Joe Diprima's musical lightning: a self-taught engineer makes Tesla coils for fun and money

If you ever wanted to play the guitar so that giant lightning flashes around you - and you - then Joe Diprima can arrange it for you. Diprima - co-founder of ArcAttack , a small artistic group from Austin (TX), engaged in design and performance; The group specializes in entertainment with Tesla high-voltage coils .



“We do a lot of unexpected things,” laughs Diprima. - Every year we go on autumn and spring tours. We call in theaters and schools, conduct hourly scientific shows, and still hold many public shows associated with them. ”



To imagine what ArcAttack is showing, visit their YouTube channel and see how they play music with the help of so-called. Tesla's "Singing Coils", where the lightning coils are modulated by rectangular waves to audible frequencies. The result looks amazing, though not particularly melodious. Diprima sometimes puts on a suit, which is a Faraday cage for the entire body, which allows him to play a special guitar at a time when he is constantly beaten by lightning from two giant Tesla coils.

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Diprima also develops and makes demonstration systems based on Tesla coils for museums, etc .: "Our systems are in the Orlando Science Center (Florida), the Rochester Science Center (New York), the Center for Free Sciences in New Jersey", - says Diprima.



More recently, Diprima and his brother (and co-founder of ArcAttack) John commissioned fashion-tech designer Anuka Wiprecht and bionic-pop actress Victoria Modest to create a hollow prosthetic leg for Modest, equipped with slots for passing discharges, especially for automotive advertising. For the prosthesis to work, it was necessary to make a Tesla miniature coil embedded in the heel of a specially prepared shoe.



Diprima has no formal engineering education. “I was already interested in electronics at an early age. My father helped me - he was a biomedical technologist, so I got some experience with things like rations, ”says Diprima. As a teenager, Diprima “briefly abandoned electronics and was fond of computers, because it was the 90s - at that time everything very cool was connected with computers. I wrote programs for my own pleasure, instead of doing homework! ”



After graduating from high school, Diprima got a job in repairing televisions and other household appliances, which in itself became an education. “You see how wrong everyone is. I think these lessons are priceless. See where rca got it wrong. See how constantly Samsung is mistaken. Today everything is very well debugged, but then there were all sorts of strange glitches or problems. ”



When the TV repair business came to naught, because buying a new TV was cheaper than repairing an old one, Diprima went to a record store to repair guitar amplifiers - “people are still willing to pay $ 150 to repair a Marshall amplifier worth $ 900,” he says. how to get a job at the University of Texas in 2005, where he developed and mastered departments for classrooms.





That's for sure an electric guitar!



It was then that he and his brother became interested in Tesla coils. “We began to make our coils purely so that they were musical instruments. We posted some videos on Youtube as a hobby. ” The clips began to gain views and the brothers began to perform live. As a result, they realized that they earn more by selling T-shirts on their performances than at work, and plunged into this business headlong, founding ArcAttack and started doing this as their main activity.



Diprima continues to spend a lot of time reading and researching for her projects. “Now I regret that I did not get an education in college, but at the same time I think that I have quite a good basic engineering knowledge,” he says.