Sometimes, all it takes to push the boundaries of science is a wacky idea and a machine to prove it. Greg Leyh, founder of Lightning On Demand (LOD), may do just that, with plans to build two, 10-story-tall Tesla coils that can shoot hundreds of feet of lightning.
“Historically, new scientific machines produce unexpected discoveries,” said Leyh in an e-mail interview. “Many new discoveries are viewed as problems, where others provide fascinating new insights.”
Leyh hopes the Lightning Foundry project will shine new light on the initiation process of natural lightning, which he explains on the LOD website. The problem with studying lightning, it states, is that as lightning forms, it uses tricks science does not yet understand to break through the air up to 10 times easier than what can be done with small-scale electric arcs.
But theories, and an experimental accident of the Siberian Institute for Power Engineering, found “laboratory-scale electric arcs start to gain lightning-like abilities once they grow past about 200ft in length,” according to the website.
Thus, the team at LOD aims to build two Tesla coils at the scale needed to generate electric arcs large enough to mimic natural lightning.
