Sparks from a modern Tesla coil
PETER MENZEL/SPL
The name of Nikola Tesla is best known today through the SI unit of magnetic flux density named after him. He was born in 1856 in what is now Croatia, and moved to the USA in his twenties. In his productive working life as an electrical engineer, Tesla carried out pioneering work on electromagnetism, alternating current, motors, generators and transformers.
In a Tesla coil, a high-frequency alternating current generates an emf (voltage) that can produce spectacular sparks. This is described by Faraday’s law of electromagnetic induction:
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