Blanket Lightning

By DAN ROBINSON

Editor/Photographer

From Dan: How the crime of copyright infringement took $1 million from me and shut down my operation.

In September of 2025, my work is generating the most income it ever has in my career. Yet, I'm being forced to shut down my successul operation, against my will, due to one cause alone: 95% of that revenue is being stolen by piracy and copyright infringement. I've lost more than $1 million to copyright infringement in the last 15 years, and it's finally brought an end to my professional storm chasing operation. Do not be misled by the lies of infringers, anti-copyright activists and organized piracy cartels. This page is a detailed, evidenced account of my battle I had to undertake to just barely stay in business, and eventually could not overcome. It's a problem faced by all of my colleagues and most other creators in the field.

(Video Capture - view more photos) If you find yourself bored on a cold winter night, you might enjoy making some homemade lightning with a blanket.

What you'll need:

A heavy blanket, sweater, vinyl shower curtain, or sleeping bag. The material needs to be clean and dry.
Dry air. While this experiment will work to some degree year-round, the interior air of most homes usually has the lowest in humidity during the wintertime. Turning your furnace up a few degrees will help dry the air out further.
A dark room.

Directions:

You'll want a dark room with the lights off. Give your eyes some time to adjust to the darkness. Sit on the floor or bed, make a fist and hold your hand about six inches away from your face, directly in front of your chin. Position the blanket behind you and pull it quickly over your head, leaving an air gap of about four or five inches between your fist and the blanket. If you're doing it correctly, spectacular little blue/purple sparks (see photo above and video captures here) will jump off of your knuckles upward into the blanket. The faster you pull the blanket, the longer and more frequent the sparks will be.

Different types of fabric will yield varying results, so try a few blankets and sheets to find which give the best results. A dry vinyl shower curtain or a large sheet of plastic bubble wrap works somewhat better than cloth or fabric. Make a fist and hold your hand in the position described above. Bunch the curtain up into a ball and hold it in your other hand, but don't allow it to touch any other part of your body. Vigorously rub it in your hair for a few seconds, then quickly move the curtain about 4 to 5 inches above your fist- and a spark should jump upward.

With hundreds of tiny branches extending upward, these sparks closely resemble ground-to-cloud discharges such as the types seen from tall television towers and skyscrapers.

How does it work?

The blanket rubbing against the hair on your head rapidly separates large amounts of electrical charge. The charges collect on your body and inside of the blanket in front of you. When the charges reach a critical voltage level, the air between your fist and the blanket ionizes (breaks down) and a spark jumps. The process is just like that in a thunderstorm, only on a much smaller scale.