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Category Archives: Mad Science!

Tesla’s X-ray studies: His ‘prediction’ of the TSA and backscatter vans.

In early 1896 Tesla had been working with a wide variety of Lenard and Crookes tubes, as well as single-electrode X-ray tubes of his own design, energizing them with upwards of 1,000,000 volts. He speaks in a number of articles about actually melting the glass vacuum envelopes and the electrodes with his prodigious and eponymous  […]

Tesla’s wireless ‘sensitive brush’ Bulbs (Or: The invention of the Fluorescent light)

In 1892 Nikola Tesla gave a lecture to the Royal Society of Electrical Engineers in London1, summarizing his experiments in what he termed ‘sensitive brush’ lighting. Tesla had been working with electrical discharge in evacuated glass bulbs, following the recent (1880′s) popularity of the Geissler tube and the discovery of X-rays. The idea of induction […]

Burning Man 2007 and 2008: My custom neon plasma tubes-

2007: The Green Man The First Green Man of 2007- Saturday eve, before the event. A priveleged view for the few of us insane enough to tinker with 15,000 volts from a bucket lift, in high winds,  while 85 feet up. The Garden of hand made plasma Delights, seen from the (relative) safety of the […]

The Fuxie tube (Also know as the ‘NSFW tube’, and the ‘Mugwump tube’.)

Named “Mugwump” in honour of the late William S. Burroughs: Renegade Saint, proponent of Free Speech and Thought, Revered Godfather of Obscenities, and child of the Burroughs Adding Machine dynasty -the popularizers of the Nixie tube. This tube is to be issued with laser-cut letters, in a numbered edition of 50 for high-voltage enthusiasts, tube collectors, […]