Can electricity flow through air w/out sparking?
>> >>> Yes. Tesla and Marconi did some interesting experiments with that >>> phenomenon. >> >> You mean they were able to pass electric current through air w/out >> arcing, sparking, or coronal discharge? > >Yes. Tesla even had ideas about supplying power to machines that way. > >In a more modern context, that’s how RFID tags are powered: there’s no >battery in the chip to drive the transmitter, the power for that is >extracted from the carrier of the probe signal. > >Of course, all of this “electricity through the air” is AC, and is in >conjunction with associated magnetic fields. Well, there is no movement of charged particles through the air then. The form of energy flowing through the air is not electricity but electromagnetic radiation. That can even flow through a vacuum where there are no charged particles, molecules, atoms, or any of the usual subatomic particles. As for electricity to flow through air without sparking – that can be done, although not often practically, and the
