And Tesla Also

From the Philadelphia Press.

Every time Marconi or the German laboratories announce some new step in the investigation or utilization of ether vibration — the X-rays above the violet of light and the Marconi and Hertz waves below the red Tesla has something to say. And it is not because this tireless laboratory worker has had nothing practical to say in the past that his claims are so apt to provoke criticism. The criticism is the natural attribute of healthy suspicion, which demands of extraordinary claims some justification in industrial application. And Tesla's claims of recent years have been nothing if not extraordinary. Wireless telegraphy may do for others; Tesla would send out electrical energy, without wires, to the ends of the earth; would run as he phrased it, the Paris Exposition by the power of Niagara!

While this claim as to the possibility of distributing electrical energy over great distances without wires would seem to follow up the work of Marconi, Preece, Lodge and a host of other laboratory workers, as a matter of fact it is entirely of a different genre. Marconi uses static electrical energy to develop his waves and induce his currents in the receiver miles away, while Tesla proposes to use dynamic electrical energy of such enormous voltage that the rarified air would become a conductor, and, by properly arranging transmitter and receiver high in the air, by means of anchored balloons, the energy radiated from the one could be collected by the other. In other words, the system of Marconi is based on electric vibrations in the ether, and these electric waves move out in straight lines and are not affected by any material obstacles in their path, such as a building, a hill or the curvature of the earth for longer distances. Tesla with his great currents, on the other hand uses the rarified strata of the atmosphere as a conductor, just as a copper wire is used commercially for ordinary dynamic conduction in everyday workshops.

Whether Tesla will soon be able to make practical use of his high voltage mechanism is not definitely stated. Last November, when he made a somewhat similar announcement to that made today, his investigations were said to have passed the stage of "mere laboratory experiments," the period for the industrial test being near at hand. Nearly six months have passed, and it is to be hoped he is ready for the test. If he has and can manage his balloon terminals in all kinds of weather — a seemingly impossible thing to do — the Marconi wave signal transmission may soon be dwarfed into insignificance. As Tesla explains his own plan it is as follows: —

I observe that the air, which is a perfect insulator for currents produced by ordinary apparatus, was easily traversed by currents furnished by my improved machine giving a tension of something like two and a half million volts. Since the conductivity of the air for these currents increased very rapidly with its degree of rarefaction, at once the transmission of energy through the upper strata of the air, which, without such results as I have obtained, would be nothing more than a dream, became easily realizable.

Nothing remains to be solved, he declares, but engineering problems, so that we ought to be on the edge of great advances in the transmission of electrical energy. As the Marconi waves — he declares they are not Hertz's waves, just as Roentgen held the X-rays were not Lenard's cathode rays — are on the threshold of their practical development, a general and radical multiplication of the methods of distributing electrical energy seems to be in sight, with untold consequences to civilization.