[calvinmorrison]

Timing lights for engines work this way for clarity: The distributor on an engine has a spinning rotor and a number of points (one for each sparkplug) on the outside the circle the rotor forms while spinning are a series of contacts across which electricity jumps to send voltage to the spark plug.

The timing light is then pointed at the flywheel on an engine, which has numbers or marks stamped into it. Each time the spark plug fires the timing light (which is hooked into that same current via induction) lights up for a brief amount of time to show at what timing offset the engine is currently at. (this all happens at hundreds of rpms a minute).

so I'm not sure it's the same