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Tesla Coils


Lord Safey

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I was looking into making one. I believe their is are some people on the forums who know tad bit more about electrical devices then I. My experience with electricity is mostly high school and fresh man college robotics which may or may not help. Have done some research on my own but just don't feel comfortable with making one myself yet

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I think the first step is travelling back in time and killing Hitler. Once you accomplish that, the rest should be simple. Just remember that the coil's weakness is power; if the Allies black out the base, nothing will stop them.

 

(In seriousness, I can't help you. I didn't even know that casual hobbyists could make them -- the ones I've seen were huge.)

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Originally Posted By: Dintiradan
I think the first step is travelling back in time and killing Hitler. Once you accomplish that, the rest should be simple. Just remember that the coil's weakness is power; if the Allies black out the base, nothing will stop them.

(In seriousness, I can't help you. I didn't even know that casual hobbyists could make them -- the ones I've seen were huge.)

Not so sure killing Hitler would be the good idea it's made out to be. World War II was the catalyst for epic technological advances, especially due to the Nazis.
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Originally Posted By: Cthulhu
Not so sure killing Hitler would be the good idea it's made out to be. World War II was the catalyst for epic technological advances, especially due to the Nazis.


if you kill off the medieval church then it will balance out...
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Originally Posted By: Ephesos
Dangit Diki, I barely saved myself from getting sucked into the site again. That was mean.

Lucky you. I only saved myself by switching to Cracked before I got to the second sentence...

Ooh, top 6 haircuts of the late 18th century Ottoman Empire... *clicks*
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It's your own fault for clicking on a link without first seeing what it is.

 

Alternatively, it's your fault for not bothering to memorize all the common pages on TVTropes beforehand so that you can easily escape.

 

(The downside to the second strategy is that they've gone and renamed so many of their pages, but Dikiyoba gets around it by assuming that any new page is simply an old one that's been renamed.)

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Actually I think the medieval Christian church is now thought of as a critical positive contributor to the scientific revolution. There's a period of a couple of centuries of proto-scientific, post-Aristotelian medieval thought, that just doesn't make the cut for any short layperson history, because everything these people did was superseded by folks like Kepler, Galileo, Descartes and Newton. But Kepler and crew did not simply leap by magic genius from benighted Aristotelianism to modern science. They were all products of their time, and their time was the product of the time before it, which led up to them in a lot of critical ways that are hard for us to appreciate because we take them all for granted.

 

Since as we now know natural law exists and is accessible to scientific investigation, in retrospect the scientific revolution was probably inevitable, given the steps towards science that had been made in late medieval Europe. In this sense it was those nearly forgotten protoscientific scholars who made science, and they were all clerics in good standing, supported by the church. And although they were smart guys, all right, they were not magic geniuses, either, but products of their time. They were critically supported by some unique institutional features of their church-dominated society, such as the legal autonomy of universities (none were secular then) and monasteries, which was a crucial advantage not shared by comparable institutions in the Islamic world or in China.

 

In short, the medieval church may have had no idea what it was letting itself in for, but to the extent that there was any dominant cause of the development of natural science, the medieval church is the leading candidate for the role. Anything it did later to oppose science, such as condemning Galileo to house arrest, was no more than flinging a bucket back against a flood that it had itself unleashed.

 

As to making a Tesla coil, I think you can just google it. The point of a Tesla coil is to make huge voltages to produce lightning. The huge voltages in themselves aren't necessarily dangerous — sparks you get from scuffing your feet on a thick carpet have enormous voltages, in the same range. But with enough power to make really huge sparks, you've definitely got something dangerous. Do not fry yourself. If there are instinctive mammalian fears in your hindbrain about tempting the angry god of lightning, you should listen to them. They're not all wrong.

 

If you do get it working and don't die, though, post pictures! That would be awesome. If you do it, I might try it myself. I've always wanted to.

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Originally Posted By: Downside-Up
Let me google that for you. Can't vouch for that method, but it looks all right.

—Alorael, who doesn't believe in being saved from TVTropes. Your only hope is to be consumed first.



I have seen this one but homemade capacitors make me uneasy as most capacitors hold enough of charge to be lethal. Ones made in factories have qualified electrical engineers add safety features that only intentional vandalism can overcome. My idea is that figure out what the capticane is on the home made ones are and buy equivalent factory made capacitors.
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