Twin Tesla Coils played the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy at the Lawn Teslathon in Baraboo, WS. There are no speakers; the music comes from the coils.
Sit back and enjoy.
(Musical tesla coil video)
These monsters of music stand a full seven feet tall and can output 12 feet of forked lightning (spark-wise). The two coils are placed eighteen feet apart; they are controlled over a fiber optic link by a laptop computer.
These coils produce well over 110 dB of sound; they were constructed by Steve Ward and Jeff Larson.
Science fiction fans may recall the Krang from Alan Dean Foster's 1972 novel The Tar-Aiym Krang:
The gigantic pipes of the machine pulsed with anvillike ringings, circlets of lambent electricity crawling up their sides like parasitic haloes. They crackled viciously, much as ripping plastic foil...
A thousand million jackboots drummed alien marches on the side of his head while a conspiracy of laughing electrons tried to pull his scalp off. He smelled burnt orange.
(Read more about The Krang)
Thanks to Eric Nodacker for writing in with the video and sf tie-in.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 12/6/2007)
Poul Anderson's 'Brain Wave'
"Everybody and his dog, it seemed, wanted to live out in the country; transportation and communication were no longer isolating factors." - Poul Anderson, 1953.
Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!)
is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for
the Invention Category that interests
you, the Glossary, the Invention
Timeline, or see what's New.
A System To Defeat AI Face Recognition
'...points and patches of light... sliding all over their faces in a programmed manner that had been designed to foil facial recognition systems.'
Smart TVs Are Listening!
'You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard...'