Tesla Tessellation Dan Land Contact Dan Via Email

I will admit, I am a geek and I live in an area that has a fair number of geeks. When I sell kaleidoscopes I like to help others become kaleidoscope geeks. One day at a show, a man kept looking between a few different kaleidoscopes. He finally looks up with a big grin on his face and says “they’re tessellations!” I was so surprised that he knew what a tessellation was. Later, I was telling my story to a good friend who afterwards said “tessellation? Does that have something to do with Tesla cars?” While my friend wasn’t geeky enough to know what I was talking about, he inspired me to create the Tesla Tessellation kaleidoscope.
Nikola Tesla was the inventor of the alternating current electric system. Ben Franklin may have discovered electricity, but we have household appliances because of Tesla. He invented many other cool things like the tesla coil (used in radios), remote controls, and a “death beam”. Elon Musk named his car company for Tesla’s electrical contributions to the world.
A Tessellation is a pattern created by repeating one or more shapes without gaps or overlaps (a.k.a., tiling of a plane). Square or hexagonal floor tiles create a “regular” tessellation. The artist Escher was famous for his “complex” figural tessellations.
Tesla Tessellations are a kaleidoscope series based on the common (regular) tessellations found in kaleidoscopes and are decorated on the outside with a branching pattern (known as Lichtenberg figures) created using high voltage electricity (ala Tesla). These patterns are literally burned into the wood and are the same patterns created in nature by lightning strikes.

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