Austin Richards
Dr. Austin Richards is the creator of the Dr. MegaVolt character, and has been building Tesla coils since 1981. He has been performing with Tesla coils in a metal suit since March of 1997, and has been interviewed on numerous TV shows and news programs, as well as in over a dozen magazines, both print and on-line. Austin is the media point of contact for Dr. MegaVolt, the designer of the Tesla coils used in our shows, and the technical director for Dr. MegaVolt. He holds a Ph.D. in particle physics from UC Berkeley and a Physics BA from Amherst College, and has worked professionally on high-voltage systems since 1987.
Connect
Scheduled Presentations
History of Dr. MegaVolt (Austin Richards)
Day: Saturday | Duration: 30 min. | Location: Fishbon ProsceniumDr. MegaVolt has his roots in a childhood obsession with Tesla Coils. Austin Richards first saw a coil in 1976. A neighbor had built a coil that generated an arc that was about 2 inches long. Austin was impressed by the aesthetics of the device itself: the coil of wire and the ceramic insulator on the top did not look like an electrical device, rather, it looked like a sculpture. Tesla coils are strange devices - they shoot electricity off into the air. Electricity is something that we rarely see - it usually stays imprisoned inside electrical wires, like a genie in a bottle. Tesla coils release the genie into the air!