Switched has a new home! Huffpost Tech.

Click here to visit the new home of Switched!

Hot on HuffPost Tech:

See More Stories
AOL Tech

Tesla 'Tree' Lights Up With 500,000 Volts of Technicolor

by JP Mangalindan on December 23, 2009 at 07:30 AM

When Christmas comes around, most people pick up a fir tree, add a few choice ornaments, top it off with a string of lights, and call it a day.

But Peter Terrent clearly isn't most people. The 53-year-old Bunbury, Australia native and father of three has experimented with electricity, or what he calls "electrickery," for more than a decade. By sending around 500,000 volts of electricity through Tesla coils, which convert electricity into light ribbons, and by taking photos of them with different color filters, Terrent is able to create intricate light shows like the 29-foot "Tesla Christmas Tree 2009," shown here in his driveway.

"Stand next to a small Tesla coil and try not to be impressed," Terrent explained of his unorthodox hobby to The Sun. "Then, stand next to a large one and try not to be incontinent."

Though this was his second attempt at an "electrick" Christmas tree, this one was more ambitious and ultimately much more challenging.

To test the waters, Tesla started with creating a huge bushy-looking pattern of streamers that shot sparks near the ground.

Eventually, he achieved colors by applying various color filters to his camera, but for some reason, the sparks appeared much brighter than the streamers.

After some tinkering, Terrent realized that continuous sparks, not streamers, erupting from the top of the Tesla coil would provide sufficiently consistent, saturated colors when transferred to film.


Once he'd finalized the design and suspended a star, his wife Jane snapped a shot of him standing next to the switched-off Tesla coil. Retreating to a safe distance, he then gradually lifted rods attached to the Tesla coil, guiding the sparks from the coil, then switching the filters on his Nikon D300 camera from green to red to yellow. To guide the sparks to the star, Terrent used a fishing rod and sinker snagged to the top of tree branches about 45 feet off the ground.

"My kids are grown up now, but I still like to make a big explosion of some sort for them every Christmas," Terrent proudly told The Sun.

Mission accomplished, Peter. [From: Tesla Downunder, The Sun, and WA Today]

Tags: art, christmas, hgg, holidays, Tesla, weird

Add your comments

Please keep your comments relevant to this blog entry. Email addresses are never displayed, but they are required to confirm your comments.

When you enter your name and email address, you'll be sent a link to confirm your comment, and a password. To leave another comment, just use that password.

To create a live link, simply type the URL (including http://) or email address and we will make it a live link for you. You can put up to 3 URLs in your comments. Line breaks and paragraphs are automatically converted — no need to use <p> or <br /> tags.

HuffPost AOL Social News Most Popular