I have a superpower. I don’t know if everyone has their own superpower, but I have an ability that seems to far exceed the ability of everyone else around me. What is my superpower, you ask? Well, it is the ability to store electrons in my body! I’m a walking Leyden Jar!
The point is this: I can generate static shocks. Yes, I know, everyone gets a little
shock now and then. But I’m talking
about a big shock. Like, something
around a 20kV range! I’ve been able to
generate shocks that travelled greater than 2cm through the air between me and
a metal grounding spot. And, yes, it
hurts – really hurts!
I don’t really remember when I
discovered I had this ability. I don’t
remember noticing this superpower when I was growing up, but there is a simple
explanation for that: I grew up in the
Pacific Northwest. Nice wet moldy
winters. It wasn’t until I moved to the
northern Midwest, with its super-dry and cold winters, that I realized my
superpower. And really, initially I just
thought “this is what happens to everyone”, but over time I’ve realized that’s
like if Joey Chestnut said to himself “well, everyone eats hotdogs.” You may be saying “I get shocks all the
time”. But do you get 2cm shocks? Of course, I really don’t know – there’s no
competitive “shock-off” that I know of.
But if there was, I think I’d win!
My wife claims that this happens to
me because I work with devices that deliver shocks to people all day. That is true, although the shocks I use at
work are very small and very productive and not painful. But my job did give me the understanding to
figure out a way to mitigate the pain that is induced by my superpower. As I studied the principles of electrical
stimulation when applied to the skin, I learned that charge density is
the important parameter that determines whether a nerve will get
activated. Thus, a high charge delivered
over a small area will activate a nerve, but if you spread that charge out over
a larger area, it will not be enough to activate the nerve. I knew that every time I touched something
and got that sharp pain – like someone just stabbed me in the finger with a
needle – that it meant that the shock was activating nerve endings in my
fingertip. So, I said to myself, what I
need is to spread that charge out over a larger area of skin and then it
shouldn’t activate the nerve endings. I
needed some kind of flat metal object that I could use and carry around with
me. Something like…a key! Keys are perfect. So, the next time I got up out of a chair
where I knew that if I touched something metal it was going to hurt, I first
pulled out my keys from my pocket and held the big part between my finger and
thumb. Then I pointed the tip of the key
towards some metal object (doorknobs, screws on outlets, steel sinks, metal
fireplace grates, etc. etc.) and zap!
The spark jumped from the tip of the key to the big hunk of metal with a
nice loud “snap”, but I felt no pain. I
can’t tell you how much of a revelation that was!! From that day forward, I always carry keys
and discharge myself to avoid the pain.
It works great.
I’ve found that the
three “C’s” are the worst: chairs, cars,
coats. Certain chairs can be a problem –
I’m sure it has to do with the material that they are made out of but I haven’t
figured out the magic formula. I’ve
learned simple tricks. For example, when
I take my coat off, it is an evil force, waiting to shock me. As I am letting go of it, it wants to zap me. So, I’ve learned that when I take my coal
off, I have to keep touching it until I can drop it on something. If I try to hang it up, odds are I will
briefly let go and then touch it again, and I will get zapped. When I come in to my office in the morning, I
have to carefully drop the coat, take out a key, discharge myself on the
doorknob or door jamb, and then it is safe to hang up my coat. Also, as a fun thing, when I take my key out,
I can wave it around near the coat and hear all of the electrons popping and zinging
as they jump from the coat to the key.
Great fun.
My superpower presents some significant
difficulties that I bet you never thought of.
For example, the chair in my office is great at generating static. Every time I get up from my office chair, I
have to get the key out of my pocket and discharge myself on the doorjamb
before I go anywhere – otherwise I will shock the first thing I touch. So, here’s the practical problem this
presents – something that has happened to me a few times. I am sitting in my chair, innocently working
away, and someone will come by my office (my door is usually open) with someone
they want to introduce me to. Of course,
the natural response would be to get up and shake their hand (ok, maybe a fist
bump or elbow bump during covid). But
here’s the problem: I know if I do that,
I will shock them, which seems like a rather unpleasant greeting. If I stay seated, I won’t shock them, but
that doesn’t seem quite respectful. If I
stand up, I’m now a walking bag of electrons, waiting to zap. So, the logical thing would be to get my key,
touch the doorjamb first, then put the key back and then shake their hand. All while the person is waiting to shake my
hand. But it seems odd to start a
conversation with someone I’ve never met by explaining that I’m weird and I
have this ritual involving a key and a doorjamb that I have to complete before
I can shake anyone’s hand. I don’t know
how to solve the awkward problem except maybe to wear a grounding strap while I
am sitting at my desk. Also, not weird,
haha. Or, maybe I should only meet new
people during the summer when it is humid.
Taking clothes out of the dryer? Pure torture. I have to do it with one hand while I hold a
key in the other hand, constantly discharging myself on the dryer. I know other people get static shocks when
they take clothes out of the dryer, but it doesn’t seem to bother them. Why is that? Are you all immune to the pain? It feels like getting stabbed with needles –
unexpectedly stabbed. Is that just me?
OK, well, the pain is one thing. But I also know that I generate an electric force field around me! When I use my key to discharge myself on an outlet screw (a nice metal object that is typically grounded), I can feel the hairs in my opposite arm stand up momentarily. Sometimes I can feel my pant leg move when the spark arcs across from the tip of my key to the outlet screw. Does that happen to other people? No one has ever mentioned it to me.
I have to tell you a story about my electron force field superpower. This happened to me in April of 2025, when it was still dry enough in Cleveland for shocks to be a problem. I was working at the hospital and, as I mentioned, every time I get up from the chair at my desk, I have to discharge onto something metal, or I'll get shocked on whatever the first metal thing I touch. Well, one time I got up from my chair and I forgot to discharge myself. And as I'm walking out of my office, I remembered that I had forgotten (I hadn’t touched anything metal yet). So, I got out my key and I happened to be passing a storeroom door with a big metal push code lock on it (not uncommon in hospitals). The lock looked like the picture below and seemed like the perfect discharge point,
so I brought my key over
close to it to zap it. I always do it slowly
because I like to see how far the spark will travel. Zap!
There was a nice spark and then, simultaneously, in the room next door, I
heard the paper towel dispenser click on and dispense a paper towel. No one else was around at the time, so it
seemed creepy that the paper towel dispenser would click on because it is the
kind you have to wave your and in front of in order to get it to spit out a
paper towel. It looks like this:
I walked
past the room and I didn’t see anyone there.
I was momentarily creeped out, because you have to wave your hand like
an inch away from the sensor or it won’t click on. But then I suddenly wondered “could it be
that my shocking of the lock on the room next door caused the towel dispenser
to click on?” But I convinced myself
that such an idea was ridiculous and it must have just been some random event
and so I went on to my next meeting.
However, later in the day I was at
my desk and needed to get up again. I
was about to discharge myself on the doorjamb when I thought “hey, I’ll go over
to that lock again and see what happens”.
So, I walked down the hall to the door, zapped the lock and……”whirrrr”,
the paper towel dispenser clicked on and spit out a paper towel!! Now I was seriously intrigued. How in the world did that happen?
My first thought was that maybe, somehow,
the spot where I was passing the lock was a perfect spot to somehow reflect
light into the other room at just the right spot that it bounced off the back
wall and hit the paper towel sensor just enough to trigger it. So, I went back to my desk, sat at my chair,
wiggled around a bit, and then repeated the experiment, only this time I walked
near the wall and snuck up near the lock.
Zap!....Whrrrr! Out came a paper
towel. I was so excited! I yelled “That’s awesome!!” into the hallway,
but there was no one around to hear me or see my amazing power. So, I did what any good engineer/researcher
would do: I repeated the test. Like probably five times. By the end I had a nice stack of paper towels
that I kept around as evidence.
As I kept repeating this experiment, I considered the situation. First, let me show you the layout. The picture below shows the door with the
lock and then further down the hallway is the open door where the paper towel dispenser
was. You can just barely see the side of
the paper towel dispenser – it is mounted on the other side of the hallway
wall. The two arrows show the lock and
the dispenser, and they are separated by about ten feet.
My first thought was that my electric
shock was going through the hospital’s ground wiring and making it to the
dispenser somehow. But I realized that
was impossible. The paper towel
dispenser has an all-plastic housing and is battery powered. It has no connection to the hospital’s
wiring. Actually, I’m pretty sure the
lock is also battery powered because I couldn’t find any kind of a wire or
conduit connecting into the door by the hinges.
The door is wooden. The walls are
standard drywall, although I’m sure the studs are metal because it’s a commercial
building.
So that means, I believe, that the field from me
discharging the static shock onto the lock has to be traveling through the air.
And somehow it has to be at a high enough intensity that, ten feet away, it can
cross the plastic housing of the dispenser, and somehow zap across some contact
inside of the dispenser with sufficient energy to trigger the motion sensor (or
circuitry or whatever it is) to cause it to dispense a paper towel. I know it sounds crazy. It makes no sense to me that such a thing
could happen. That’s why I had to keep
repeating it again and again. And I kept
trying I every day until it finally got too humid to work anymore and then,
over the summer, I moved away from that office and haven’t had a chance to try
it again.
I guess I didn’t get much real work
done that first day – at least not for that half an hour or so where I kept
repeatedly dispensing paper towels. But
I did learn one very important thing about myself…
