Sparks, Tesla coils, and lightning

I started organizing my bookmarks last weekend and came across a few nice sites on Tesla coils and big sparks.

I like the above link because it is a guy that has taken hobby Tesla experiments to a new level. He is even approaching performance art in some of his installations.

Not every spark comes from a Tesla coil and there is a nice site that shows various electrical discharges as well as having a few nice videos of scary arcs. The best thing about that last video link is the sound the arc makes as is forms and collapses. I hope you have a good audio system on your PC or perhaps a set of headphones may work. Nothing beats big speakers for putting the buzz in your belly that these sparks make. You can see the guy running from the arc on the video and I sure don’t blame him, we would be running too if we heard and saw that monster at full volume.

While we’re on the subject, how about Mother Nature’s sparks, lighting? Here is a nice gallery of lighting discharges.

Above is one of my favorites. I was the kind of kid that ran to the windows to watch the storms, at least until my mom ordered me to get away from the windows and plumbing fixtures. Ohio had some pretty good lightning but when my parents moved to Florida is when I saw modern electronics being blown up by discharge surges in the ac electrical grid.

And just to round things out, here is a video of Hans Camenzind, the inventor of the 555 timer IC, on Nikola Tesla, my fellow Serbo-Croatian that came up with the Tesla coil.