Two Wonder Workers

We take the following from the Sunday Buffalo Express briefly sketching the lives and works of two wonderful minds of the present day:

“Thomas A. Edison, the elder of the two, is a man of 54. The story of the difficulties through which he struggled to prosperity and fame has often been told. He is one of the fine examples of what a young American of energy and genius can achieve. He began life as a train-boy, and a stationmaster whose child he had saved from peril taught him telegraphy. At 23 he invented the duplex telegraph. Since then he has turned a marvelous series of inventions, including the carbon transmitter, the phonograph, the microphone, the megaphone, the kinetoscope and the incandescent lamp.

Nikola Tesla’s career in this country began in Edison’s workshop. He is ten years younger than Edison, a native of Herzegovina, and was educated in Europe. Before coming to this country he was engineer of the Edison station in Paris, and he was employed for several years in Edison’s laboratory near Orange, N. J., before he opened a laboratory of his own. His most famous achievement is the rotary field motor, the multiphase system of which is employed in the Niagara Falls power plant. His later experiments with wireless telegraphy and his discussion of the practicability of communication with Mars have aroused great popular interest. One of his latest inventions is an electrical lamp which can be run with one wire, and in some cases with none, and which not only pours forth a radiance more like the sunlight than any other artificial light, but also, so he says, ozonizes the atmosphere and so has some of the curative effect of sunshine. He calls it his ‘sanitary light,’ and its radiance has been described as ‘artificial sunshine.’ But Tesla, as said, is even more a man of the future than of the present; and he is continually pointing the way onward to more wonderful applications of electricity than any yet witnessed.”