Book Table - Review of Experiments with Alternate Currents of High Potential and High Frequency Lecture

EXPERIMENTS WITH ALTERNATE CURRENTS OF HIGH POTENTIAL AND HIGH FREQUENCY. By Nikola Tesla. New York: McGraw Publishing Company. 1904. Pp. (five by seven inches), ix., 162, with a new portrait of the author and 40 illustrations in the text. Price, $1.

Tesla's is a name to conjure by, and this little book will not lack for readers, although it is but a reprint of a lecture delivered several years ago before the Institution of Electrical Engineers in London and of an article on "The Transmission of Electric Energy Without Wires," published in the Electrical World and Engineer last spring. There is a fascination about the personality and work of Tesla, due partly to his fame as an inventor, but largely to his daring conceptions and prodigal predictions. An example of the latter and of the writer's fervid style is the very last paragraph of the book:

"When the great truth, accidentally revealed and experimentally confirmed, is fully recognized, that this planet, with all its appalling immensity, is to electric currents virtually no more than a small metal ball and that by this fact many possibilities, each baffling imagination and of incalculable consequence, are rendered absolutely sure of accomplishment; when the first plant is inaugurated and it is shown that a telegraphic message, almost as secret and non-interferable as a thought, can be transmitted to any terrestrial distance, the sound of the human voice, with all its intonations and inflections faithfully and instantly reproduced at any other point of the globe, the energy of a waterfall made available for supplying light, heat or motive power anywhere on sea or land, or high in the air-humanity will be like an ant heap stirred up with a stick. See the excitement coming!"

An interesting biographical sketch forms the introduction to the lecture. In this it is said that Mr. Tesla is "tall and spare, with a clean-cut, thin, refined face and eyes that recall all the stories one has read of keenness of vision and phenomenal ability to see through things."