Electric Circuit Experiments: High Voltage Ethanol in Flames

Video Transcript

"Alright, so we're dealing with the electrical properties of gelatin and electrolytes here. Now we're going to move on to my ethanol gelatin, and this is just gelatin that's made with ethanol, made with pure alcohol. You can also use purell hand sanitizer if you don't feel like making jello, but I am going to use my high voltage source again which is this fifteen thousand volt supply that I built. And I am going to, it doesn't conduct unless I move it toward this electrically active gelatin. Now once they connect up with the gelatin, let's see what happens. Our electricity generates enough heat that it turns the gelatin, it turns into plasma. Just make sure my alligator clip doesn't burn there. Then it sets the ethanol on fire. The cool thing though is fire itself, can be a conductor too, so if I put this in the stream of the fire, notice how different that is from this. I contract the flame because high voltage electricity like this is a form of plasma. It's a state of matter and then fire is also plasma. So we can manipulate the fire and make all kinds of cool effects by using our gelatin as a medium in between."