by Ray Holder » Sat Nov 08, 2008 7:46 am
This story reminds me of a time, probably more than 75 years ago, when as a boy I used to visit the market in my home town of Wimborne in Dorset, it was a cattle market, with lots of accompanying stalls.
There was this man who was selling electrical sole inners for putting into one's shoes/boots, they consisted of a thin shaped copper sheet, and a similar zinc sheet, separated from the copper one by a piece of cloth, apparently treated with some chemical to form a kind of electrolyte.
His impressive piece of equipment was a large voltmeter, such as those on power plant switchboards, he would spit on the cloth separator, and join the copper and zinc plates to his voltmeter. Lo and behold!! full scale reading, electricity !! ( just a simple voltaic cell) and people swarmed to buy them. Even at that young age, I wondered where the return path for the current might be, down through the soles of the boots and through the ground, and back up the other leg??, what if the two insoles were not in series aiding, but in opposition to each other??
It was an obvious con, with a bit of showmanship thrown in. The magnets so often recommended appear to be no more than a similar play on peoples' expectations of help from invisible forces, but no principle has been found for any possible benefit to occur---a sort of modern voodoo!!!
Ray