Hi all
I was browsing through the book "Analog Circuit Design: Art, Science and Personalities" and checked on Chapter 8, titled "True Analog Circuit Design". On page 59 in this chapter, Tom Hornak writes about how he got involved in electronics when he was younger. He explains his and his friends first hands-on experiment which dealth with electric arcs as thus: We used a 1kW smoothing iron as a series resistor and large iron nails as electrodes.
I had a dumb question about this, which is that what is the reason for using a resistor in this type of experiement? I mean, would there not be more current and therefore a larger arc if no resistor was used? How is the limiting of the current flow (by the resistor) desireable?