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Lightning On Demand
Effugas writes "The technology isn't new--Tesla coils have been around for a century. However, I doubt very many of us have seen much like the pictures located at Lightning On Demand--consider that, for most of these displays of extreme electrical discharge, there's a guy sitting *inside* the main electrode. I'm trying to imagine sitting in a metal ball while thirty foot electrical streamers erupt around me. Got Drool? "
Actually, a Tesla coil produces longwaves (below 500Khz). Interestingly, it tends to not harm a person, other than removing hair. It makes for really great demos where you hold a neon tube in one hand, and a tesla coil output in the other.
After reading the excellent book Tesla last year I feel that Nicola Tesla was the Linus Torvald of the 19th Century.
Direct Current power was king. Thomas Edison's company was lighting much of the country with his D.C. lightbulbs. A young eastern european came to work with him. Nikola Tesla. Tesla was an EE genious. Tesla told edison about his Alternating Current power and how it would change the world, edison brushed him off and cheated him out of money.
Tesla had a renewed vigor to use his AC current so he went around looking for someone to support him. Finnally he found someone in Mr. Westinghouse. Tesla worked night and day for years perfecting his A.C. power, until it was ready for primetime.
He had an exibit at the World Fair in about 1892 I think. His amazing projects were the highlight of the world's fair. People wanted his A.C. power. However, this is when the smear campaign began. Edison knew that A.C. was better than his D.C. for general use, but he was ready to anything to stop it.
Edison, and people from his company would go to cities that were thinking about adopting A.C. power and electrocute a couple of animals with high voltages, to show them how dangerous this, A.C. power was. They were probably the first FUD masters.
In the end the better technology won out. But it was long and hard. People don't know about Nikola Tesla, even though he is responsible for almost every thing related to electricity in our lives. Everyone knows about Thomas Edison. But look who won
geach
I'm wondering if that refers to the SRL Shock Box that was shown at an Artspace installation several years back. Basically a huge capacitor with exposed plates, you could throw metal objects (cans, etc.) at it and it throw them back. (Actually, the can would short out the capacitor, some of the metal would vaporize and propel the can back, more or less.)
Moderately cool, but the Electrum (Tesla Coil) was way better.
I'm a nature photographer.
If you ever get a hold of a 2uF capacitor or greater that can take about 8KV, try it. Just charge up the capacitor with the two charged plates parallel and just close enough...
At this point, be sure to wear some good safety glasses as parts will fly at high velocities. Drop an old integrated circuit between the two plates and watch it explode. Great fun to show off as it makes the loudest bangs while pelting everyone with the flying pieces.
Actually, removing hair like burning it off (only the hair, the process is painless). It's effect is very localized to the area where the corona touches your skin. I'm surprised that women don't use the effect instead of hot wax and such. It will grow back the same way hair that is pulled out will. I tested that on a small spot on my arm.
Meanwhile, over at a the Lightning On Demand web site, a very pissed off Marc Andreesen enters the address of the Redmond conferance room into the Electrum 130kW LOD web site and ZAP! Bill G. is struck by lightning.
I can dream, can't I? :)
I can't believe I forgot to link in this psychotic little page on their site. These guys have actually hacked together a Taser Gatling gun using their prodigious electrical skills.
;-)
:-)
Whoa.
For people like me, who grew up in Northern California and walked outside a few months back in slack jawed amazement for his first exposure to a lightning storm, mass electrical generators of any kind are damn cool, simply because we don't get much of that around here.
The equivalent, of course, is when you take someone from the east coast, or the midwest, and toss a 5.0 quake at them. No big deal to Californians...Armageddon to everyone else
Actually, there are some very, very cool tricks that can be done with static generators. When I was very young, we picked up a "negative ion generator"--essentially a device that used some technology to create a standing static charge. Connect the leads to a big metal bowl, fill the bowl with flour or salt, and as you move your positively charged hand into the bowl, negatively charged particles literally fly onto your hand, (I assume) electrostatically coating it. Fun for the entire family.
Nothing, of course, like being in that metal cage. My god! That thing was built in my hometown! How could I have never seen it
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Okay, how many people really trust Faraday that much ? :-)
NP
Can you sum it up in a word? *No.* In a noise? *Whuuuurghhhhh!*
When the mad scientist running the show got inside the cage at the top, he first said, ``and now we're going to have a highly graphical demonstration of Faraday's law.'' He said that he didn't think anyone had ever been inside a running Tesla coil before, because nobody had ever built one large enough to get inside of before. Afterward, he said, ``I feel odd, but it's not entirely unpleasant.''
(This is why I like San Francisco. ``Hey, let's go check out the World's Largest Tesla Coil tonight'' just isn't the kind of thing you're going to hear in other parts of the world.)
Another interesting site is www.austinrichards.com . I think this was the guy at Burning Man this year who had a tesla coil mounted on top of a delivery van: he was standing on top of the truck wearing a Faraday suit and waving a metal rod around, letting the lightning hit him directly, the whole time shouting through a loudspeaker, ``I am Doctor Megavolt'' or something like that. It was sublime.
This reminds me of the Boston Museum of Science's Theater of Electricity... very neat.
"The sign on the wall says 'Danger 100Kv.'"
I have heard that tesla was really wrong on a lot of things. He was really against Eistein's theories and believed in the aether wind and other theories that have pretty much been disputed. I know there are some poeple out there that still believe that einstein's theories are wrong and that tesla was and is right. He beleived the universe was filled with KE in the air waiting to be tapped and other things that people just no longer accept, well, there are still a few out there. What was so great about this man if so many of his theories were reasonably disproved. Yes, he was a leader in developing AC current but like newton, he sort of went off the edge after a while (newton believed in alchemy and other strange things near the end of his life). I guess my question is why is he so revered by people. Anyone else have some insight into this...
You'd like Vermont, ayup. In the summer we had some storms during which the emergency broadcast services told everybody in town to unplug everything in the house and stand away from windows and walls :) that was a pretty good storm. Some of the lightning strikes were going on _right_ at ground level. If you think J. Random Storm is impressive, you ought to see what it's like when the bolt _doesn't_ originate 8 miles up in the air ;) smash! wham! explode! ;)
I wonder how long it would take that thing to
cook a frozen convienence store burrito.
Just a thought.
:)
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Nifty.
But while it's nice to see these people expanding so well on tesla's work with AC electricity, it would be nice to see these people looking at some of his other work. Why, for instance, have these people done nothing involving free energy, antigravity, FM radio, or warping of the space/time continuum?
Just because the government doesn't want you to know about these important advancements doesn't mean we should totally ignore their worth while using tesla coils to blow things up. For example i'll bet a pure-space free-energy reaction would look pretty cool wth Hemos sitting inside of it.
Just a thought.
-mcc-baka
7H3 7RUTH 15 0U7 7H3R3!!
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Massive electrical charge has a well known history of clearing the mind.
Just ask Hemingway, who suffered through quite a bit of electroshock assisted mind-clearing(he lost almost all of his memory...supposedly one of the reasons he shot himself.)
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
I helped out during the 97 SRL show in Austin TX, they brought one of Greg's big Tesla coils.
The machine was a work of art if you ever got to see it closeup. He fed it with a bank of transformers that took 440 3Phase from a 300KW generator that we rented and stepped it up to about 10KV DC . The base of the Tesla coil has a motor driving a 1 inch thick aluminum disc with large copper electrodes bolted to the rim. The 10kV was fed to a stationary electrode on the bottom, jumped the gap when the rotating electrodes aligned with the top electrode which was connected to the primary coil. The operator pedastal controlled the speed of the motor, it was really interesting to hear the pitch of sound change as he tuned up the coil to get the highest voltage for the day's humidity and other variables. The primary was about 6 turns of copper busbar about 1/2 inch thick and about 2 inches wide. Really beefy looking since it carried about 100KW. The secondary coil had what looked like 0 gauge battery cable wrapped around a spool about 15 feet high tooped with an aluminum toroid. I think Greg said he got 2 million Volts at 50mA at the top electrode. He brought that same coil out to Burning Man in 1998, it was very popular, you could hear it across the whole Black Rock City.
The one thing that was pretty neat was that one guy at the SRL97 show built a Faraday cage suit out of heating ducts and wire with a birdcage as the helmet and he walked up to the big coil while it was running. I was filming him on his first try of the suit, you gotta trust your physics at that point... The next night they tried it again and really freaked out some state trooper who was watching from across the street. They said he came rushing over with the car lights flashing and got out of the car and started yelling at them 'What the hell do you all think you are doing!!'
It looked like the same suit that DR MegaVolt was wearing this year at Burning Man. He was standing ontop of a Ryder truck with a 5foot hight Telsa coil and was doing a lot of stunts with the electricity as one of his minions was exhorting the gathered crowd with a bullhorn 'All hail Dr MegaVolt... Bow to the power of Dr. MegaVolt.. Give us your offerings of love and food and alcohol and other things....' The crowd would give him some offerings to be held up to the coil where the arc would make them burst into flames. Quite cool...
Starman97@Gmail.com (bring it on spammers)
If you live in the northeast, or ever travel there, be sure to check out the lightning show at the boston museum of science. they have the worlds largest van de graaff generators, with a guy in a cage that gets hit by bolts. Also, the museum is just great in general.
Heh, you thought just putting them in the microwave was cool, Now show what you think of those inferior OS's/ISP's Tesla Coil CD Zapping
"Hope is the denial of reality, it is the carrot dangled before the draft horse in a vain attempt to reach it" - Raistl
Actually, whether "sparky" is a real person (which I doubt judging by the lightning through his hand) or not doesn't really seem to matter. He can't be inside the Faraday cage. The fluorescent lightbulb around his head is lit, and as we all learned in Physics 101, there will be a net zero electromagnetic field inside the cage.
The reason that the fluorescent lightbulb is lit is because of the stupidly huge electromagnetic field created OUTSIDE of the Tesla coil. That field will light fluorescent lightbulbs in the vicinity (an area proportional to the square root of the coil power...)
This actually brings up a good point... Tesla himself was a big advocate for using Tesla coils to power people's lights. He even at one point built a tesla coil large enough to light an entire town (I don't remember exactly where it was.) However Tesla coils, while convenient because nobody needs silly things like cords or sockets for their lightbulbs, use up stupid amounts of electricity and are REALLY noisy. The story continues that Tesla finally finished the project, flipped the "big switch" and drew so much power that he shut down the power grids in several states.
Just some nice, Sunday morning, anecdotal remarks.
"That's right babe. Just call me Zeus."
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
FWIW, Greg Leyh knows what he is doing. He is a pro and isn't going to get anyone killed or blow stuff up. The demonstration with someone inside a sphere isn't as dangerous as it appears. Electricity follows the shortest path to ground. The sphere is grounded so the electricity hits it. Same things with power lines etc.. Electrum is the biggest coil I'm aware of next to the master himself, Nikola Tesla. He built a rather, uh, large facility in Colorado Springs near the turn of the century.
/. members haven't heard of Tesla Coils before. There is a mailing list w/ searchable archives at www.pupman.com. There are more pics there as well. Go see one in person if you get the chance. The pictures don't do them justice. :)
I build coils as well, though not nearly as well as Greg does, so I am aware of the danger and saftey issues. I'm surprised more
Actually, its 1.21 gigawatts... the conversion is that you've probably been pronouncing words starting with "giga" wrong ever since you got a computer with a harddrive bigger than 1000 megs.
The correct pronounciation of the "giga" prefix is "jigga". So that's a 1.21 "jiggabyte" drive you've got too...