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Our demonstration was not quite this dramatic, but was close

In class we had an electrifying demonstration of Tesla coils courtesy of Mr. Vale, and I think it’s safe to say that it startled just about everyone with how much noise it made. He was able to safely touch the spark on top using a wooden rod without getting shocked, and a few brave volunteers tried the same thing.

Nikola Tesla was a revolutionary inventor who imagine every home having its own Tesla coil, which he invented in 1891, in order to generate electricity for the home. Mr. Vale demonstrated that by holding bulbs and light cylinders near the coil he can make them light up, and Tesla hoped to use this to power entire houses without the need for wires. Unfortunately the coils are not efficient enough and are highly dangerous, but in terms of wireless transmission of energy he was ahead of his time. Tesla was arch rivals with Thomas Edison, and both men worked with electricity in both AC (alternating current) and DC (direct current) forms, though only Edison’s technology caught on in the mainstream.

It’s too bad that the Tesla coil couldn’t be developed, because not having to use wires to power electricity would revolutionize how and where we could use them.

We continued our experiments using the Lego Mindstorm and NXT robotics set, and this time we used a flashlight with magnets inside it to produce energy through shaking, and then measure the output of energy through the robot.

The flashlight has several magnets inside of it, and when shaken the motion produces energy that is then sent to a sensor that measure the output. We did this several times for 30 seconds each at different paces, fast, slow, and just for fun three shakes in a row followed by a pause.

In the first round, Jason counted 85 shakes which came out to 153.4535 volts. Sarah’s trial had a count of 32 slow shakes which was came out to 53.09822 volts. Lastly, my trial had 29 staggered shakes (three shakes, then a moment of rest continued for 30 seconds) which came out to 36.59198 volts.

We  put this data into a graph in Excel and included a linear trendline. The data shows The more shakes,the more energy it produces, so for more energy the flashlight must be shaken longer and more frequently.