The question that I get asked the most about the Tesla Coil is "What is it?". So frequently, in fact, that I thought it should have it's own page. (The second most asked question is "Is it like those Soviet defense tower things in Red Alert 2?": Yes. Yes it is. Except that these ones aren't designed to kill people. Usually. ^_^)

The Tesla Coil, at it's simplest, is a lightning generator. It takes in a lot of power, makes a LOT of noise, and results in your own personal thunderstorm. But that wasn't it's original purpose - for that, we need to look back to the turn of the 20th century, and to a Serbian-American inventor named Nikola Tesla. He was trying to achieve wireless power transmission, and his idea was to use magnetic resonance between coils of wire. It's the same principle used to charge modern electric toothbrushes, except on a much, much larger scale. And in 1899, he demonstrated this idea with a pair of what came to be known as Tesla Coils. It wasn't a particularly efficient method of transmitting power - there was a lot of power lost in all the annoying electrical discharges! In fact, if tuned correctly, a Tesla Coil should not emit any sparks at all; just electromagnetic radiation. But that would be no fun, would it?

The guts of the Tesla Coil consists of an inductor-capacitor circuit (All this will be further expanded on in the Build Your Own section.)