Lightening has been attributed to a lot of powerful events in Hollywood movies. It powered the DeLorean in “Back to the Future,” but lightning’s most famous movie accomplishment was bringing to life Frankenstein’s monster. The 1931 Boris Karloff film showed Dr. Victor Frankenstein robbing graves to sew together a creature and bring it to life with a bolt of lightning – a revenant made of reassembled corpses. Now, Nokia (News - Alert) has harnessed the power of lightning to charge a mobile phone.

Much like Frankenstein’s monster, the Frankencharger was created in a laboratory. This one was not in a dark basement of an old, scary castle, however. Experts at the University of Southampton were co-opted by Nokia to catch a 200,000-volt spark and step it down before feeding it into their mobile phone Lumia 925. This spark was artificially generated, but the process works just as natural lightening would.

Taking electricity from the air and stepping it down isn't that hard, if you have a reliable source of energy to grab up. The only difference between captured power and the usual supply is the noise introduced by the 30-centimetre air gap.

According to an article by The Register (News - Alert), "The writhing of the spark manifests itself in variation to the power delivered, little of which is smoothed out by the stepping process. Nokia phones can take just about any voltage and turn it into useful power. Nokia phones can take just about any voltage and turn it into useful power. The signal provided by those novelty hand-cranked USB chargers will be almost as noisy – and they are considerably safer than a million-volt bolt of lightning, too."

Nokia emphasizes that no one should try this at home. Don't play Igor and try flipping that switch to bring your device to life.