Since the release of “Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope” in 1977, kids across the world have wished to own his or her own light saber.

36 years later, one SIU student has been digitally praised for making his own lasers, even though Star Wars was never the inspiration.

Drake Anthony, a pre-med sophomore from Goodfield studying chemistry, builds lasers in his free time, specializing in diode lasers. Anthony has become a YouTube sensation for his laser designs, and as of Monday night, reached 41.4 million views total.

Parents Marc and Jan raised Anthony, along with two sisters, Victoria, 23, and Elesa, 17. Marc works as a general contractor and is a professional bow hunter on the side, while Jan is a nurse who enjoys buying items at garage sales and thrift shops and then selling them on eBay.

“We just do so much random stuff in my family,” Drake said.

Marc said Drake was no ordinary boy, and was always creative and intuitive even as a child.

“He was a handy kid, he was very curious about things,” Marc said. “As young as two or three years old he would grab the cabinet doors below the kitchen sink and swing them for an hour. He would swing them back and forth and he would study those hinges, he was so intrigued how those hinges worked,”

Jan said Drake always loved to discover, and while he had many interests as a kid, he would consistently jump from one to the next. He became an expert in every field from trains to chemistry and pyrotechnics. One of those childhood phases was his obsession with coins.

“He could go to coin shows at six years old and talk with dealers about what they were selling,” Jan said. “He could stand there and talk like an adult.”

He then was interested in moths, butterflies, nature and weather, to the point where he would be able to tell the difference in clouds from a young age.

“I hated storms,” Drake’s childhood friend Jordan Krizman said. “I hated them with a passion and we’d be at school…and he would look out the window and be like, ‘oh these are those type of clouds…it’s not even hot enough to storm we’ll be fine,’ and I’d just be like, ‘well alright, okay.’”

After burning through numerous hobbies, Drake started building lasers at the age of 12 and making YouTube videos of them at age 14.

“I had a laser pointer and thought that was pretty cool,” Drake said. “In my seventh grade science class we learned the real basics about lasers, so I went and looked it up and I saved my money that I got from working and bought a green laser, ripped it apart and broke it. Bought another one, ripped it apart and made it a little bit stronger.”

When Drake first started creating them it was just a trial and error process, and after several attempts, he was finally building his own low wattage lasers.

“I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, but I just kind of figured it out from breaking stuff and reading and eventually learned how to do some stuff,” he said.

Drake’s high school chemistry teacher Brian Bill said he remembers Drake telling him about a laser he had built and bet a can of Cherry Coke it wasn’t true.

“He told me he had a laser that would light a match and pop a balloon, and I said ‘well, you got to prove it to me,’” Bill said. “He brought it in and sure enough, it lit a match and popped a balloon.”

In order to create these lasers, Drake often rips apart broken computers and DVD burners.

“You can build them as strong as you want, you can buy certain ones as strong as you want, but you can’t sell like the handheld ones. Even though you can build them, you can’t sell them,” he said. “I got a big one back home that you can set blocks of wood on fire.”

Most of Drake’s online videos consist of him lighting objects on fire. In one of his most popular videos, he sets several random items on fire, including ping-pong balls.

“Ping-pong balls are really cool to light on fire because they have a chemical called nitrocellulose in them, which is actually something they use in like shotgun shells, it’s just a certain percentage,” he said. “So if you light a ping-pong ball on fire it just goes up in flames. It’s not really the main application of these lasers but that’s what the fans like, you know.”

In each of his videos, Drake highly emphasizes the use of safety goggles, as these types of lasers can be harmful.

“None of this stuff would kill you,” he said. “If you’re not wearing those laser goggles, and it just hits bounces off the wall or something it’ll burn permanent holes in your eyes and it will never repair and you will go blind.”

Drake’s initial YouTube fame took off when he added the words “light saber” in the title of one of his videos. While Drake knew that would draw attention, he personally is not a fan of the movies.

“I have never even seen the Star Wars movies,” he said. “The media outlets all said ‘oh, I’m some Star Wars fan.’”

Even with available technology, the battle scenes he has heard of in Star Wars are unrealistic — the light beams would simply cross through each other, he said.

“I don’t know how you could even do something like that, even with future technology I couldn’t think of anything where you could do that,” he said.

Drake said he is going to build a “battling remote controlled laser drone bot” in the future. He is going to make out of Combat Creatures, Attacknid Stryder, a commercial toy that takes the appearance of a spider, he said.

“It’s like this remote controlled robot you use to battle the other robots,” he said. “It’s just a toy but I’m going to modify it and put a death ray laser on top of it so I can remote control it, aim it and like shoot stuff with it,” he said.

Drake is consistently thinking of new video ideas for his YouTube channel. Technically, Drake’s job title online is a YouTube Partner, which is run through Google. Drake said he gets paid every time an advertisement is clicked on while a viewer is watching his video, and is sometimes paid per views.

“I think probably his senior year, he was probably making as much doing YouTube videos as I was teaching,” Bill said.

While Drake is still making money from YouTube, he is also receiving an immense amount of emails from all kinds of viewers and feels bad he does not have enough time to answer them all.

“I put specifically on it business or media inquirers only, because I used to try to answer them and then eventually I just gave up. There’s just no possible way to do it,” Drake said. “So I try to make my videos clear on what to do and whatnot and places to learn stuff about them so they can figure out for themselves if they really try.”

Recently, Drake scouted for a position at SIU associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry Boyd Goodson’s research lab, which involves his passion for lasers. He will be an undergraduate researcher, working on projects that will involve atomic physics and laser physics applications. He will look at developing optical and laser technology for spin-exchange optical pumping.

Goodson taught Drake in an honors chemistry class last year. He had viewed several of Drake’s YouTube videos, and at the time, didn’t know it was Drake, he said.

“I had saw one of his videos without knowing who he was at !rst actually, and I didn’t know that he was a student of mine, or a student in the class,” Goodson said. “Of course separately I knew who Drake was but I didn’t know they were the same person because he uses an alias in the YouTube videos.”

Drake uses the name “Styropyro” on his YouTube page, which originated when he and a friend dissolved Styrofoam in acetone, and then lit the resulting flammable gel on fire. Goodson originally heard of Drake’s experiment through other students and realized it was Drake’s YouTube page he had been watching.

Thee lasers in Goodson’s lab are measured at 70 watts, while Drake’s most powerful homemade laser is around 40 watts. Goodson said for homemade lasers, Drake’s are particularly strong, not to mention constructed colorfully.

“I saw one of his cool blue laser pointers that he overpowered, so I thought that was pretty neat, and he seems to have good lab hands,” he said. “So I thought he would be a good person to recruit.”

While Drake is not sure what he wants to do as a career yet, he said he plans to go to graduate school. “If I decide to go the medicine route there are a lot of applications of lasers in medicine,” he said. Lasers are used in cancer treatment, Lasik surgery, and dermatology procedures he said.

Aside from lasers, Drake’s second love is Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. In March, Drake took home a gold medal at the International Brazilian Jiu- Jitsu Federation Open in Chicago for his weight class. Drake also won gold at a national event in St. Louis.

“I think that’s the sport for nerds in my opinion, because it’s a game of physics, using physics to choke people,” Drake said. Drake said he hopes to reach 100 million views on his YouTube channel by the time he leaves Carbondale. His videos can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/user/styropyro.

Luke Nozicka can be reached at [email protected] or 536-3311 ext 254.