Slashdot Mirror
Working On Man Made Lightning
New submitter PerlJedi writes "There is a very cool write up on the Make blog about an effort to build the world's largest tesla coils. Quoting: '"Somehow lightning can generate huge discharges with only about a fifth of the voltage per foot that lab discharges require," Leyh explains. "The part that especially fascinates me is that this mysterious ability kicks in around 200' in length, which is right at the edge of what we can produce with a practical machine." Leyh wants to see if humans can replicate this voltage economy effect, and has launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the building of two 10-story Tesla Coil towers (obviously superseding his current coil-size world record).'"
I feel sorry for that house in the middle. It looks like a nice one too. But to be placed under massive Tesla coils will greatly reduce resell property. Perhaps it is one of those older houses where the ghetto was built around it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I'm absolutely electrified to see the results of this experiment! I would be shocked if he doesn't get enough funding to try it.
Kidding aside, I too am curious about why lightning can exist at lower voltages. Do longer distances allow for more pathways in the air, where enough variances in humidity etc, to allow lower dielectric breakdown on average?
could possibly go wrong?
"Man made lightning" and "Man-made lightning" mean two different things.
In soviet Russia they actually have some of these already:
darkroastedblend.com/2007/07/creepy-high-voltage-installations.html
Completely misread the title as
"Man made lighting" - I was getting all excited thinking they would soon be able to add photo-luminescent genes into people.
You know at the bars all the men are going to want to hit on the girl whose buttocks glow like a fire fly.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Maybe something happens in storm weather that you aren't accounting for.
I don't care if it works or not, I just want a pic of me in front of two 10-story tall Tesla Coil towers wearing my xkcd shirt.
And perhaps a white lab coat, monocle and puffy white wig.
And pants, yes pants as well.
Rubber boots in motion.
The reason for the "mysterious ability" of lightning is that the capacitor nature uses is made of a different material than the ones we use.
It goes like this |earth/another cloud| air molecules |clouds(water vapor)|.
Command & conquer Red Alert
What confuses me is that there seems to be a disconnect regarding this project vs. lightning... Tesla coils operate on relatively high frequency AC whereas lightning is a very slow DC process. If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say the lightning can get away with lower voltages because the charge buildup allows for partial ionization at charge concentration points (e.g. a lightning rod) which can create ion streams and render the atmosphere partially conductive thus reducing the required potential. That may not be quite right, but still I find it odd that one would try to replicate lightning using such a fundamentally different design; a marx generator seems far more appropriate. Does anyone know if they're planning on rectifying the output? I guess it's theoretically possible...
Also, Tesla coils generate a _huge_ amount of broadband RF interference (not to mention sound). It seems to me that building this thing would be far less difficult than simply being allowed to build it (and for good reason!). Do they have a location picked out and have they talked to local government and the FCC?
Harry Diamond Labs used to have a place down near Albuquerque that they used for zapping things with lightning and other big electromagnetic pulses. If you needed to simulate what happened to an airplane, radio system, or telephone switch near a nuclear explosion, that was the place to go. I don't know if it's still operational - Wikipedia indicates that HDL got absorbed into the Army Research Labs in the 90s, but at least the equipment should be in better shape in dry New Mexico than in Russian climates.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Yeah, and girls in bars generally prefer guys who use language like 'buttocks'. :-)
Resistance is divided by the area of the resistor. For instance, to resistors in parallel have R 1/(1/R1 +1/R2), which makes the R drop mighty fast for many resistors. When I learned as a teen that lightning is in the 10's to 100's of millions of volts, I thought that sounded really low for spanning such distances. But the resistor (sky) is obviously really big, so it made sense, I thought.
So basically what I'm trying to say is that I never considered it a mystery, but I guess that was just my ignorance. Also, according to this idea of mine, having the simulated lightning jumping between two points greatly narrows the size of the resistor. If he was running one tower and looking for the greatest arc distance in any direction then I suppose he would observe arcs more in keeping with the lengths lightning achieves.
Also I saw in a book from WWII era, that St. Elmo's fire-type glow was observed in 50 V submarine systems using gigantic amperages. So perhaps there is some poorly-understood effect that gives 5x arcs to lightning, but it may be an amperage-based corona effect that he wouldn't get from amperages that are relatively low compared to lightning.
Man made lightning has been around for years
...and it's starting to feel good!
I would have thought all it took was 1.21 gigawatts.
A pilot, in those days, was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth.-Mark Twain
It may be cool, but I'm a ham radio operator and if you build this thing anywhere within 10 miles of my house, I will come over and burn it down.
This is just a toy for rich techies. There are plenty of places where lightning is frequent enough that if you build a structure to attract it, you will get lots of hits from the real thing:
http://www.lightningsafety.noaa.gov/images/map.jpg
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
I read lighting rather than lightning and wondered why slashdot was posting a story a century late
Oh, you silly Tesla. Only you would want to build a giant coil of self-naming.
...when you can wear one as a personal MIDI player...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEgaI6WouQ0
Laters Sol "Have you found the secrets of the universe? Asked Zebade "I'm sure I left them here somewhere"
And poor conduct, too!
Why does he want to build a tesla coil? Why not build a lightning machine?
I'm not sure what they are called exactly, but At my university we have one that is about 20m if I remember correctly.
It's basically a bunch of capacitors that you charge up in parallel and then discharge in series to create the required voltage or something like that.
Man made OF lightning!
http://laughingsquid.com/tesla-coil-hat/
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I've got to admit that when I read that they were looking to build the world's largest Tesla Coils, I was wondering how loud the music they would be playing on them would be.
The show from playing the Dr. Who theme with Tesla coils that huge would be unbelievable.
And like earlier commenters, I think they're missing out on too many variables as to how lightning accomplishes what they're trying to duplicate in order for this endeavor to be of any practical use or gain any substantial further useful knowledge.
Gimme!