By Andrew Liszewski
The easy route here would have been to find 32 old vacuum tubes and simply dress them up like standard chess pieces, but artist Paul Fryer opted to take the difficult route instead. His ‘Chess Set for Tesla’ still features 32 vacuum tubes, but they actually connect to each square on the chess board and when plugged in they show an icon on top representing what piece they are. According to the All Visual Arts site there were actually 7 of these produced, but since it was created last year I have my doubts any of them are still available.
[ Chess Set for Tesla ] VIA [ MAKE: Blog ]
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1) Surely vacuum tube chess set would be more of a “Chess Set for Marconi” (or Turing). Tesla would be magnetic or sparks flying (along with Franklin). And Faraday would have the whole thing motorised?
2) How the heck do you move the tubes, don't they get hot? And how frequently do they blow?
1) Surely vacuum tube chess set would be more of a “Chess Set for Marconi” (or Turing). Tesla would be magnetic or sparks flying (along with Franklin). And Faraday would have the whole thing motorised?
2) How the heck do you move the tubes, don't they get hot? And how frequently do they blow?
Those are obviously not real vacuum tubes. For one thing, there is pretty much no way that all of those different-sized tubes would use the same footprint socket. So they are probably blown glass, and the artist is a master glass blower. And then the sockets were setup and wired so the top icons, which are probably LED-lit, get power when plugged into any of the sockets. I tried to find “how it was made” information but haven’t yet.