The Tesla Coil

Lightning strikes a few times nearly every day at Carnegie Science Center, thanks to the fan-favorite Tesla coil, named after inventor Nikola Tesla. Visitors to Works Theater learn how Tesla’s invention, built in 1891, would go on to find applications in early radio-transmission antennae, television picture tubes, and sodium street lamps. But they also learn that the Science Center’s 10-foot-high creation is one of the country’s largest and oldest amateur-made Tesla coils still in operation today. Pittsburgh teenager George Kaufman constructed it in 1911 in the attic of his family’s Ben Avon home. It took him a year and $125 of his own money, not to mention the ire of neighbors who suffered power-grid failures due to the 1 million volts of ungrounded electricity it generated. Kaufman went on to earn a degree in electrical engineering from what’s now Carnegie Mellon University, and became chief electrical engineer for J&L Steel, where he earned more than 100 patents. In 1950, he donated his Tesla coil to Buhl Planetarium, where its special brand of homemade lightning wowed visitors for decades before finding a new home at the Science Center in 1991.