Contact Breakers in Vacuo.
Contact breakers in vacuo, as applied to Ruhmkorff coils, are by no means of recent date. Poggendorff made use of such prior to 1859, and noted the diminished sparking at the contact breaker and increased effect in the secondary circuit.
Fig. 24.
Fig. 25.
Mr. D. McFarlan Moore, whose experiments in vacuum tube lighting have proven so interesting, was granted patents upon various forms of contact breakers, in which the chief merit was that the contacts were broken in a vacuum. The sparking was almost eliminated, and the suddenness of the break of contact so accentuated as to materially improve the output of an induction coil. A perusal of his patents, copies of which may be procured through almost any bookseller, will prove profitable to the coil constructor.