[Mark was here]

If you stand close enough to a power line and hold a florescent bulb so that it glows, that's the effect of the electrical, not the magnetic field. This effect would occur even if the lines were DC.

Florescent bulbs glow when the energy stored in the gas is released. With AC the gas is constantly being charged and the energy is released. I'm not getting how a DC current could make a bulb glow, maybe just flash once.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

The energy comes from the external field. I thought that the principle was that it accelerates naturally ionized gas, the accelerated ions collide with other gas molecules generating more far more than the natural number of thermally ionized molecules. The glow is from the recombination of the electrons and ionized molecules. (The ionization engery is supplied by the external field, remember.) Thermal agitation will overwhelm the relatively small number of ionized molecules, (neutral molecules diffuse rapidly) so that there are always plenty of ions throughout the tube. The density of the gas is adjusted so that the mean free path of the molecules (at the design voltage) is much less than the tube length but long enough to allow collisions to result in more ions, and the recombination time is much much smaller that 1/120 seconds. Effectively the 60 Hertz is much greater than the time constant of the tube.

The Point is, it's the E-feild, not the B-field that couples to a florescent lamp.