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With the battery ignition if you wired the coil the coil neg to distributor coil positive to battery spark jumped from spark plug wire to ground .If you reversed the wires plus to ground the spark jumped from ground to wire.The pencil was inserted between wire and ground end of spark plug and spark plug wire you could see which way the spark jumped.
Yeah, I remember those days. As far as I can remember, the theory was that the spark jumped easier from the hot center electrode for the same reason radio vacuum tubes had red hot glowing cathodes. An interesting fact though, is that OMC V-4 magnetos produced two positive sparks and two negative sparks per revolution. Just something to lay awake pondering on tonight.