About Vortex
It began in Vancouver at the University of BC in 1970 ...... Actually it started much earlier when I was a child ! As I was technically inclined my Uncle Freek gave me a 10.000 Volt ignition coil after I drove him crazy asking how a spark plug worked. I had experimented already with 220 Volt.... My Mom had to buy the fuses and the neighbours complained constantly about snow on their TV. My plasma education got an early start in those days. The 10.000 Volt coil made strikingly beautiful plasma sparks, but they packed no punch. I knew it after I tried to electrocute our cat and he survived... It is very simple: the poor thing was frizzled and ended upside down on the ceiling.... It was petrified for only three days when he came down and he lived happily ever after.
Later I found out that with 30.000 Volt from a neon light transformer the sparks became more powerful. I could also light up fluorescent lighting tubes simply by holding them in my hand close to the high voltage terminals.
Between the electrodes, such as are shown on the left here, I could create beautiful blue, green, red and violet electric discharge arcs. Such discharges - plasma channels - became the focus of my professional engineering work 30 years later in 1999.
At the University of BC I discovered in 1970 that a few young scientists had created Sun Light
inside a tube of swirling water !
The water in the tube formed a vapour core due to its rapid rotation. In this vapour
core a Plasma Arc was induced and this produced a highly intense white light that was as bright
as the Sun or maybe even brighter.
This invention was the Vortek Lamp.
The company Vortek Limited in Vancouver, BC, Canada, manufactures these lights for worldwide
distribution even today. Maybe your local football stadium is lit up at night with Vortek Lamps.
If you search for Vortek you will get the company's name and address...
The spectacular display of the plasma arcs, and the vortex tube made a deep impression on me. At the University of BC I selected Engineering Physics to learn more about the plasma physics and vortex technology.
From this simple event in my life my Vortex Story developed. Here is an example of the Vortex Engineering GlidArc activities.