See spectacular Tesla coil demo Saturday at Alameda Point - East Bay Times

Alameda is the lightning capital of the Bay Area. You may not have noticed a flurry of bolts hitting the flag pole at City Hall (because none did), but strange and scientific flashes can be spotted on Alameda Point, and you can catch a glimpse of them on Saturday.

The mock weather phenomenon is the work of Greg Leyh and his crew at Lightning on Demand at a warehouse on Monarch Street, a stone’s throw away from the wineries and distilleries of Spirits Alley on the former Navy base. Leyh, an engineer with the climate and energy arm of Google and a former engineer with the Stanford Linear Accelerator, has built what he believes is the largest Tesla coil in the world — a 40-foot inflatable coil made of bounce-house materials and a stainless-steel netting that produces 3 million volts of electricity. The only objects in the world believed to produce more volts in this fashion were 1960s transmission line towers in Russia that have been dead for 50 years and are sinking their way back into the Siberian forests.

“The lightning we produce here is made of hot electrons, just like the real stuff,” said Leyh, 57. “They’re so hot they glow, producing a bluish white light.”

If you’ve never seen a large-scale Tesla coil before, the sight is one to behold. The towering object looks like a cone at it base and lengthens upward with a “doughnut” top. The “coil” part of the tower winds up the base 5,000 volts for every turn, producing the 3 million volts he uses for his educational demonstrations on the Island.

This week, Leyh will test his new — and what he says is the first and only — wirelessly powered vehicle at the demo, a recumbent bike fashioned with a high-voltage deck and motor that moves only from the unseen ambient fields surrounding the coil. You can’t see any power arcs, just a ghostly motion of the roadster as it circles the warehouse parking lot.

If that’s not enough to wow you, the other experiments certainly should. Leyh performs demonstrations on the effects of high electric fields on common household objects, showing and explaining via microphone how fields can light bulbs without wires and produce St. Elmo’s fire. He shows how the carbon, the “veins” in wood, can become visually brilliant conductors at higher electric fields and how electric arcs can reach across great distances in air. But Leyh doesn’t work with this coil for the cheap thrills. He’s been working with Tesla coils since the 1990s when a scientific paper he read about the origins of lightning piqued his interest.

“You’d think the creation point of lightning would be well understood by now, but it’s not,” he said.

And the origin of lightning in the clouds is still a mystery. Lightning on Demand, Leyh’s self-funded project, has a goal of building two towers three times Leyh’s current baby’s size — 120 feet — spaced apart by a football field to mock a real cloud’s lightning buildup and strike. What those experiments could do is possibly find ways of redirecting lightning from hitting, say, a forest and starting a fire to hitting a rocky hillside instead. He has already stumbled across how to wirelessly send horsepower to his “Tesla Roadster” bike without wires. What’s next? If his dream came true, he’d harness 16 million volts of electricity. He’d also expect some surprises.

“This could be groundbreaking science,” he said. “And we could build this thing full-scale in Alameda.”

Leyh just needs equally excited financial backers. His 40-foot version of the Tesla coil has traveled to namesake inventor Nikola Tesla’s former lab in Long Island to give a demonstration to a crowd of 200, for which 1,500 showed up and blocked neighboring streets and highways to get a glance. It was set up on Tesla’s original foundation where the scientist built a 187-foot tower in 1903 but lost funding before the power switch could be turned on. Leyh swears his coil ran better and with more power there.

Leyh also ran his coil in Little Rock, Arkansas, last year at the Clinton Presidential Center, where 5,000 showed up to a venue with a capacity of 1,500. Crowds have been minimal in Alameda so far. For lovers of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math), Leyh adds that the demonstration isn’t just an eye candy-type event.

“There’s no such thing as a free lunch. You gotta listen to the science,” he said. “I want people to come away from these demos with a sense of wonder about the possibilities out there in the universe.”

You can catch the coil burst at 1951 Monarch St. on Alameda Point at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 8 (or Feb. 15 if the demonstration is canceled due to the weather). Admission is free, but donations are accepted at a mini-Tesla coil display on the premises, one that produces arcs gentle enough to touch. Dress for cold weather and bring a chair if you’d like. The evening will also include a Q&A session afterward. Other events and more information about Leyh’s vision and Nikola Tesla’s science can be found at lod.org.

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See spectacular Tesla coil demo Saturday at Alameda Point - East Bay Times
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