makezine.com: Electrical engineer Greg Leyh is no stranger to high voltage. He invites it, measures it, and controls it. Back in 2007, Leyh brought two 10-foot Tesla coil towers to one of the first Maker Faires in the Bay Area, and he was featured in Make: Volume 11. That was certainly nowhere near his first foray into building coils. You could safely say he’s been a lifelong enthusiast and researcher of high voltage and nature’s incarnation: lightning. Notably, he’s previously built two coils that were the largest in the world at the time they were built. One was a 40,000-watt coil that could throw 25-foot arcs, built in collaboration with Survival Research Labs, using reclaimed materials. The other was a 130,000-watt coil commissioned by artist Eric Orr, which stood four stories tall and was capable of throwing 50-foot discharges.
2 comments:
This is an awesome combination of art and science. Leyh gets to continue to build coils and run tests on lightning, and artists that contract him can have this amazingly unique aspect to their piece. I love that a community of artists and their workspace, American Steel, were more than willing to let Leyh work with them, and would even help him with welding. This is what I love about events like the Maker Faire. I only recently found out what they were and I'm dying to go to one!! These Faires allow for creative, scientific, and inventive minds to come together, show the community what they've created, and let them interact with it all. I bet theres a cool way to integrate portable lightning into a theatre show (though perhaps its safety would be too questionable for the audience), and there's no doubt in my mind that places like the Maker Faire hold cool ideas and technologies that could be involved in theatre.
Im upset that the the investors of American Steel were so quick to go back on the promise they made as prospectors. Perhaps I can understand why something like a giant Tesla Coil would put executives on edge, but to also kick most of the artists after promising "preserve the vibrant artistic community” in order to get the venue disgusts me. Too often does capitalism and the need for a certain aesthetic get in the way of artist and creators just trying to create.
Over three hundred years ago, Benjamin Franklin experimented with lightning to investigate the nature of electricity. According to Leyh, conventional electrical theory says that lightning shouldn’t happen at all! It’s hard to believe that in the 21st century, we still don’t know how storm clouds can produce lightning. I think that's absolutely absurd. We have sent machines to the farthest reaches of our solar system, but we can't figure out why lightning happens!? Regardless, lightning is an absolutely fascinating phenomenon. Though we may understand electricity, lighting has just as strong an emotional impact on us as it did those in the British colonies before the Revolutionary War. Lightning as a symbol has been used in advertising for decades now as a symbol of power and ferocity, and this trend shows no sign in slowing with many naming conventions from Apple, such as their "thunderbolt" and "lightning" connectors.
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