Paly junior Spencer Davis takes precautions. He confidently straps on his clear safety goggles and pulls on long, yellow rubber gloves. His finger is on the bright red switch of a compact black box, known as a coil gun.
Two wires extend from the box and their shiny metal tips glint as Davis presses them together. Suddenly, there is a loud crack and a flash of light. Davis smiles: 330 volts of electricity have been discharged, the metal tips have melted and melded together — and this is his own creation.
Many of Davis’ friends are impressed with Davis’ extensive inventing talents. Junior Andrew Cohen describes Davis’ inventions as “very creative” and “pretty sick.”
Out of all the inventions Davis has created, the coil gun is his favorite. Using the coil gun, he can project objects or fuse metal pieces together, as Davis demonstrated for this article.
“If I am able to build a really good one [coil gun], I could sell it to the military,” Davis says. “The navy is currently working on coil gun development.”
The majority of the coil gun’s energy is obtained from disposable camera parts that Davis receives used from local drugstores.
“We just ask them [the drugstores] for their disposable camera parts, and they just give them to us for free,” Davis says. “Sometimes they ask what we’re using them for and we just say … ’science.’”
Davis dedicates about six hours of every weekend to work on his inventions. Then, he blows off steam and gets new inspirations by playing video games.
Photo by Sahar Raz.
Life Of A Teen Inventor
June 18, 2008 by Rich | 3 Comments
In Humor, Inventors, Teens
danakeith on June 18th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
wow! really an invention.. so genius of him to have created such thing.
Anothercoilgun on July 6th, 2008 at 10:50 am
Assembled is the keyword. Next time do a research on coilguns before here anyone’s claims of inventing it themselves.
Anothercoilgun on July 6th, 2008 at 10:50 am
Assembled is the keyword. Next time do a research on coilguns before anyone’s claims of inventing it themselves.