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)
Humans Love Helping Other Species
'At the ringside opposite them a table had been removed to make room for a large transparent plastic capsule on wheels.' - Robert Heinlein, 1951.
Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!)
is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for
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Humanoid Robots Building Humanoid Robots
''Pardon me, Struthers,' he broke in suddenly... 'haven't you a section of the factory where only robot labor is employed?''
Stratospheric Solar Geoengineering From Harvard
'Pina2bo would have to operate full blast for many years to put as much SO2 into the stratosphere as its namesake had done in a few minutes.'