Bet You’ve Never Seen a Tesla Coil Do This…

How VPS.net’s Head of Datacentre Infrastructure has turned a Tesla coil into a musical instrument…

Primarily used in experiments into lightning, X-rays, and current, Tesla coils are the usual suspects in science and technology museums.

Pretty soon, though, one might turn up in the Royal Albert Hall or accompanying the Royal Philharmonic. That is, if the head of datacentre infrastructure at UK2 has anything do with it.

Over the past 6 months, Jim has created a way of using a Tesla coil to turn sparks into music.

“It started with my daughter’s school project,” said Jim. “She was learning about electricity and came home from school and said it had helped her understand what I do. I asked her what she had learned. She told me she’d found out that Thomas Edison had invented the light bulb. As some of us know, Edison didn’t invent the lightbulb, and this started a conversation about who were the real pioneers of electricity. I showed her some of the experiments that Nikola Tesla conducted, and some hairbrained projects started!”

He took inspiration from Boston, MA; the home of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), where a “singing tesla coil” had already been created by two students. These students crowd funded a product called oneTesla, to try to bring Tesla coiling within reach of more people interested in it.

As the lead times were long, and school projects were looming, Jim set to work on utilizing one of Tesla’s open source code for some of the parts of his own project. He also took inspiration from the fundamentals of their layout, and adapted it to UK voltages. The result was a UK-based musical Tesla coil.

Jim’s musical coil can only produce two notes at a time, and he’s used it to recreate some classic theme tunes and 8bit game tracks—think Tetris and Axel F. He’s also been playing around with recreating classical numbers such as Toccata and Fugue.

With “one never being enough” and being inspired further by “The Masters of Lightning,” he now wants to create a “Tesla coil orchestra,” with estimated costs running to about £2,000 to set up. Anyone want to help fund it?!