This is a demonstration of the Tesla coil.
The Tesla coil was invented by Nikola Tesla around 100 years ago
and what he wanted it for was he wanted to be able to send electricity through
the air. He wanted to control lightning so when I
turn this on, we should see some lightning strikes.
Now what causes the lightning strikes is that when this is plugged in it gets
up to a voltage around 1 million - 1 million volts. That's enough to ionize
the air which means it pulls electrons out of the air molecules
and when those electrons hit other air molecules, that's when we see the light
so let's see what the lightning looks like.
Now when the Tesla coil is on - if i came close to it
those lightning bolts would hit me and that would not be a good
thing but there's a little trick i can use.
There's something called a Faraday cage - that's what this is here.
Just a metal mesh and if I have the mesh between me and the Tesla coil,
the lightning bolt should hit the mesh and not go into the cage let's keep our
fingers crossed and let's give it a shot.
This is a demonstration involving dominoes. Now we all have seen the case
where you have a string of dominoes and they knock each other over but my
question is how big of a domino can a small
domino knock over? If you do the calculation, it turns out
to be twice as big. Twice as tall, twice as wide and twice as thick. So what I have made up here is dominoes
each one getting bigger and bigger and bigger
all the way until we get to the biggest one up here.
Now this is not an ordinary giant domino. I have put a machete on the top.
Now you may wonder why would I put a machete on top of a giant domino.
But without the machete, this is just a giant domino - there's not much you can do
with it but by putting machete on the top I can
use it to slice pineapples. Want to see it in action?