Describing main/ major and minor parts or components

These days, most stun-gun models have two pairs of electrodes: an inner pair and an outer pair. The outer pair, the charge electrodes, are spaced a good distance apart, so current will only flow if you insert an outside conductor. If the current can't flow across these electrodes, it flows to the inner pair, the test electrodes. These electrodes are close enough that the electric current can leap between them. The moving current ionizes the air particles in the gap, producing a visible spark and crackling noise. The circuit basically consists of a fairly standard single transistor transformer oscillator that steps the voltage up to a respectably high level. It's rectified by four diodes in series and used to charge a capacitor via a heavy winding on a pulse transformer. When the voltage is high enough to strike over the cross shaped spark gap, it dumps the capacitor through the pulse transformer generating a sharp pulse of high voltage on the secondary winding.

I always wondered how they managed to generate such a high voltage output from such a low voltage input. If you consider that the output of these things can be in the region of 100,000v (apparently) derived from a small 9v battery, then that makes for a voltage multiplication factor of over eleven thousand times. In reality it's even higher because the voltage across the battery gets dragged down by the high current demand. I brought the circuit board back as a technical novelty and have decided to post it here to satisfy the technical cravings of fellow techno dudes.