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I mentioned over dinner at my parents house (about 20 years ago) that I'd read that running 240v through a gherkin would cause it to glow - and pretty much as soon as dinner was over, my father and I had the experiment set up.

Gherkins and even pickled onions glowed brilliantly. I set up a basic site to share the video we'd taken and details of the experiment, and shared it to B3ta. Sadly all lost to time.



"WRL Technical Note TN-13 Characterization of Organic Illumination Systems" https://simh.trailing-edge.com/semi/docs/WRL-TN-13.pdf


Further testing indicated that the taste was neither enhanced nor diminished, but remained ‘‘very much like a pickle.’’ Our conclusion is that the culinary potential of electrical stimulation is limited.


I think bigclive would disagree about that, he is known for electrocuting his sausage and sometimes enjoying the taste after


One of the authors, Alan Eustace, was an exec at Google (in the days when execs at Google had a clue) and also holds the record for highest jump (135K feet).


Bill Gates can actually jump over a chair. og Tech execs are awesome at jumping it seems!


Necessary life skill with Ballmer on the Executive team.


This is gold and I will be keeping this .PDF in my rather limited data hoard.


I see a similar comment at the end of the original article that mentions that pickles incandesce. Is it true incandescence or is it just internal arcing?


I wish I had the video still - maybe I need to run the experiment again, this time with my kids?

Tangent: I look back sometimes and realise how stupidly lucky I was to have a father who not only humoured my crazy ideas, but actively encouraged them - I only hope I am doing the same for my kids.


Many many moons ago I connected a pickle to a 10kv transformer - in that case at least it was definitely the result of arcing :)


Pretty sure my high school physics teacher did this one.




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