{"id":559987,"date":"2026-03-25T15:27:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-25T15:27:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/559987\/"},"modified":"2026-03-25T15:27:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-25T15:27:08","slug":"kindly-uncle-unleashes-fires-of-hell-with-giant-boosted-tesla-coil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/559987\/","title":{"rendered":"Kindly Uncle Unleashes Fires of Hell With Giant Boosted Tesla Coil"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you happen to be driving round the back roads of Oakland late at night\u2014and no, we\u2019re not going to ask why\u2014you might happen upon an unlikely sight: a kindly-looking old gentleman standing next to a 17-foot-high Tesla coil. If so, don\u2019t fret: that\u2019s just nice Greg Leyh, aka Lightning on Demand,<\/a> testing his terrifying lightning machine again.<\/p>\n

Leyh is something of a legend in the outer limits of electrical experimentation. He\u2019s cited as an inspiration by Styropyro<\/a>, whose own reality-threatening experiments<\/a> we covered recently, and while you\u2019d never know it to look at him, he has a long history of building some of the world\u2019s most insane devices. Leyh\u2019s backstory includes a long involvement with the frankly batshit San Francisco-based performance art collective Survival Research Laboratories<\/a>, whose unhinged happenings are today the stuff of legend: imagine a sort of meeting place between Throbbing Gristle and BattleBots, staged in a bleak liminal space under a freeway with an apparent lack of regard for safety and\/or sanity.<\/p>\n

Watching SRL events today<\/a> is a window into a completely different city and a completely different time, when a bunch of nutters could do things like construct a replica V-1 rocket that generated 300 calls to the city\u2019s earthquake hotline<\/a> or unleash a six-legged robot walker controlled by someone\u2019s pet guinea pig<\/a>. One suspects that today\u2019s San Francisco would be rather less receptive to such activities, and indeed, SRL seems to be largely dormant today.<\/p>\n

Leyh hasn\u2019t been idle, though. A year or so ago he unveiled an upgraded version of a device he calls the Lorentz plasma cannon<\/a>, and this month he returned with an update on another long-term project: a colossal Tesla coil. As he explains, he began building the device in 1990 with parts from an Oakland scrapyard, and on its completion, it was the largest operating Tesla coil in the world. It was put to work at SRL shows, often to disable \u201chostile machines\u201d by cooking their on-board electronics.<\/p>\n

As Leyh explains it, the upgrades made since have focused largely on boosting the output current that can be sent along its output arcs. \u201cTesla coils can produce fantastically high voltages,\u201d he explains, \u201cbut \u2026 low output currents.\u201d Boosting these currents involves synchronizing a large boost in the device\u2019s primary with the moment its arc touches its target. This creates a channel of conductive plasma through which perilous amounts of current can be discharged.<\/p>\n

Of course, doing this isn\u2019t straightforward. Boosting the energy requires the use of something called a \u201cpulse forming network,\u201d which\u2014as its name suggests\u2014creates a brief spike of high current. The challenge is timing this pulse correctly so that it passes through the coil and out via the arc, rather than into the coil\u2019s components. \u201cThis last part,\u201d Leyh notes drily, \u201cis especially important if we want to perform the experiment more than once.\u201d<\/p>\n

Leyh\u2019s Atacama-dry delivery is a highlight of his videos, and he\u2019s in fine form here. The pulse network\/plasma channel combination works a treat, and he demonstrates the difference between the effects of a boosted pulse and the unboosted arc of a normal Tesla coil by one of each at an incandescent light tube. The unboosted arc makes the tube glow. As he prepares the boosted pulse, Leyh explains \u201cthe tube should become noticeably brighter.\u201d The tube duly detonates.<\/p>\n

A few minutes later, another terrifying arc is sent at one of the small buildings Leyh has built to demonstrate the potential effects on an unshielded structure. Those effects turn out to be \u201ca loss of structural integrity,\u201d which is certainly one way of saying that the building is basically obliterated.<\/p>\n

The pi\u00e8ce de resistance, however, comes at the end of the video, when Leyh unleashes the coil\u2019s full output power onto a hapless Ford Econoline van. The discharge completely liquefies the car\u2019s electronics, reducing every piece of wiring within to bubbling pools of copper. Or, as Leyh puts it: \u201cIt appears that the [car\u2019s] electronics \u2026 were adversely affected by the boosted energy pulse.\u201d<\/p>\n

The video closes with Leyh explaining that while the machine currently has a working range of about 30 feet, an effect called \u201crelativistic runaway breakdown\u201d could \u201cdramatically boost the strike range by a factor of 10 or more\u201d. It may also open a portal to the netherworld, but those are the risks you take at the outer reaches of science. Godspeed, kind sir.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you happen to be driving round the back roads of Oakland late at night\u2014and no, we\u2019re not…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":559988,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[49,48,216481,216482,314,66],"class_list":{"0":"post-559987","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-physics","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-greg-leyh","11":"tag-lightning-on-demand","12":"tag-physics","13":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=559987"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559987\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/559988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=559987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=559987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=559987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}