Inventor gives Rodin's 'The Thinker' a shocking new twist... by shooting 500,000 volts of electricity down his body

Apr 23, 2009

It's a picture that's sure to make your hair stand on end.

A daredevil inventor has created a shocking new image of Rodin's 'The Thinker' - by shooting 500,000 volts of electricity down his body as he sat in the pose.

Enlarge It's electric: Peter Terren shoots 500,000 volts of electricity down his body as he sits in the pose of Rodin's 'Thinker'

It's electric: Peter Terren shoots 500,000 volts of electricity down his body as he sits in the pose of Rodin's 'Thinker'

Using a home-built Tesla coil pieced together from junk and bits from hardware stores, Peter Terren risked his life to make the electrifying image.

He was also only protected from painful death by electrocution by a layer of cheap builders' foil.

Terren, from Bunbury, Western Australia,said: 'I wanted to convey the concept of the modern electrical age with the barrage of electrical interference in our lives. So much is happening and demanding our attention that it is difficult to "think".

'I decided upon a real life posture like the thinker with a lot of electrical activity around me with sparks onto my body.'

Enlarge The electricity pours out safely out through Terren's rubber-soled shoes to the floor below

The electricity pours out safely out through Terren's rubber-soled shoes to the floor below

His previous Tesla experiments have seen him wrapped in a Faraday cage - like a see-through Dalek - but this time he wanted to push himself.

Peter's face was protected by a mask made of fine strands of stainless steel and his 'safety suit' consisted of a wrapping of builders' insulating foil. A wig covered up a foil headcap.

The electricity fired from the Tesla rod, which is passed over him in a semi-circle, can then pass down the foil suit and safely out to the earth through his foot.

The 52-year-old said: 'In doing this I wanted to do something new that also challenged the boundaries.

'Allowing the sparks to contact my body or face directly is not safe of course. A single spark that gets past the defences would throw me to the ground in intense pain like a Taser shock.

'Multiple sparks would also stop me breathing and be fatal.'



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