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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A tesla coil generates high voltage power through a series of AC transformers. When you change the current going through a piece of wire you will actually create a current in any nearby wires. So if you put two loops of wires close to each other and then alternate the current in one of them the other will also have alternating current at the same voltage, this is called induction. What you can do is to have three loops and then connect the two passive loops in series generating twice the voltage, but half the current. That is the basic design of the transformer. A tesla coil will typically have two or three of these transformers to get the voltage high enough with lots of windings each. The last one tends to be visible as its windings go all the way up the tower creating a massive transformer.
In order to create the alternating currents that this requires the original design calls for a spark gap AC generator. You charge up a capacitor and coil with a battery and when it gets to high enough voltage it will short circuit across a gap specifically designed to create sparks at the exact voltage. Because the plasma in the spark is more conductive then air it will maintain the spark until the capacitor and coil is drained completely. So you get an alternating current from the battery source. This can also be used to create higher frequency power from the relatively slow frequency of a power grid. However modern designs will often use electronics instead of the spark gap.
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