Very weird, very cool encounter today that I now need some help with. Ran into a gentleman who turned out to be a moderately famous inventor. His father had cleaned out the house of an earlier moderately famous inventor from the 1910s-20s at some point in the 1960s. In this collection of stuff was a MOTHERFUCKING GIANT VAN DE GRAAFF GENERATOR. The upshot is this guy no longer wants this thing and I can have it if I want. While I try to figure out if I have way to store this thing, I need /sci/'s help because it's a design I don't understand and I'm not sure of the theory of operation compared to the usual style I'm used to.
-Built circa 1920 out of copper, steel, wood, and glass
-Currently disassembled and missing some major parts, including the belts, motor drive, and support base for the right sphere
-The design apparently used two parallel spheres with two belts running in opposite directions inside each other
-Belts are driven by a counter-rotating gearbox driven from a shaft in the right sphere
-The small loose sphere may have sat on the grounded support under the left sphere's platform
-I see no brushes or combs anywhere on the unit
-There are a few heavy, insulated cables that don't go anywhere
I've tried to make a simplified drawing of how it would look when set up. How would this have worked in operation and what would this have been for, compared to the ones you see all over the place that have the motor in the base and one sphere is simply an empty ground? Assuming two 8" wide belts running in a ~26" diameter sphere, how much voltage are we talking?
-Built circa 1920 out of copper, steel, wood, and glass
-Currently disassembled and missing some major parts, including the belts, motor drive, and support base for the right sphere
-The design apparently used two parallel spheres with two belts running in opposite directions inside each other
-Belts are driven by a counter-rotating gearbox driven from a shaft in the right sphere
-The small loose sphere may have sat on the grounded support under the left sphere's platform
-I see no brushes or combs anywhere on the unit
-There are a few heavy, insulated cables that don't go anywhere
I've tried to make a simplified drawing of how it would look when set up. How would this have worked in operation and what would this have been for, compared to the ones you see all over the place that have the motor in the base and one sphere is simply an empty ground? Assuming two 8" wide belts running in a ~26" diameter sphere, how much voltage are we talking?
