Greg managed to sew the entire 40-foot Tesla tower secondary winding together by fitting it through the opening of a household sewing machine, demonstrating remarkable feat of topology and practical engineering.

When asked why he thinks he is alone in researching lightning physics and why there is no NASA research lab doing this, Leyh responds that DARPA and other agencies are busy doing other things to violate basic physics, and if you want to look at what people are interested in, you just go to Kickstarter or IndieGoGo and see things raising all the money are like little clips for your iPhone, and nobody is really interested in pure research the way they used to be.

Tesla's wireless power transmission scheme involved placing high-voltage towers at strategic points globally to capacitively couple power up to the upper atmosphere, which Tesla believed to be reasonably conductive based on his work with rarefied gases in vacuum tubes.

The primary drive system for each tower includes 12 stations, each with an array of the largest 6,500-volt transistors available in order to produce the required aggregate primary drive currents, and these individual transistors are each the size of a phone book and are currently used to power high-speed electric trains.

In the 1960s at a high-voltage test facility in Siberia, a 90-foot tall Marx generator producing 5 million volts produced super long discharges that traveled hundreds of meters across an open field, crossing from the tower top to hit transmission lines and streetlights in a parking lot, despite classical theory predicting arcs should only reach about 2.5 kilometers at 2,000 kV/m but instead reached with less than 100 kV/m, only a twentieth of normal requirements.

Tesla coils are more cost-effective than Marx generators for producing multiple millions of volts because Tesla coils are 'mostly air'—just a winding—while Marx banks require expensive capacitors all the way up a structure that must support their weight and provide good electrical insulation.

Classical electrical theory requires approximately 2,000 kilovolts per meter to break down air and create an arc discharge, and modern electrical insulators depend on this value to hold off voltages.

Understanding how to control wild arcs at multi-megavolt levels would allow renewable energies like solar to become cost competitive because you could build huge solar plants and send power directly to the dark side of the planet via transcontinental transmission lines.

You can make plasmas in your microwave oven by putting a carbon mesh (called carbon veil) strip on top of a ceramic cup turned upside down and running the microwave on, creating balls of plasma about the size of a fist that are orange-white, float around, and hum at the 60 Hertz frequency of the magnetron, eventually hitting the ceiling and peeling all the paint off the top.

Relativistic runaway breakdown, developed by Russian physicists Gurevich and Zybin, proposes that cosmic rays strike atoms in cloud electric fields at the right angle to knock off electrons at relativistic velocities, and these relativistic electrons shrink due to warped spacetime, significantly reducing their friction in air and allowing them to accelerate to near light speed and knock off more electrons in a chain reaction.

A number of groups have tried to answer the question of far-field ionosphere coupling using computer simulations to simulate the entire cavity between the ionosphere and the earth, but this is a huge problem presenting over 10 billion degrees of freedom, and nobody has quite gotten there yet.

Leyh witnessed a bizarre electrical accident he caused by leaving a clip lead connected across the primary terminals of a coil, which burned the clip lead, but the interesting part was that the coil was disconnected from everything and stored away in a corner of the lab, yet somehow energy transferred to it while another coil was running across the room.

NASA's Fermi gamma-ray Space Telescope made an accidental discovery that about 1,800 thunderstorms are in progress somewhere on the globe at any given moment, and new observations show thunderstorms produce both terrestrial gamma-ray flashes (TGFs) and antimatter through a process where relativistic electrons emit gamma rays that occasionally transform into electron-positron pairs.

Tesla had plans to set up another tower in the UK as a smaller listening station to test receiving a signal across the Atlantic, and he was actually trying to get power across the Atlantic, but had told JP Morgan it was going to be a radio station, which is how things fell apart.

Leyh's plan to replace his lost lab space is to outfit a custom cargo trailer with all the tower components, instruments, and a workshop, allowing the entire collapsible 40-foot system to pack into a single 18-foot trailer, enabling the mobile lab to move to desolate test sites around the Bay Area without needing building space, administrative overhead, or utility hookups.

Leyh lost his lab space at American Steel studios when New York real estate developers purchased the entire site and was displaced along with other workshops and artists, including artist Gary Wilson and Karen Cusolido who founded American Steel studios; real estate development pressure is now making it difficult to find reliable industrial workspace in Oakland.

Greg's collapsed Tesla tower design uses an inflatable double cylinder structure at the center where the air column is under compression, with all other structural elements under tension (like aircraft wing design), allowing the tower to be packed into an 18-foot cargo trailer while maintaining structural integrity.

In the late 1990s, researchers started searching storm clouds for telltale gamma rays that would support relativistic runaway breakdown theory, but for many years found nothing because they were looking from the wrong direction.

Modern structural plastics used for towers can only support about 7,000 volts per inch outdoors when well maintained, so a tower supporting 8 million volts requires a minimum of about 12 stories in height, which also conveniently places the runaway breakdown zone safely above the ground where it is easier to view with instruments.

For the full-scale experimental apparatus, the design target is about 20 percent higher than the minimum 16 MV required by the theory, because historically large electrical machines and large research machines always encounter intriguing corner cases just out of reach, and Leyh references many times including the Tevatron where they wished they could turn it to eleven.