Dr. MegaVolt

Dr. MegaVolt is a performance act that has appeared at several Burning Man events. It features a person in a metal mesh suit interacting with artificially generated lightning (Fig. 5). The Doctor sets objects on fire with electricity originating from large Tesla coils, spars with the electric arcs and exhorts the audience to worship the elemental force of electricity.

Dr. MegaVolt has its roots in my Tesla coil experiments, which I began at age 12. I built a coil that threw a 4-in arc and used it in a Halloween show at my parents' house in the Boston area. The next incarnation of the coil made a 12-in arc and scared the neighbors' kids, while also jamming the reception of my parents' TV during Knotts Landing. I stepped up to the 10-kW class of coil in graduate school, taking advantage of the bottomless pit of scrap material and power electronics discarded by the Department of Energy laboratory behind the University of California at Berkeley, combined with the serendipity of my doctoral thesis advisor's sabbatical. Suddenly I had a machine that could produce 10-ft arcs, and it attained some notoriety among the university police and the homeless who roamed the campus at night.

In 1996, members of Survival Research Laboratories built a metal cage in which one could stand while the cage received arcs from the largest Tesla coil in North America (built by San Francisco Bay Area resident Greg Leyh). I survived the ordeal, even though a wit wired up the cage with hidden pyrotechnics that ignited during the show. A year later I shrank the cage down to a metal bodysuit made of a birdcage, heating duct and flexible dryer duct. Dr. MegaVolt was born.

The Doctor came to Burning Man in 1998 at the urging of my friend Chris Campbell. He brought the coil to the event and set it up, and I followed a few days later to troubleshoot. We were plagued with technical difficulties that year, but the seed had been planted, and we had learned enough to operate coils in a desert environment. That year the coil was stationary, and only about 500 people saw it operate. The following year, Burning Man partially funded our operation. Dr. MegaVolt had become a team operation led by myself, John Behrens and Gunthar Hartwig, designer of our web site, <http://www.drmega-volt. com>. We installed the Tesla coil on the roof of a moving van covered in black carpet. A generator towed behind the van provided power to the coil. Dr. MegaVolt toured the playa, the van creeping along at idle while arcs shot off the coil. We ran four straight nights and were probably seen by 15,000 people in total. The show culminated in a performance by John Behrens right next to the Burn (the burning of the 40-ft wooden Burning Man sculpture takes place at the end of the event). Burning Man 2000 was our magnum opus. We increased the output of my coil by 50% and built a second coil to those specs. Two coils were mounted on a 24-ft moving van towing a 150-horsepower generator. We pulled off some great shows in spite of terrible weather and coil-damaging wet dust.

The reason we do this show is simple: Very few people ever get to see electricity at close range, and to see it that way can change one's life forever. Electricity is a humble servant, imprisoned in the copper cable infrastructure of the modern world. But raise the voltage high enough, and the genie escapes from its bottle and into the air itself, which becomes momentarily conductive. We cannot match the power of natural lightning, but we can capture the essence of it—the truly random patterns of electrical arcs in air, the noise, the ozone and the lethal energy held back by paper-thin stainless-steel mesh originally intended for industrial debris filters. During a show, Dr. MegaVolt becomes a sorcerer conjuring up an elemental force that, unlike the element of fire, can be put back into the bottle with the release of a switch. Electricity, not...