Fried my power supply by doing a bad thing

[Averagesupernova]

High-voltage stick rectifiers were made from silicon rectifier pellets, stacked end to end.

I recall those. You could lose a few and get by. But too many go missing from the stack and that is inviting trouble.

 

[Baluncore]

I recall those. You could lose a few and get by. But too many go missing from the stack and that is inviting trouble.

Each diode pellet was similarly leaky, like having a parallel resistor, so the reverse voltage was shared equally by all the diodes in the stack. The least leaky diode would drop the most voltage and so go short first, followed by a cascade of failures as each carried a greater voltage burden than before.

The 1S2 EHT tripler tube had much going for it. It wore an aluminium cap, that made the dust stand on end.