[mikewarot]

Long ago I was doing software, but on the other side of the room they were discussing a process step in making halogen lightbulbs, and the problem was that the bulb needed to be "seasoned" but if you didn't do things just right, it would sag and blow through the envelope.

I turned and said "why don't you just levitate the filament?"

The next day I had a DC power supply, some magnets and a long thin stretch of wire, and demoed how Lorenz forces work, moving the wire up and down at will.

A week or so later, I had a hacked up transformer for an electromagnet and my Pioneer stereo supplying the AC power to heat the filament, and the DC supply to levitate it. It worked until my stereo popped.

We rebuilt it with real industrial equipment and it runs to this day as far as I know.