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)
Personal Sniffer Robots
'...The ticking combinations of the olfactory system of the hound.'- Ray Bradbury, 1953.
A Big Collection Of Small Books
'Black, oblong, no larger than the end of Paul's thumb... It's a very old Orange Catholic Bible made for space travelers.'- Frank Herbert, 1965.
Elon Musk's Debt To Science Fiction Books
A marvelous vision of a national fleet of electric phaetons that would truly revolutionize motor transport. And private space craft.
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.
Sky City's 220 Stories Are Go
'It rested among green parklands and... stood in total isolation, a glittering block of whites and flashing windows dotted with colors.'
Robo-Raven Flapping Wing Robot Bird
'When he had first built them, they had been crude indeed, flying mechanisms with little more than a reflex-response unit.'