A couple of videos I just discovered on the net demonstrate one of the most inefficient uses of electricity I’ve ever seen. From Wikipedia:
A Tesla coil (also teslacoil) is a type of resonant transformer, named after its inventor, Nikola Tesla. Tesla coils consist of two, or sometimes three, coupled resonant electric circuits.
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An important characteristic of his later, higher power coil designs was that the primary and secondary circuits were also tuned so that they resonated at the same (high) frequency (typically, but not always, between 25 kHz and 2 MHz). The later Tesla coil designs can also be used to create long electrical discharges. Today they are built by many high-voltage enthusiasts.
Apparently these resonating frequencies can be adjusted to give specific tones to the spark discharges that the coils make, and certainly if it can be done, it will be done by someone. Enter the coilers, Tesla coil enthusiasts. This past September they had their Lightning on the Lawn Teslathon in Wisconsin. These are a couple of videos of a pair of Tesla coils using a laptop computer to control their resonant frequencies by placing each on a different MIDI channel. From the description of the second video:
The music that you hear is coming from the sparks that these two identical high power solid state Tesla coils are generating. There are no speakers involved. The Tesla coils stand 7 feet tall and are each capable of putting out over 12 foot of spark. They are spaced about 18 feet apart.
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What is not obvious is how loud the coils are. They are well over 110dB. If you look at [the first video] which is from a different angle, you can hear the echo off the building and get a better idea of how loud it is.
From here I’ll let the videos do the rest of the talking:
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Yep, that is definitely a fast way to use energy. WOW, I had no idea that the tone of sparks could be controlled.