MOUNT VERNON — Little information regarding allegations against Mount Vernon Middle School science teacher John Freshwater is being divulged by school officials or Freshwater. In an effort to further understand how a student of Freshwater’s could be burned during a science experiment, the News met with Dr. Terry Klopcic, director of laboratories at Kenyon College, to discuss Tesla coils and their educational value in the classroom.
Klopcic said that in its simplest definition, the Tesla coil is a transformer used as a source of high-frequency power. He showed how placing a Tesla coil close to a florescent light bulb or a neon light would generate enough energy to illuminate both devices.
“The Tesla coil would be used to show current,” he said. “[They] are used to drive a lot of high-voltage applications. When you want to do high voltage small current, when you want to get something to ionize or glow or give a spark, then you use something like a Tesla coil,” he said.
When the Tesla coil comes near the light sources, a lot of snaps and pops are audible.
“The snapping that you hear, it works a lot like the coil in your car — at least in the old days,” explained Klopcic. “You used to have breakers, the points. The points would snap and every time the point opened, you’d get a pulse. If you put the pulse through a transformer, you can take that high-current, low-voltage pulse and convert it to a high-voltage, low-current pulse.”
Klopcic said there were no experiments he knew of that would require a teacher to touch a student with a Tesla coil during an experiment, but said he did not feel the device would cause harm if it were done.
“I would not be worried about life-threatening [injuries], as the current is very, very low,” he said. “The voltage is high but the current is very low. You can see from the device that there are no huge red warnings, no threats, no nothing. I expect it would get your attention [if placed on your skin], that you would feel the tingle, but I don’t believe that this is a dangerous device.”
He also said he believes it would be highly unlikely that flesh burns would occur from the Tesla coil because the current is so low.
Kenyon’s physics chairman, Dr. Tim Sullivan, allowed Klopcic to touch him with the Tesla coil. The initial touch was placed on his shoe, which Sullivan said resulted in nothing. The next touch was to Sullivan’s sock on the front of his leg. Immediately Sullivan’s leg pulled away. Klopcic then brought the coil to Sullivan’s arm, and Sullivan again pulled his arm away with urgency.
“You can definitely feel it,” Sullivan said. “It’s definitely painful, but I don’t see any burn marks.”
“I can’t imagine anyone would stand there and have that,” Klopcic said of holding the Tesla coil to the skin for an extended period of time.
“I’m pulling away. Let’s put it this way, I think it would take an extraordinary amount of will to hold it there. It is painful,” Sullivan said.
The Van de Graaff conductor is another device used in the classroom to explore electromagnetic energy. It is a smaller version of the experiment at COSI, where participants touch it and their hair stands on end. With a group of students touching hands, the energy passes from one student to the next. The farther the energy passes down the chain of students, the less energy is felt.
Above any lesson learned through experiments with the Tesla coil, or even the Van de Graaff conductor, Klopcic said he believes the relevance of these lessons is more far reaching than merely test scores.
“We have a real crisis in American students, getting them interested in science; they get turned off,” he said. “There are few enough that are really capable and if those get turned off ... Most people believe that if you can turn the kids on early, if you can show them something, show them science really is exciting — which it is — and awfully cool and appealing to the left side of the brain. If you can get them turned on early, something like [Tesla coil experiments] is a ‘gee whiz.’ It will attract their attention and sparks their curiosity — then we might get our next scientist out of that.
“I think it’s appropriate,” Klopcic said of using the Tesla coil in an educational environment.
A message for Mount Vernon Superintendent Steve Short requesting information regarding the scientific devices in John Freshwater’s classroom was unreturned as of press time.
