Monday, February 14, 2005

Well, it isn't a secret any longer--MONOPOLY! opens this Friday, at the Ohio Theatre. I've been keeping kind of a low profile on this one, letting it bake and simmer, talking to folks i know and trust about the show as it develops...but this Friday it gets unleashed into the wild for the first time, which means I'll be doing it live, creating the show with nothing but an outline and my fevered babblings.

Oh, and a Tesla coil...a few pictures of which I took when we went to see it the other day.

Coil

This is the coil in its nascent, slumbering state. It's a Class IV coil, capable of very long arcs of ionizing electricity--it looks like barely harnessed lightning when it runs, because it *is* barely harnessed lightning. You can actually smell the ozone in the air as the electricity pulses through it--magnificent.
Coilnameplate

Here is the faceplate of the coil above, revealing that at 1/2 a megawatt it is more than enough to kill a human, and the largest one on the island of Manhattan.

More will follow soon, including photos and notes from my trip to Wardencliffe, Tesla's only surviving laboratory site. For now I need to get back to the monologue.