Tesla coil enthusiasts: Danger and drama part of allure

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chicago/chi-tesla-coils-zones-02-dec02,0,3913995.story

(See video of high-voltage hobbyists at link above)

By Steve Schmadeke

Tribune reporter

December 2, 2009

Under a starry Saturday sky behind a Lake Zurich warehouse, three men unload a small flamethrower, electric cabling, neon-tube "light sabers," about 80 pounds of chain mail and two 7-foot devices that look like monster-movie props. Terry Blake, 48, Jeff Larson, 39, and Steve Ward, 24, call themselves the Masters of Lightning and are members of a small sect within the hobbyist world: Tesla coil enthusiasts. Their coils -- which generate beautiful, lethal electrical sparks up to 12 feet long -- are a much-modified version of the device Nikola Tesla invented to wirelessly transport electricity.

There are likely only about 1,000 Tesla coil hobbyists worldwide, but they have a growing following as parts have become more readily available over eBay and videos have gone up on YouTube. For obvious reasons, Tesla coils are popular among electrical engineers. And now their appeal is seeping into pop culture, most recently with a fan making a video of a new Flaming Lips song using a musical Tesla coil that the band posted on its Web site.

The Masters of Lightning have won their own measure of fame. Videos of their performances, typically before crowds of 50 to a few hundred, have been viewed more than 2 million times on YouTube.

The three use advanced industrial transistors to produce what is essentially 1.6 million volts of lightning to play music from Bach's Toccata and Fugue to the 8-bit theme from Super Mario Brothers. It works by precisely controlling the firing rate of the sparks, using them like a speaker to make music so ear-splittingly loud that last summer people living a half-mile away from the warehouse complained. snip

Not that you shouldn't be scared. Chip Atkinson, of Colorado, who runs a Tesla coil mailing list that has grown from 700 to 900 in recent years, has a nearly 7,000-word warning about the hobby's perils on his Web site. Among them: "Explosions can and do occur with Tesla coils!" (See here: http://www.pupman.com/safety.htm)

"It's one of those things where if you don't know what you're doing, it can be fatal," says Bert Hickman, 62, a retired Woodridge engineer and former Tesla coil hobbyist.

[Laelth]

1. Very interesting. Thanks. k&r n/t

:dem:

-Laelth