James Bruton's Van de Graaf Ping Pong Ball Transporter

James Bruton recently bought a Van de Graaff generator, which allows him to create static charges of 100,000 volts. Such charges can be used to move small bits of metal, including ping pong balls coated with nickel spray, as demonstrated by his 3D-printed electric “gutter” project.

His device works by alternating positive and negatively charge strips of aluminum tape down its length. As the ball approaches one strip it picks up a charge, and is in turn attracted to the next oppositely-charged section, causing it to traverse level surfaces as well as slight inclines.

Bruton envisions this as a part of his great ball contraption that he’s been working on, another part of which we saw in his previous Coandă Effect video.

The idea for this section is that as a normal ball traverses the accelerator, it will be surreptitiously exchanged for a metal-coated ball, which is electrostaticly pushed through a visible section. The normal ball rolls along in a hidden tube below the visible metal-coated ball, and pops out the other side instead of its metallic surrogate. A clever illusion involving a servo and Arduino-driven elevator system recycles and lifts the metal ball, leaving observers to wonder just how it was able to be coated in metal and change back again!