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The Rodin coil

What is a Rodin coil?

A real coil, unproven claims

A Rodin coil is a toroidal coil, wire wound around a donut-shaped form, in a pattern taken from Marko Rodin’s vortex math. Instead of laying turns side by side, each pass crosses the center hole and skips ahead a fixed number of positions, so the wire traces a star. The recommended pattern goes 12 times around the cross section and 5 times around the ring. Proponents claim levitation, wireless power and free energy. The only peer-reviewed measurement we found shows an ordinary magnetic field that follows textbook physics.

Wind a Rodin coil0 of 12 passes

This pass

Pattern from Rodin and Volk, 2010: 12 times around the cross section, 5 times around the ring. Shown as one wire; the paper winds pairs carrying opposite currents. Drag to turn the coil. The field view shows an ideal toroid, where the field runs around inside the core.

How it is wound

A star drawn on a donut

Rodin’s 2010 paper with Greg Volk describes it this way: “the actual Rodin coil consists of electrical wires wrapped along the ‘doubling’ circuit paths.” The doubling circuit is the loop 1 2 4 8 7 5. The paper goes on: “The recommended wrapping traverses 12 times around the cross section, but only 5 times around the toroid circumference.”

That is what the model above does. Each pass starts on the outer rim, goes over the top, down through the hole, under the bottom and back out, landing 5 of 12 positions further on. Because 5 and 12 share no factor, twelve passes visit every position once and close the loop. Seen from above, the crossings make a twelve-pointed star.

The paper also winds the wire in pairs: “Two adjacent wires are wound to carry currents in opposite directions, but with gap spaces between pairs, represented in the torus by the 396693 pattern.” Hobbyists build many variations, which is one reason results are hard to compare.

What it actually is

A toroidal inductor with an unusual winding

In electronics, a coil wound on a ring-shaped core is a toroidal inductor, and it is an everyday part. Because of its symmetry, little of its magnetic field escapes outside the core. A Rodin coil is one of these with a crossing, star-shaped winding instead of side-by-side turns.

That winding does change how the coil behaves. The Natural Philosophy Wiki, which is friendly to Rodin, notes that a crossing winding “will differ measurably from a conventional toroid in inductance, self-capacitance and resonant behaviour,” and adds: “Those differences are ordinary electromagnetism.” It also warns that “apparent excess power in pulsed and reactive circuits is very often a measurement artefact.”

The one measurement in a peer-reviewed journal came from a team at the Universidad de Guanajuato, published in Revista Mexicana de Física in 2024. They modeled the field of a vortex-wound coil with the Biot-Savart law, the standard rule for the field of a current, and measured it with a 3D magnetometer. The model and the measurements agreed. They were studying the coil’s field shape for magnetic stimulation, not testing energy claims.

What people claim

Levitation, free energy, necklaces

Rodin’s paper reports that “these inductive anomalies include a displaced magnetic south pole, levitation, and wireless power transmission.” Its examples are secondhand: an iron filings pattern read as evidence for an exotic field, and a builder who “levitated a 64 gram magnet with only a 3V supply.” It links the coil to DNA as well. In the same paper Rodin and Volk write that “to date no scientifically disciplined, quantitative, controlled studies have been published.”

The best known promotion was Randy Powell’s 2010 TEDxCharlotte talk, reposted online under titles like “Free Energy Finally Discovered.” TED removed it from its official channel in 2012 after Powell never sent the data he had agreed to provide.

Today the coil also sells as jewelry. One Etsy listing for a copper Rodin coil necklace says it “follows the 369 Tesla sequence, creating a magnified and potent magnetic field, that produces tremendous free energy.” A copper coil with nothing connected to it carries no current, and without a current there is no magnetic field to magnify. Tesla never wrote about the pattern, and Rodin’s paper does not name him.

Real vs legend

The Rodin coil, sorted

Claim	Status
It is a toroidal coil wound in a skipping, star-shaped pattern.	Real
Its winding changes inductance and resonance compared with a normal toroid.	Ordinary physics
Its magnetic field matches standard physics.	Measured · 2024
It produces levitation or wireless power beyond normal physics.	No controlled studies
It produces free energy.	No evidence
A Rodin coil necklace makes a healing magnetic field.	No current, no field
It follows Tesla’s 3, 6, 9.	No source