Wow, I want to make a tesla coil as well, it looks incredible.
It's there a instructor manual on how to make this safely out there?

There are places that sell kits to build tesla coils. They tell you how to build them safely, not always how to use them safely. Do as much study as you can.

Pop is exactly correct. The spark gap primary circuit of my coil is 15 kV and the amps are enough to kill you. Plus capacitors can retain a stored charge for a long time.

The http://onetesla.com/ site offers decent kits but previous experience in soldering and building electronic kits are required. They give theory and safety tips as well. It is a solid state coil so a little safer than the ones that use neon sign transformers in the primary circuit.

Here's another site that offers solid state tesla coils.
It uses a 12 volt power supply.

http://www.high-techmagic.com/ez-catalog......0100.xsl

Happy New Year!
For New Year's eve, I loaded up Auld Lang Syne on my musical tesla coil and rang in the new year as we watched the ball drop on TV.
Anybody else do anything special for New Year's?

I blew up my liquid capacitor on my Neon transformer based system. This covered the inside of my metal box with dangerous PCBs. It was a dangerous and messy cleanup. We replaced the capacitor with a dry one. That is another safety consideration.

Pop,

The older capacitors did have PCBs in them. The new ones don't.
Yeah, I've stressed coils before and blew the capacitors. Exciting!
Good way for the coil to end in a bang!
I've been having fun playing with my solid state coil lately.
The sparks are not as hot or as long as my older spark gap coil.
But the old one doesn't play music and is not as portable as this one is.
And it's a different type of buzz but still fun to watch, listen, and to play with.

Pop,

Does your Tesla coil use just one neon transformer?
Mine has two 15 kV Franceformers in parallel.
Yeah, the primary is definitely lethal.
And the neon transformers are so heavy, I put them in a wheeled metal cart.

Mine is just one transformer. The Secondary coil is only a foot tall. Sparks are 8-10 inches. 160,000 volts.

Just saw this today:

Pop,

'The Special Head show goes beyond a traditional magic show.'
THAT's the understatement of the year! lol
The lightning from the fingertips is a cool touch. Actually the spark coming off the fingertips is hot enough to burn the flesh.
It is annoying. That's why you use metal thimbles over the tips so the spark can jump off them and not burn a hole in the flesh.
Although the Hutchinson effect is an actual thing, he is not using it in his levitation.
And the Hutchinson effect may have been discovered by Tesla years ago when he was involved in the Philadelphia effect.
Of course, that went horribly wrong and Tesla warned them not to have the crewman on the ship.
John Hutchinson not only could levitate objects but wood was melded into metal as if it melted together. Even he has had difficulties trying to recreate the effect.

Thanks for sharing a cool video...

My oneTesla coil has a MIDI port on the control box.
I can plug in a MIDI cable from a keyboard and directly control the coil through the keyboard.
If only I knew how to play keyboard! lol

Apparently there is a MIDI to USB cable where you can connect a computer to a keyboard and import or export MIDI files from the keyboard or computer.
So until I get better on the keyboard, I guess I could play chopsticks on the keyboard and ultimately through the Tesla coil...

I stumbled across this video of two people in special suits dueling each other on Tesla coils.
There is some serious power here!
Some ninja moves with high voltage. What's not to love?
Check it out here:



Enjoy!

Well I didn't know Tesla coil and plasma balls could make a fashion statement but apparently they can.
And such a pretty one too.
Pop, you ought to see if she can fill in for Tesla girl when she gets sick! lol

More Tesla coils.
This time from a hand held spark tester. Although it is a type of Tesla coil, it is an induction coil that produces a high voltage spark.
The buzzer type adjuster on the end of the induction coil was the oscillator of sorts and the kickback would cause the voltage multiplication.
They used it in hand held Violet Ray devices as mentioned here:



Enjoy!

Now this thread is about high frequency electricity and the Tesla coils that produce it.
Now Tesla coils are named for its inventor, Nikola Tesla.

I stumbled across a video that celebrates the incredible genius of this Wizard of Electricity, The Man Who Lit The World.
Come watch this magical adventure where digital technology and illusion will bring to life one of the world's greatest inventors.

My grandfather, Hugo Gernsback, was a friend and colleague of Tesla and published his autobiography, My Inventions, in his magazine, the Electrical Experimenter. Many, many years ago I worked on a project trying to develop a version of Zombie that used a globe made of borosilicate glass filled with argon and neon. My plan was to use a variant of a Tesla coil to light it wirelessly. However, my full time avocation as a physician prevented me from finishing it. The difficulty at the time was making it quite. The rotating spark gap was too noisy. I could probably make I today without the rotating gap.

OMG!
I LOVE Hugo Gernsback publications!
My late father used to subscribe to and collect Radio News magazines.
He later bound 1 years' worth of magazines in a bound version, like a hardback book, sewn and glued just a a book with hard covers.
He used gold foil and a stamp to describe the title and year of the publication.
I still have those musty journals in my bookcase.
When he bound them, I think he removed the full pages of ads to trim the size of the books.
But I liked reading the old ads and their claims as well. It is amazing to look back into history during the 40s and 50s.

I also have some reprints of the Electrical Experimenter from August 1917 and it is interesting to read Nikola Telsa describing a high-frequency "electric ray" for locating submarines.

"The Reflected Electric Ray Method Is Illustrated Above; the High- Frequency Invisible Electric Ray, When Reflected by a Submarine Hull, Causes Phosphorescent Screens on Another or Even the Same Ship to Glow, Giving Warning That the U -boats Are Near."

This is NOT sonar, but radar! And Tesla was describing it in WWI, not WWII when it was used!
Amazing!

BTW, I HAVE a hand held plasma ball and was thinking a doing a zombie routine with it. But the plasma ball itself is heavy and fragile and one would need steel fingers to keep that thing aloft! LOL

But a flickering neon lamp that looks like a flame on a candle IS entirely possible and I played around with that. I developed a battery operated power supply that would feed into the neon and it is totally silent and solid state. No rotary spark gaps needed! LOL

I don't know exactly what you are describing as far as Rippley's is concerned. What I can say is that the general nature of a type of electrical phenomenon you are describing that is not harmful to humans is high frequency current such as generated from a Tesla Coil. Over the years I have had a number of ideas to use something like this but at the time the noise of the rotating spark gap was prohibitive.

My grandfather, Hugo Gernsback, published Tesla's Autobiography, My Inventions, in his magazine, the Electrical Experimenter. (August 19th was the 50th anniversary of my grandfather's death and I will be launching a website and the magazine will be available there.)

Click here to view attached image.

Andrew,

Talk about necro'ing a post! It is indeed a Tesla coil but they CAN be harmful in humans if not constructed properly. The early Tesla coils used series gaps or rotary spark gaps as the oscillators in the primary high voltage circuit. Later Tesla coils used vacuum tubes and newer coils use solid state oscillators which is more quiet except for the spark out at the end of the torroid. Most people say the high frequency high voltage is harmless due to the "skin effect", however, one of the Tesla coils I built using a series spark gap introduced a 60 Hz ripple across the secondary. And that CAN be dangerous.

BTW, the image of Tesla sitting in a chair in the space between the primary and secondary coils of his Colorado Springs magnifying transmitter is actually trick photography. A double exposure was made where Nikola Tesla is shown sitting in a chair inside his coil with the power off. He got out of the chair and then turned on the machine and took another picture with the sparks rolling all around. Although he wore thick cork heels to insulate him from the ground (he was already over 6 ft tall), he never sat inside the coil while it was operating. Tesla's demonstrations with high frequency and high voltage was done in New York (prior to Colorado Springs) using a much smaller transformer (more like a neon sign transformer) in a box filled with mineral oil.

Tesla was smart about using thick cork to insulate him from the ground. One time when I was playing with my Tesla coil that used to throw 4 ft sparks, I took a fluorescent bulb and drew the spark from the top of the coil. It went through my body and out the bottom of the leather sole of the shoes I was wearing. And jumped into the foot switch (which was grounded) that I used to turn the coil on or off. Fun times! But a little painful and you could see where the spark jumped out my sole and left a little burn mark...

Well, excuse me for breathing.
I was aware of all of this.
I picked the picture simply for its dramatic effect.
Building and using Tesla Coils is not something that should be done by someone who is not thoroughly familiar with HV.
There are many potential problems if details are not adhered to.
I have built them with both spark gaps and rotary gaps. The late Bill Wysock built the rotary gap for me and helped me get a toroid.
I was a member of the Tesla Coil Builder's Association and saw quite a few interesting demonstrations of coils and magnifiers.

Andrew,

I've seen this picture so many times before and being the grandson of Hugo Gernsback I suspected you might already have known the back story. But from the original post you necro'ed that person probably did not and maybe others.

Bill Wysock was quite the builder and I believe his 13M Tesla coil that went up for sale in 2009 was one of the largest coils in the world. When he passed in 2013 he was sadly missed by those in the Tesla community. I used to belong to the TCBA several years ago...