Leigh is a legend in the outer limits of electrical experimentation. They’ve been cited as an inspiration by StyroPyro, whose own reality-bending experiments we covered recently, and while you’d never know it by looking at them, they have a long history of building some of the most insane devices in the world. Leigh’s backstory includes a long involvement with the San Francisco-based performance art collective Survival Research Laboratories, whose untouched events have become the subject of legend today: Imagine a kind of meeting place between Throbbing Gristle and Battlebots, staged in a dark liminal space beneath a freeway with no apparent lack of regard for security and/or sanity.
Watching SRL programs today is a window into a completely different city and a completely different time, when some nut could build a replica V-1 rocket that generated 300 calls to the city’s earthquake hotline or take out a six-legged robot walker controlled by someone’s pet guinea pig. One suspects that today’s San Francisco would be less sensitive to such activities, and indeed, the SRL appears to be largely inactive today.
However, Leh has not been idle. About a year ago he unveiled an improved version of a device he calls the Lorentz Plasma Cannon, and this month he returned with an update on another long-term project: a giant Tesla coil. As he explains, he began building the device in 1990 with parts from an Oakland scrapyard, and upon its completion, it was the largest operating Tesla coil in the world. It was put to work in SRL shows, often to disable “hostile machines” by cooking their on-board electronics.
As Leigh points out, upgrades since then have largely focused on increasing the output current that can be sent along its output arc. “Tesla coils can generate surprisingly high voltages,” he explains, “but…low output currents.” Boosting these currents involves synchronizing a large boost to the device’s primary with the moment when its arc touches its target. This creates a channel of conductive plasma through which dangerous amounts of current can be passed.
Of course, doing this is not straightforward. The energy boost requires the use of something called a “pulse forming network”, which – as its name suggests – creates a brief spike of high current. The challenge is to time this pulse correctly so that it passes through the coil rather than through the coil’s components and out through the arc. “This last part,” Leigh summarized, “is especially important if we want to do the experiment more than once.”
Leigh’s Atacama-dry delivery is the highlight of her video and she is in good form here. The pulse network/plasma channel combination works a treat, and he demonstrates the difference between the effect of a boosted pulse by one of each on an incandescent light tube and the unboosted arc of a normal Tesla coil. Flashes the unboosted arc tube. As he prepares the boosted pulse, Leigh explains, “The tube has to be quite bright.” tube duly blasted.
A few minutes later, another terrifying arc is sent over one of the smaller buildings constructed by Leigh, demonstrating the potential effects on an unshielded structure. Those effects come out as “loss of structural integrity”, which of course is a way of saying that the building is basically destroyed.
piece de resistanceHowever, the video comes to an end, when Leigh unleashes the coil’s full output power on a helpless Ford Econoline van. The discharge completely liquefies the car’s electronics, turning every piece of wiring into a bubbling pool of copper. Or, as Leigh says: “It appears that [car’s] Electronics…adversely affected by the increased energy pulse.
The video ends with Leigh explaining that while the machine currently has a working range of about 30 feet, an effect called “relativistic runaway breakdown” could “dramatically increase the strike range by a factor of 10 or more”. It might even open a door to Hades, but those are the risks you take on the outer reaches of science. God bless you, kind sir.
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