The most significant case of being close to the inside of a loop in a home is the one I mentioned in the booklet, bad grounding of the mains phase(s). It is only because I am old and stupid that I failed to think of a far more devastating example: the subway. What prompted my lazy brain was an excellent one-page (and easily understandable) article that I highly recommend to you: R.H. Romer, "Oersted on the Subway," The Physics Teacher, Feb. 93, p.92.
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The next picture shows what Romer is talking about: the loop formed by the rails carrying the current in and out, and the motors between them. Electric clocks? Pardon my laughter. If it is very old and out of date it may take as much as 10 mA (milliamps, correctly milliamperes). A subway train, especially when it needs the maximum torque for staring, draws more than 5,000 amps, or 500,000 times as much as the electric clock into whose loop you cannot possibly penetrate anyway. (The New York subway rails use 5,000 volts, Boston and the Bay area transits use somewhat more, but the voltage is immaterial here, the magnetic field is directly proportional to the current or more generally
¾in a coil¾to the current times the number of turns, since each turn represents a loop.) Small magnetic fields, such as that of a household appliance or the geomagnetic field, are rather difficult to measure; but all Romer needed was a common compass needle, which went wild every time the train started.And Brodeur scares you with electric clocks, which he claims can be lethal. He started out with a book trying to scare the pants off people with microwaves, then one repeating the hoax with asbestos, and finally one about the horrible dangers of electromagnetic fields, all of them serialized in The New Yorker, where he works as an editor, raking in not just bundles of green cash, but the glory of the noble knight who fights the big bad corporations on behalf of your health.
By now he is probably being driven in a chauffeured limousine to the offices of America's phoniest and most snobbish magazine, but before he attained success as a snake oil merchant, he must have ridden to work in the New York subway. If I were given to anecdotal evidence (the only "evidence" ever presented in his horror fiction), I would say that his case does indeed show the danger of strong magnetic fields: it can lead to cretinismus viciosus in excelsiis.
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Vol. 20, No. 8
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Volume 20 Issue/No.: Vol. 20, No. 8 Date: April 01, 1993 11:14 AM Title: The New Nevilles
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
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