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Borax or Baking Soda Rectifier and the glow (2003)
While experimenting with these rectifiers, I have found them to work quite well and I have been able to observe the glow. It was also easy to make full wave rectifiers using more than one rectifier in traditional full wave rectifier circuits.
For those who know what they are doing and are comfortable doing this kind of thing, the glow can be easily observed by connecting a 75 watt incandescent lamp in series with the rectifier and 120 vac line voltage. The only problem is that as time goes on, the plates usually continue to form, and the overall maximum capacitance eventually drops to a value too low to supply adequate current to the lamp. I have observed an interesting N type negative resistance effect that happens only when the tip of a very sharp aluminum electrode is just barely touching the top surface of the solution.
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