Around the World Without a Wire

Tesla to Destroy Navies and Shoot Motive Power From Niagara to Europe

All this is done without metallic conductors. A wonderful feature is that with a little pocket oscillator distant war ships, forts and cities may be annihilated.

Tesla Will Run the Paris Exposition With Niagara’s Power

The Magician Tells the Herald How It May be Accomplished - With His Mighty Oscillator He Controls the Electro-Magnetic Forces of the Globe

Tesla proposes to run the machinery of the Paris Exhibition with electric power sent instantly across the world from Niagara Falls.

It is an astounding statement. He has just patented his machine for transmitting electricity without wires. He says he can shoot thousands of millions of volts around and through the globe without metallic conductors.

The Electrical Review says “it is like a tale from the ‘Arabian Nights,’ and, if successful, it will open up unlimited resources of practically costless power.”

If successful, it means that from the great falls of Niagara, of the Yellowstone, of Alaska and of the canyons of Colorado unlimited power of millions of volts can be delivered in New York, London, Paris, St. Petersburg and Pekin in a second of time. Mountains, rivers and oceans would thus be annihilated.

Tesla says his machinery works perfectly: that he has demonstrated the seeming miracle beyond all possibility of failure.

He said to me yesterday: - “I will supply the Paris Exhibition with Niagara’s power. I will send it across the ocean without a wire. My invention is the crowning success of long years of thought and labor.

Tesla went on to explain how he invents. He first discovers the natural laws governing the secret he is after. Then he can predict just what his mechanism, when constructed in a certain way, will accomplish.

When the laws controlling their appointed work in the universe have been once mastered the making of the proper machine to act in harmony with the laws is comparatively an easy task.

When Tesla discovered the laws leading up to the invention of his famous oscillator he was convinced that if he made certain wires in the machine exactly of the electricity of the required length the electricity of the globe would stream forth in flame.

A New Marvel

He worked long and persistently, with no satisfactory result. Still, he said, he knew to a mathematical certainty - a certainty on which he would stake his life - that the flames must appear when once he found the right measurements.

At last he hit it, and the world now marvels at the results announced. When Lord Kelvin, the Shakespeare of European science, saw this machine in action, its awful flames shooting and exploding in veritable thunderbolts, it is said that his emotion was profound, for above and beyond its spectacular features he realized that it sent its currents around and through our universe of matter. Between each terrifying lightning stroke the globe is penetrated and encircled by the million volted force. With this seemingly divinely endowed oscillator Tesla, it is declared, instantly brings Parts and Hong Kong within the reach of his hand.

I saw the machine yesterday. At the touch of Tesla’s finger It blossomed into lightning flame. In color and shape It was like a celestial morning glory flower, twenty feet in diameter, fringed with ten thousand purple thunderbolts - shooting into daggers and tongues of fire, continuously exploding with the roar of a cyclone.

It was like the spectacle on Sinai.

And what is this electric force that moves cars and machinery?

“Invisible light,” says Tesla.

To Abolish War

A still greater marvel is claimed. Tesla will destroy navies and abolish war. His invention to accomplish this sublime end is the subject of wide discussion. General Grant said: - “Make war terrible enough, and you will have peace.” This Tesla claims to have accomplished with his astonishing machinery.

But it is not by raining artificial thunderbolts on the enemy nor throwing shells by electricity. Tesla’s plan is to steer swift dynamite boats at express train speed along the surface or under water against a ship or a fleet, against a fort or a city, and blow them up - annihilate them.

Tesla will handle his destroyers from shore or a distant ship as skillfully as would a captain with a picked crew of experts. By electric devices alone the engines will be controlled and the boat steered and run at any speed, its guns fired or the boat exploded. If a submarine boat it will be made to dive and move below the surface at any depth, coming up at the desired point to blow the enemy out of the water. All this and a hundred other things will be done, he claims, by electricity, without wires or any artificial means of communication.

More Wonderful Than Fiction

It is a staggering statement to make. But the electrical machinery for doing it is fully described in the twenty-four typewritten pages of specifications covering the patent. There are eight thousand words in the document, showing the invention as a veritable engine of power for peace or war. Its action is largely automatic, and under the manipulation of the operator, stationed a mile or fifty miles away, it would seem almost instinct with human intelligence.

Tesla shows that his machine not only has the capacity for executing any number of orders, but it exhibits what practically amounts to intelligence.

It distinguishes from any number of signals that particular vital one which it has been previously “instructed” to select and obey.

Herein lies the proof of its almost omnipotent power for civilization, for peace or war. By its use, war becomes annihilation, and peace is the inevitable consequence.

Already rivals in electricity are criticizing the claims of the patent, calling Tesla a laboratory dreamer. As usual, they say that sending electrical currents without a wire is nothing new in theory; that it will be impossible to achieve anything of practical character on sea or land with the enemy vigilant, the weather stormy, the sea boisterous, and battles raging. They claim that dynamite boats can never be steered and fleets blown up by an operator stationed miles away with no metallic means of communication.

But Tesla is no ordinary inventor. According to the records, he stands in the front rank of geniuses. He was associated with Edison, and his achievements are a part of the marvelous history of electrical discovery.

Tesla Too Busy to Bother with Critics

When I showed Tesla some of the things the critics had written about this last invention, he smiled and said life was too short to enter into a defence of his work. He preferred to devote every hour to perfecting his inventions, leaving the results to vindicate his skill and judgment.

“I was many years in perfecting my electrical apparatus for transmitting power,” he said. “Many were at work in that direction, but I invented the machine now used in this country, in Europe, Asia, and even in Zululand. It has revolutionized the whole system of transmitting power. It was not difficult to transmit power a short distance. To transmit power successfully and cheaply long distances required years of study and demonstration.

“But in regard to my invention for destroying cities, forts, and fleets, which I have just patented, that is altogether beyond any question of doubt. I know just what it will do.

“It is a mistake to imagine that fleets can be destroyed without the operator knowing where they are. That is absurd. I never made such a claim. He must see the warships with his unaided eye or through a telescope, or they must be otherwise located so that he may know exactly where they are, and then direct his attacking boat, filled with dynamite or gunpowder, against the enemy to accomplish their destruction.”

How the Miracle Is Accomplished

And how does Tesla propose to do this without wire or any artificial means of communication?

He uses the earth and the atmosphere as his double wire and thus secures a complete electrical circuit. He has at hand his famous “Oscillator.” Instead of producing the few thousand volts used for electric lighting, propelling trolley cars, or killing murderers at Sing Sing, it manufactures millions of volts. But the electricity is of such a character that when the machine fills a room with jagged lightning, flashing and thundering in a tornado of fiery storm, it does not kill anybody, yet it develops a a force thousands of times greater than the biggest ordinary dynamo can produce.

With this machine creating a pressure of millions of volts, Tesla lashes the vast ocean of electricity of the earth into a cyclonic storm. Instantly the waves spread in all directions through the universe of matter.

And this electricity is as rigid as steel. It cannot be compressed nor condensed. Yet it is thousands of millions of times lighter than the lightest air of the highest mountain tops. It is everywhere in the universe, in the earth, in the sea, in the air, and in the vast abyss above the air. With it your eye penetrates material substance, as in using the X-ray. In the presence of this divine fluid, electricity, the earth and the universe of matter in a sense no longer exist, yet on a spider web wire, on a sunbeam, on a cloud you can send a thunderbolt or a human whisper hurling through space.

Like Aladdin’s Famous Lamp

All science stands aghast before the secret of this inexplicable power, yet it is obedient to the red freckled telephone girl who works in accordance with its laws. And yet old Archimedes’ lever, which moves the world, cannot condense a volume of electricity to the extent of a hair’s width. If you had a bag reaching from Tammany Hall to Chicago filled with electricity, and you dimpled the bag in New York with your fist, it would instantly be dimpled in Chicago, eight hundred miles away. It can encircle the globe sixteen times in a second.

All the universe is a big bag of electricity. When Tesla’s thunderbolt machine bombards it in New York, rippling waves break on the most distant electric shores of the world - in Chicago, San Francisco, Siberia, New Zealand, in our Philippines, at the poles north and south. This is Tesla’s claim, that the electromagnetic waves thus made sweep around and through the world in an instant.

How the Machines Work

Now how can he send his message aboard ship from distant lands - reaching one particular vessel?

By having two electric circuits, one on shore and one on the vessel, both adjusted to be in exact unison. They may be likened to a pair of violins in perfect accord and tune. You play one, and the other takes up the strain of music.

One of the most wonderful features of this invention is that the oscillator for producing these tremendous, far reaching electric waves can be almost tucked away in one’s pocket, like a cigarette case.

When Tesla on shore wants the ship’s engines to start, he touches the code signal, which goes flying on the billows of electric ether through all space. If these duplicate machines were in every city every city would receive the message to start the engine, fire the guns, steer “port” or “starboard,” go ahead or back, or whatsoever the message sent might be.

But the machine is deaf and blind to all other messages. Hence the enemy is powerless to thwart any attack.

So one ship alone of a fleet receives the electric message, the current “impulse,” or whatever it may be termed.

A little armature or lever is released, the electric circuit is complete, the clock starts a more powerful electric machine connecting with the engines, as it does with the steering machinery, and away goes the boat with its load of dynamite, being propelled and steered for the fleet at terrifying speed.

McKinley’s Great Feat.

Didn’t McKinley press a button and start the great machinery of the big fair?

Tesla touches his code signal, and the distant boat starts for the enemy’s fleet.

Every day a similar feat is performed in the big hotels of the country. The visitor on the fifteenth floor of the Imperial wants writing material and a steak. He sets the electric machine to the proper index in his room.

Down in the hotel office, it rings and points to the same articles on the same kind of dial - bearing all the “calls” and dishes, lettered exactly the same as the twin machine in his room on the fifteenth floor.

In the big hotel, the electricity travels over a double wire. Tesla’s electricity travels through air and earth. They are his double wires.

In your house, you pull your district messenger call for a boy, fire engine, or policeman. It is because of the peculiarity of the machine that the electricity obeys you - calling for a boy or policeman as you wish.

So again with Tesla. The secret is in the peculiarity of the machines. His machines not only enable him to control the distant ship, on which there is no human being, but they pick out only the vibratory current originally sent flying by the machine creating it.

With a glass Tesla sees the enemy’s fleet fifteen miles away. He adjusts the two machines - one on shore, one on the boat. He starts it, steers it, increases speed, rushes it against the fleet with its cargo of dynamite blowing the war ships to destruction.

If it is a diving submarine boat, he knows its course by bars of colored electric light which shoot from the depths to the sky from the speeding boat. If, on the surface, he uses colored lamps.

Besides ships, Tesla says he can direct balloons, or wagons - steering them in the same way.

Atlantic travellers know how easily the pilot steers the big steamship by merely pressing a button, operating the machinery connected with the ponderous steering mechanism. In a similar way, Tesla would set his dynamite boat’s machinery in motion. What matters it whether he is one or twenty miles away? Electricity laughs at distance.

How Tesla Describes It

Here is a section of his own technical description of how he does it:

“In a broad sense, my invention differs from all of those systems which provide for the control of the mechanism carried by a moving object and governing its motion in that I require no intermediate wires, cables or other form of electrical or mechanical connection with the object, save the natural media in space.

“I accomplish, nevertheless, similar results and in a much more practical manner by producing waves, impulses, or radiations which are received through the earth, water, or atmosphere by suitable apparatus on the moving body and cause the desired actions, so long as the body remains within the active region or effective range of such currents, waves, impulses, or radiations.

“These actions necessitated the designing of devices and apparatus of a novel kind, in order to utilize to the best advantage various facts or results which, either through my own investigations or those of others, have been rendered practically available.”

About the Electric Waves

Tesla describes a number of ways, well known to electricians, by which an electric effect could be transmitted to a distance without direct connection, and says:

“But by adopting such means as I have devised, that is, either by passing through the conducting path currents of a specially designed high frequency alternator, or better still, those of a strongly charged condenser, a very high rate of change may be obtained, and the effective range of the influence thus extended over a vast area, and by carefully adjusting the circuit on the moving body so as to be in exact electro-magnetic synchronism with the primary disturbances, this influence may be utilized at vast distances.”

An expert describes the working of the electrical machine:

“The device which he has adopted for his model demonstration consists of currents of enormous voltage, which can be projected in waves at the will of the operator by the turning of a little crank.

“Two waves go forth at each half-turn. The effect of these is like that of the vibrations produced by the voice in a telephone. On the vessel to be controlled is a broken electrical circuit, loose particles of a metallic oxide being at the point of separation. A current is always endeavoring to pass through these but fails. The magnetic waves produced by the operator bring together these particles by magnetic action, which thus have the power to conduct an electric current.

Working the Signals

“When the operator sends out his signal current, it is enabled to pass through the oxide, a magnet. With the first move of the armature a clockwork starts and prepares to set closing other electric circuits as soon as it may be released.

“A second magnetic wave moves the armature again, and the vessel’s machinery begins to move. Then by special devices combinations of impulses coming from the operator are made to operate each and every part of the machinery in the vessel at the will of the operator.”

Many astounding facts in electricity have been discovered. It originally cost thousands of dollars for copper wire alone to carry comparatively weak currents a few miles to move machinery. It was finally discovered that a tremendous voltage could be sent on a mere thread of wire, thus reducing the cost to a trifling expense. Tesla first succeeded in transmitting power over one wire, now he abolishes all wires.

Regarding the Diagrams

The accompanying illustrations, taken from Tesla’s patent specification, show a top and side of his boat, Nos. 1 and 2 respectively. Also a view showing the operating boat out at sea and the electrical wave generator and controller on shore, where the operator stands directing the course of the vessel. This latter operation Tesla thus describes:

“In this figure S designates any source of electrical disturbance or oscillations, the generation of which is controlled by a suitable switch contained in box T. The handle of the switch is movable in one direction only and stops on four points - t t¹ u u¹ - so that as the handle passes from stop to stop, oscillations are produced by the source during a very short time interval. There are thus produced four disturbances during one revolution, and the receiving circuit is affected four times, but the rudder is moved only twice - once to the right and once to the left. Now, I preferably place the handle of the switch so that when it is arrested on points t t¹ - that is, to the right or left of the operator - he is reminded that the vessel is being deflected to the right or left from its course, by which means the control is facilitated. The normal positions of the handle are therefore at u u¹ when the rudder is not acted upon, and it remains on the points t t¹ only so long as necessary. Since the working of the apparatus is very sure, the operator is enabled to perform any such operations as provision is made for without even seeing the vessel.

“To blow up the boat or ram it into the enemy’s fleet, the switch handle of the electric wave controlling machine is simply turned by the operator continually round and round for, say, ten or twenty seconds, sufficiently to accomplish the work designed.”

In summing up the various uses of this invention, Tesla says it will be invaluable in saving life at sea and in shipwrecks along shore. The operator can send out a lifeboat, scoop in the struggling swimmers from the water, turn the boat about, and bring them safely to shore.

In his own words, Tesla says of its merits:

“The invention which I have described will prove useful in many ways. Vessels or vehicles of any suitable kind may be used as life, dispatch, or pilot boats or the like, or for carrying letters, packages, provisions, instruments, objects, or materials of any description, for establishing communication with inaccessible regions and exploring the conditions existing in the same, for killing or capturing whales or other animals of the sea, and for many other scientific, engineering, or commercial purposes.”

And he adds the following significant and prophetic remarks: “But the greatest value of my invention will result from its effect upon warfare and armaments, for by reason of its certain and unlimited destructiveness, it will tend to bring about and maintain permanent peace among nations.”