Frank Schott. Greg Leyh
One cold, clear night five years ago, Greg Leyh stood inside a cage atop a 39-foot steel pole. Waving a metal rod like a magician on a mountaintop, Leyh shot lightning bolts to the ground, creating brilliant white tracks against the black sky. He had built Tesla coils before, but this was the first time he'd conducted electricity from on high. The effect was mesmerizing. "They looked like cracks in the black fabric of the universe," he recalls. "Like seeing through to the other side."
Terry Leonard. Leyh (inside the cage at top) builds supersized Tesla coils like this one, which he tested in San Francisco in 1998.
If Leyh's hobby sounds dangerous, it is. The 2 million volts generated by his biggest coils can cause severe burns. But Leyh knows his stuff: By day, he designs power converters for Stanford Linear Accelerator. After hours, the electrical engineer indulges a passion for lightning-on-demand that's shared by other members of the Tesla Coil Builder's Association. The coil, invented in 1891 by Serbian-American scientist Nikola Tesla, is a resonant transformer that builds up charge at one electrode until the voltage becomes so great it throws off sparks.
Leyh has constructed dozens of coils since the 1980s. Now he's campaigning to build a pair of 115-footers somewhere in the Southwest. The cost: about $6 million. He hopes to cover expenses by, say, selling machine time to the FAA (to study what happens when planes get hit by lightning), and by opening an on-site gift shop, bar, and museum of electrical oddities. So far, no investors have expressed interest, but Leyh is optimistic. After all, Nikola Tesla funded his own giant coil by marketing it to J. P. Morgan as, of all things, a communications device.
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