I know it has something to do with magnets and copper? I’m not sure. I find them super fascinating though. I love seeing the little lightning sparks. Nikola Tesla is one of my favorite people of all time.
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Electricity and Magnetism are mostly the same thing. While they often seem completely different, the details of the physics are the same.
When you have an electric current in a wire, it makes a magnetic field. If the current changes, like in a wall outlet, the magnetic field changes. This seems unusual because we thing of magnets as static, but that’s actually only true for bar magnets because they are a special case.
When a wire moves in a static magnetic field, or a wire stays in the same place and the magnetic field changes, an electric current is formed in the wire. This is the concept used by generators and motors.
A Tesla Coil combines these two ideas. A small coil is connected to an alternating current, from a wall outlet. A large coil, with very many wires is mechanically mounted to the small coil. This is also very similar to the concept behind a transformer. The Tesla Coil trick is that the ends of the large coil are not connected in a loop. When the small coil makes a magnetic field, the large coil can’t conduct because the ends of the coil of wire don’t touch.
You might think this is a stalemate, because air doesn’t conduct electricity (that’s why unplugging things turns them off). But, it turns out that this isn’t true if the voltage is large enough. Just like Lightning, if you put enough turns in the large coil you can make the voltage high enough to break down the molecules of air and turn the air into a conductor. This gives the lovely sparks that come off the Tesla Coil.
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