[Editor’s note: This video disappeared, but there’s another version here at the moment. We’re leaving the links as-were in case they come back up soon.]

The aptly named [LightingOnDemand] has created a Lorentz cannon that can fire a lightning bolt. Honestly, as you can see in the video below, it looks like something from a bad 1950s science fiction movie. The inspiration was researchers using rockets trailing thin wires to attract lightning.

How does the tiny wire carry that much juice? It doesn’t, really. The wire vaporizes into plasma, and if the pulse is fast enough, the Lorentz force hold the plasma together. The rest is non-trivial high-voltage engineering.

The original gun used a Marx bank that weighed 4,000 pounds and towered 8 feet above the ground. It looked like a Gatling gun with a laser target designator.

The original capacitors were picked up from scrap and didn’t work with a high enough voltage. Raising the voltage killed many of the capacitors. Fast-forward 30 years, and high-voltage caps are cheaper and better. The new version was able to pop 150,000 volts over a sizable gap. Perfect for destroying any hostile big-screen TVs.

Based on the scaling, they estimate that a 30-foot-high Marx tower could project plasma over a quarter of a mile away. We know you aren’t likely to try this at home, but it is a fun video to watch. And, of course, Marx generators are good for other things, too. They aren’t hard to build. We’ll stick with a ray gun.