Restoring General Electric's 1939 Lightning Laboratory

Hello! My name is Jeff Behary and I'm the curator of the Turn Of The Century Electrotherapy Museum, located in West Palm Beach, Florida. The museum is now entering its 30th year, and 3rd year as a Non-Profit Organization. Thanks to the generous help of friends and strangers, and a huge shout-out to The Proper People (for helping make our story known), we were able to save General Electric's last high voltage lightning laboratory, the last of its kind in the United States. This past year we have been busy organizing and preparing more than 40,000 pounds of equipment for restoration and reassembly. We still need a permanent location for this laboratory, and in order to arouse curiosity and support both locally and nationally, Colonial Metalworks, located in Fort Pierce, Florida, has generously offered to help. Colonial Metalworks is a unique machine shop and creative collective of engineers and highly skilled craftsmen.

We have moved nearly 28,000 pounds of equipment to their shop, and this upcoming month we are moving the remaining 12,000 pounds. With their generous offer to donate time, skills, and use of their extensive machine shop and fabrication facility, we are able to begin the restoration, testing, and reassembly of parts of the high voltage laboratory. This fundraiser launches the restoration of this laboratory and is specifically to raise funds to restore the Impulse Voltage Divider and Coupling Capacitor assemblies. These structures stand next to the Marx Impulse Generator and are large towering assemblies (nearly 36 feet tall) that allow the discharge of the Marx Impulse Generator to be directed for an application and the waveforms to be measured. They require special components, including large spun aluminum toroids, and extra heavy duty steel bases with casters. To help understand the functioning of these components, we will be demonstrating them using a high-powered Tesla Coil producing 8-16 foot arcs of raw energy. (You can see this coil operating at low power in the heading photo of this fundraiser.)

This past year we made the General Electric Library public and have started the ongoing process of scanning more than 50 years of unpublished research papers and books.

They are currently uploaded to the Internet Archive (free to the public for downloading or viewing) as color, 600 dpi PDFs, and a variety of other common book formats.

In addition to the library, we restored the smaller 50-cm sphere gap voltmeter (seen in the opening photo measuring 680,000 Volts!) and developed the equipment needed for quality control testing of the impulse generator capacitor banks.

The single capacitor tested in the above photo produces an arc over 1" thick -- so bright that it must be viewed with only the darkest welding shade glass -- and so loud, that testing requires both earplugs and earmuffs (in addition to other specialized personal protection equipment). The Marx Impulse generator contains 40 of these capacitors, and each one will be tested in the upcoming months with extensive videos posted to YouTube and social media platforms.

We ask you not only to help us raise the money to begin the more elaborate restoration work of this tower but to also share our story and tell your friends about our mission. We have one of the largest collections of obscure electrical and medical historical apparatus in the world, from the 1700s-1900s, and need to find a permanent location for all of these items, of which the 40,000-pound General Electric Lightning Laboratory is "just a small part".

Nearly 30 years ago the museum's mentor William C. Wysock built an insulator assembly for aerospace and transmission line testing that is approximately half the size of the one we are restoring and rebuilding with this fundraiser. This project, when finished, will be one of the largest high voltage laboratories and research centers in the world today.

Please help us make this possible! Sharing our story and mission means the world to us.