Electromagnetically Shrunken Quarters

When you were younger, did you ever buy a flattened penny? One from the train tracks, or one from a machine with a special print on it? When I was little, I thought that was pretty slick.
Shrunken Quarter
Now that I’m older, it takes a bit more to impress me. But this might have done the trick. ThinkGeek takes 6,000 volts at 100,000 amperes and in only 1/100th of a second shrinks a quarter to the size of a dime (but twice as thick).

When you were a wee geek, you probably took a coil of wire and wrapped it around a nail. You hooked up each end of the wire to a little 9v battery and then using the resulting electromagnet to pick up paper clips. Well, electromagnetic forming is the same basic concept except blown up to Tesla-like proportions (well, more of a byproduct of Faraday to be precise).

Once you have ‘Tesla-like proportions’ you can crank high energy through the coil, around a conductor (the coin). The magnetic fields repel each other in a very violent way. And if the power is sufficient, the coil explodes, and the conductor (the coin) is compressed.
The shrunken quarters can be purchased for $24.99. It’s 1/3 the size, twice the thickness, and costs 100 times as much. Apparently ThinkGeek thinks they’ve solved inflation.