The Future Bath

NIKOLA TESLA HAS INVENTED A WAY OF CLEANING THE SKIN

Electricity a Substitute for Soap and Suds. Before and After Pictures — What He Calls the Busy Man’s Bath — More Invigorating Than Hot Water.

Nikola Tesla, the electrical expert, has discovered a new application of his electrical oscillator, which opens up a field of possibilities almost as interesting as the discovery of the X-rays. Mr. Tesla is now experimenting in his laboratory, and has already achieved some rather remarkable results.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the discovery, made along the lines of his present experiments, is that he has found an electrical current which acts upon the human body very much like a hot soap and water bath. In other words, Mr. Tesla finds that he can almost in a jiffy drive off into the air even the minutest particles of dirt which lodge in the skin along the entire surface of the human body. While this is interesting as pointing the way to the rich man’s bath of the future, it also has a much more important medical value. It is expected that this discovery will be of great service to surgeons in enabling them to obtain an absolutely and chemically clean surface on the human body, which is the first preliminary always to a surgical operation.

The further application of the discovery in medical and surgical work will be known only after patient experiments. It is expected that it will be found that the current is a microbe killer as well as a tonic and stimulant to the human system. It is the peculiar current produced by the Tesla electric oscillator which makes it possible to pump in and out of the human body an electrical current of two million volts, which by any other method would be instant death. In speaking of the peculiar characteristics of this oscillating current, Mr. Tesla said:

“Voltage, you know, is speed, not strength. A current of millions of volts passes so quickly that it cannot be felt. A needle, driven slowly into the flesh, would hurt, but a needle so small as to be well nigh invisible, yet traveling at terrific speed, could penetrate the body and not be felt. It is so with electricity.”

The electric bath, “the busy man’s bath,” Mr. Tesla calls it, has developed itself almost insensibly during the electrician’s experiments with his mysterious “oscillator.” It chanced one day that Mr. Tesla placed a big copper globe within the electrical field of the oscillator. The globe, a month before, had been heavily coated with black paint.

With no particular idea of what would follow, Mr. Tesla turned on the current. There was a shimmer of black dust in the air — and there lay the copper globe, clean, shining, and as free from paint as on the day it was made.

That was practically the origin of the “busy man’s bath,” for Mr. Tesla began to experiment, and soon perfected an apparatus which will remove dirt from the human body as quickly and thoroughly as the paint was freed from the copper globe. Mr. Tesla himself has tried the effects of the bath, and his workmen and some of his intimate friends have experienced it.

Assured of its entire success, Mr. Tesla, in a lecture before the Electro-Therapeutic Association, made his invention public. Apparently it was too much for the members to accept without further information, for the following paragraph has been making the rounds of the medical press:

“Nikola Tesla says that from 4,000 to 7,000 microbes light on every square foot of the human body every twenty-four hours. Examined under the microscope, the skin would swarm with millions of microbes, which feed upon the skin and destroy its freshness, producing yellowness and wrinkles. Mr. Tesla has invented a battery to drive these microbes away, with great violence.”

“That is badly garbled,” said Mr. Tesla when this paragraph was read to him. “In my lecture before the society I described the skin-cleansing effect of a current of large voltage, which I had developed from one of my machines. I said that it would probably be the busy man’s bath in the days to come and that for purposes of cleanliness it would supersede water. In illustrating its possibilities in the field of electro-therapy I quote the writings of Pasteur and Koch as to the number of microbes which settle on the human body.

“I didn’t say they produced wrinkles; neither did I say that the current produced by my invention would banish all microbes from the skin. I am an electrician, not a bacteriologist. It is for students of bacteria to determine whether I have also discovered a germicide.

“All that I claim for this invention is that it will instantaneously strip dirt and extraneous material from the human body. The current is, moreover, a powerful tonic. The apparatus for its use takes up hardly any room. Because of its time-saving advantages I believe it will become the busy man’s bath of the future.

“Here,” said Mr. Tesla, rubbing his bare arm with a lead pencil, “you see this pencil mark. Now the oscillating current will drive every trace of this mark into the air in an instant. Along with the pencil dust every particle of dirt of any other kind is stripped from the surface of the skin.”

We present in the accompanying illustration a microscopic enlargement of a bit of skin showing the mark of a lead pencil and another similar microscopical enlargement after the skin has been cleansed. The cross section of a greatly magnified bit of human skin is also given, showing the grains of pencil dust.

If bacteriologists should discover that Mr. Tesla’s new current is also a germicide the value of the invention to surgery would be incalculable. At present it takes from thirty minutes to thirty hours to produce absolute surgical cleanliness over the proposed field of an operation. If Mr. Tesla’s current can instantly destroy bacteria it will supersede bichloride of mercury in the operating theatre as completely as bichloride has ousted Lister’s “Puffing Billy,” an apparatus which enveloped both patient and surgeons in a spray of diluted carbolic acid. Moreover, the current could probably be also applied to the cavities of the body, penetrating tissues and assuring antisepsis where other agents would be barred.

Surgeons, and doctors generally, have faith in Mr. Tesla and his inventions. For that matter, they have reason, for Mr. Tesla has been heard to say that if every man who was using one of his machines in electro-therapeutics would pay him a quarter he would be a rich man.

Once in a while some one wants to know what Tesla has done for practical electricity. They say they know he has discovered strange things, but are they practical? That question can be answered quickly — Tesla is the man who made electricity practical. When Tesla first entered the American field the continuous current was used almost exclusively. The continuous current is very good for short line work, but energy at high pressure cannot be delivered successfully at a great distance. It was Tesla who invented the alternating current motor and thereby made possible and practicable such enterprises as the bridging of the forces of science.