More than any other of his inventions, the Tesla coil is the engineer's most recognizable invention. With its shooting tendrils of lights, the coil has become synonymous not only with the power of science but its madness and danger as well. The spectacle of its appearance is matched by the importance of its innovation. As noted by Live Science, with the invention of the coil in 1891, electricity was transmitted wirelessly for the first time. Radio antennas and telegraphs were the first devices to utilize the technology, but other applications soon followed.
According to PBS, each of the coil's individual components were known at the time, but the way in which Nikola Tesla modified and combined them was revolutionary. The basic Tesla coil "calls for a power supply, a large capacitor, the coil (transformer) itself, and adjustable spark-gap electrodes." When activated, the Tesla coil turns low-voltage, low-frequency electricity into high-voltage, high-frequency electricity. No wires involved.
According to "Tesla: Inventor of the Modern," over the years, Tesla patented 50 different versions of the coil, in different shapes and sizes, and used variations of it in numerous other inventions. His largest coil, according to PBS, built at his Colorado Springs lab in 1899, was 52 feet across. The (literal) flashiness of the coil, which he happily showed off at conventions and lectures, generated much publicity and was instrumental in making Tesla, at age 33, one of most talked about inventors of the day.
