DIY Tesla Coils Will Shoot 260-Foot Lightning Bolt

Lightning's always fascinated me since elementary school,

especially when I tried to read up on it and discovered that

most of how lightning works is not understood.

My name is Greg Leyh.

I'm the principal engineer for Lightning On Demand.

We're at our warehouse in Oakland,

where we do all of the heavy assembly

and things requiring overhead cranes.

With the Lightning Foundry, we'll be able to recreate

some of the original conditions that are believed necessary

in order to initiate lightning up in the clouds.

So, why not throw it up on Kickstarter

to see what people think?

It's been an amazing response.

We need $348K to fund the project.

The scale of the Lightning Foundry is directed completely by

what we expect to find in terms of

where runaway breakdown occurs,

so we're going to set up the experiment

to cover a range from 20 to 80 meters

and support up to 200,000 volts per meter over that length,

and as a necessity, the machine needs to be

tall enough to support the voltage,

which is 12 million volts total,

and so you need two towers about 10 stories high.

If they were any smaller, they would just simply break down

along the surface of the towers and probably start a fire.

Lightning, where it initiates,

is so far away from the ground.

It's hard to get to, it's high up in the air,

and you never know exactly where it's going to start.

There's a high chaotic component to it.

If we do manage to trigger

a relativistic runaway breakdown event,

it'll be the first time that we've been able

to approach it closely with instruments

and actually try to determine what's going on

and figure out how lightning gains this unusual ability

to strike over long distances with relatively low voltage.

I never thought we'd even get this far without funding,

but we've managed to put an entire shop together,

including electronics, machining, welding, and everything.

It's just a matter of time

before I find the big transformer I need for free

or 10,000 feet of wire somewhere in Mexico

that's good enough to wind the secondaries.

With all the companies that have failed,

the stuff is out there.

It's just a matter of time to finding it or finding somebody

who thinks it's worthwhile to pursue this research.

(industrial beat)