Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion Physics Forum lamp glows with only one wire

i am an engineer in instrumentation. Once i was working with an emergency light. Meanwhile i observed that even when the lamp (Small flourescent tube) is connected at only one end, it is glowing. later i observed again that even witth only one teerminal of the lamp is conneected, (note that this type of lamps have 4 terminals, 2 in each side, out of 4, only 1 is connected)it is glowing. I repeated the experiment and found it is true.
One interesting thing is that the filament aat one side was fused in thaT lamp. When i connect the fused part also, it was glowing. Let me repeat, i was connecting only one terminal of the lamp.
i tied a lengthy wire to the terminal and to the emergency. But it was not glowing at tthat time. I reduced the length of wire, then it glowed.
i decided to check whether the lamp is taking any current. I connected a multimeter in series. But at that time i think, due to the length of wire, the lamp did not glow.
Anybody may please answer this. how the lamp will glow with only one wire connected to it? How it willll draw current only through a single wire? Note that during this entire period, the emergency was under battery power.

The emergency light uses and RF up converter to change the low voltage DC battery to a higher voltage to run the fluro tube.

Due to the high frequency RF it has considerable skin effect which is because of the high frequency the current wants to run along the skin between air and surface interface and it will do it over humans, plastic and almost anything that is semi conductive.

If you want to see a no wire fluro tube take the raw tube and place it near the tip of a car CB antenna and turn the CB on ... the tube will magically glow :-)

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSYj2lEaxhY)

The normal voltage meter will not measure the current because it is AC and far to fast for the meter which is expecting around a 50-60Hz power signal.

>>>> WARNING <<<<
Do not try this on a high power commercial CB's you can actually get bad RF burns to the skin.