If you’re driving on the back roads of Oakland late at night – and no, we won’t ask why – you might encounter an unexpected sight: a kind-looking old man standing next to a 17-meter-high Tesla coil. If so, don’t worry: it’s actually Greg Leyh, aka Lightning on Demand, testing his terrifying lightning machine again.
Leyh is something of a legend at the outer limits of electrical experimentation. He’s been cited as an inspiration for Styropyro, whose reality-threatening experiments we talked about recently, and while you might not know it from looking at him, he has a long history of building some of the world’s craziest gadgets. Leyh’s backstory includes a long participation with the San Francisco-based performance art collective Survival Research Laboratories, whose constant events today are the stuff of legend: think of the meeting place between Throbbing Gristle and BattleBots, organized in a gloomy place under a path that does not care / or does not care about safety.
Watching SRL events today is a window into a completely different city and a completely different time, when a group of nutters can do things like build a V-1 rocket that produced 300 calls to the city’s earthquake line or release a six-legged robot controlled by a pet. One suspects that today’s San Francisco would not accommodate such jobs, and indeed, SRL appears to be out of business today.
Leyh hasn’t done anything, though. A year or so ago he introduced an improved version of the device he calls the Lorentz plasma cannon, and this month he returned with a proposal for another long-term project: a giant Tesla coil. As he explained, he began building the device in 1990 with parts from an Oakland scrapyard, and when it was completed, it was the largest working Tesla coil in the world. It was used in SRL programs, often to disable “hostile machines” by cooking their onboard electronics.
As Leyh explained, the improvements that have been made are mainly focused on strengthening the current output that can be sent along with its arcs. He explains: “Tesla coils can produce very high voltages, but… Amplifying these currents involves connecting a large boost to the main center of the device when its arc touches its target. This creates a channel of conductive plasma through which a dangerous amount of current can be discharged.
Of course, doing this is not easy. Power generation requires the use of something called a “pulse forming network,” which – as its name suggests – creates a short wave of high frequency. The challenge is to time the pulse just right so that it passes through the coil and out of the arc, rather than into the coil sections. “This last part,” Leyh notes strongly, “is very important if we want to do the experiment more than once.”
Leyh’s Atacama-dry delivery is a highlight of his videos, and he’s perfect here. The combination of the pulse network / plasma channel works well, and shows the difference between the effects of the amplified pulse and the unstable arc of the standard Tesla coil with each in an incandescent light tube. The unboosted arc causes the tube to glow. While adjusting the pulse, Leyh explains “the tube should be very bright.” Tube correctly it explodes.
A few minutes later, another terrifying arc is sent to one of the small buildings that Leyh built to demonstrate the potential effects of an unprotected structure. The results were “loss of structural integrity,” which is really another way of saying that the building is damaged.
The element of resistancehowever, it comes at the end of the video, when Leyh unleashes the full power of the coil on an unharmed Ford Econoline van. Draining completely dissolves the motor’s electrical current, corroding every part of the wires inside the copper reservoirs. Or, as Leyh put it: “It seems [car’s] electronic devices … were badly affected by the power surge. ”
The video closes with Leyh explaining that while the machine currently has a working range of about 30 feet, an effect called “relativistic runaway breakdown” could “improve strike speed by a factor of 10 or more”. It might open a portal to the netherworld, but those are the risks you take in the outer realms of science. Godspeed, kind sir.
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