrated today. With this set up we got about 20-30 seconds of glow time before a filament burned out with very cool visible thinning that Noelle noticed even before the first one burned out (4th picture shows a partially used filament with this effect).
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