Talk:Floating water bridge

Media
It's pretty easy for me to produce media for this article. I shot another higher quality video of it, but the increased lighting made it impossible to see the starting arc, so I thought the pre-existing video was more informative. I did, however, upload this higher quality still which might be useful if the article ever grows. --Gmaxwell 00:42, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Merger proposal
I've just noticed that there appear to be two articles dedicated to the same experiment, done at different times by different people. I'm proposing that they be merged, since they in essence cover the same topic. However, I don't know which should be merged into what, or what has precedent over what. So, I'll simply note the two pages, the related info, make a humble suggestion and let the community decide how to handle it. Mgmirkin (talk) 07:23, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Recently, there was an article on Physorg: Water forms floating 'bridge' when exposed to high voltage. That apparently prompted an article on Wikipedia to cover it: Floating water bridge. However, a prior Wikipedia article already existed: Water thread experiment. That prior article was based upon an experiment [WASSERFADDEN (WATER-THREAD)] covered in an article by the popular hobbyist site run by William Beatty. 1 & 2. The question now becomes how to resolve this issue of two WP articles based on two distinct articles on the same topic (albeit the Beatty article mentions using a string between the beakers to initiate the water bridge prior to the string getting sucked from one beaker into the next, leaving only the water-thread between the beakers)? Mgmirkin (talk) 07:23, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

I've suggested a merger. However, I don't know which takes precedent. The Beatty material is obvious the senior source of the two on account of having been published in 1996, whereas the Physorg piece was not published until 2007. That gives the Beatty piece nearly a decade's headstart, chronologically. However, Physorg is the more "mainstream" / "reliable" source. However, the fact that Physorg has essentially "validated" the Beatty piece, lends the original article credence of mainstream authentication. Beatty's site is popular and relatively notable in its own right within the electrical hobbyist and non-mainstream science communities. Mgmirkin (talk) 07:23, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

My humble suggestion is to nix both the titles Water thread experiment and Floating water bridge titles, and merge the information from both articles into a new namespace such as Wasserfadden experiment, giving precedent/acknowledgment/official namespace to the 9-years senior experiment / article (the actual original experiment for Wasserfadden may have been considerably earlier). Both prior namespaces Water thread experiment and Floating water bridge would then point to the new namespace. I hope that's an amicable solution and not unreasonable. Anyway, discuss amongst yourselves, and have a good one. Mgmirkin (talk) 07:23, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Hm. Using a string to initiate the bridge isn't as interesting a phenomena as sufficiently short bridges can be maintained without electricity at all just due to surface tension. The Wasserfadden article makes no mention of deionized water, which is interesting because the phenomena did not occur for me without it (as discussed in phsyorg) would halt abruptly for me on the introduction even a small amount of of salt into the water (while other similar disturbances did not halt it). (The dyes I had available also broke the effect.). --Gmaxwell (talk) 20:35, 28 May 2009 (UTC)