Seattle old-timers may remember the first quarter-shrinker

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Bill Beaty’s fascinating account of what is believed to be the first "Quarter Shrinker"

Dale Travous is a sculptor who once had a big studio space in downtown Seattle, and was making Tesla coils (and later a big Tesla Magnifier.) He traded some equipment for some big caps around 1990 or so. I think they were 150 kV, maybe 10 uF, six of them. He was charging them up and using them to destroy pieces of wire, and I told him about an article I'd seen in the 1970s about an "optical shutter" made from a coil of copper rod wound around a soup can with the ends removed.
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Around 1994 or 1995 Dale Travous had some pieces in an art exhibit at Seattle COCA gallery. One was a series of about twenty progressively shrunken quarters mounted in a row on a piece of white Plexiglas. At the same time he stopped shrinking coins and instead was using the cap bank attached to a steel "watergun", a short stubby cannon which could explode a cc of water and drive a plastic slug through a 12" block of clay. Big fun. Later he entered the cap bank in the "science fair" put on by THE STRANGER adult newspaper. It was a room-freshener. He was vaporizing cherries, strawberries, etc. An immense blast like a shotgun going off, and then the room smells nice.