This week Tom Wales visited us. He had a big box that seemed to have something pretty interesting inside of it. It was a Tesla coil. Before Tom explained to us what that was, he talked about wireless systems and Bluetooth. He actually gave us a pretty interesting tip. When you are using a remote control and don’t know if it is working or not, you just have to take a picture of the front of it and if you see the signal, then it is working. This is because remote controls work with infrared, something that cannot be seen by the human eye, but it can be seen through a phone’s camera.

Getting back to the Tesla coil, it is an electrical resonant transformer circuit. As he explained to us, the dream of Nikola Tesla was to have a system that didn’t need wires.  The Tesla oil is actually really surprising because it was invented around 1891 and it can give electricity to a light bulb without touching it.

Here’s a picture of Tom showing us how the Tesla coil works.

In the picture, we can see Tom holding two light bulbs; those light bulbs wouldn’t work if they weren’t close to the coil.

Another interesting thing that Tom showed us was a light bulb that when it was close to the coil would light up but with two colors. One half of the light bulb would light on blue color, and the other one half would light up red.

After Tom’s showed that to us, I was a bit curious about how Tesla coils work, so I looked it up. It works with electromagnetic induction, where its magnetic fields create electric potential, which allows current to flows in light bulbs near it.

Here’s a picture of how it works.

Although Tom’s visit was short, I found really interesting (as a future electrical engineer and student) all the things he taught us. I’m looking forward to his next visit and can’t imagine what would he show us if he comes again.

If you would like to know more about Tesla coils, here is a link for it:

http://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2014/01/29/how_tesla_coils_work_108474.html