I once read about that - he had the device attached to a beam in his lab, and was moving different pieces of furniture around on the floor by changing the frequency of the device's oscillations. What he didn't realize, was that the beam he had it attached to, went down into the bedrock, and was causing chaos in the surrounding neighborhood outside his lab. The cops came busting in to find out what he was up to, and he smashed the device to pieces.

Later on, he built another one, and attached it to a building that was under construction. Once he found the resonant frequency of that building, it got to moving and vibrating so much that the construction workers couldn't get down off it fast enough.

I can't remember the name of the book that was in. I was a senior in high school when I read it. My friend and I made a crude Tesla coil for our physics class project and it impressed the teacher. We made the secondary out of 6" PVC pipe and used a neon sign transformer to power it. We were able to draw about a 15"-18" arc off of it and we would light up a fluorescent tube light just by holding in our hands while standing a few yards away from it.