Robert E. West

When I was in high school, I loved electrical engineering and wanted to learn more, but our rural high school didn't offer any courses in this area. Instead, I was allowed to conduct an Independent Study in Electrical Engineering, which culminated in a final project. For my final project, I designed and constructed the Tesla Coil shown in the picture below (please excuse the quality; it was taken with an iPod in 2013). The Tesla Coil was powered by a 12kV Neon Sign Transformer and actually worked pretty well! I hope to soon get it out of storage, dust it off, and take some high-resolution pictures and video.