The Burning of Tesla's Laboratory

Of Tycho Brahe's famous observatory at Uraniburg remain to-day but a mound of earth and a couple of holes. The same inventory would aptly apply to all that is left of the upper floor where Nikola Tesla has of late years been carrying on his suggestive and beautiful demonstrations in electricity. Two tottering brick walls and the yawning jaws of a sombre cavity aswim with black water and oil were all that could be seen on the morning of March 13 of a laboratory which to all who had visited it was one of the most interesting spots on earth. Beset by the squalor and clamor of plebeian South Fifth Avenue, the building was unpretentious, and its lower stories were given up to the prosaic details of an iron-pipe cutting business. Commonplace also was the origin of the disaster. A flaring gas jet, oilsoaked floors, and a "watchman" have been heard of before as an effective combination for midnight fires.

It has been curiously pathetic to note how universal was the expression of sympathy with Mr. Tesl in his loss. The newspaper dealers in the marvelous had been so relentlessly active in attempting to describe what they imagined to be going on in the laboratory that they experienced no difficulty in arousing regret as to the magnitude of the loss. But even now, if the average citizen were asked to explain definitely what he was grieving about, he would hesitate to answer. Impressions as to the laboratory have been mixed and weird. For example, one vivid young lady of the press, in her anxiety to be instructive, went so far as to depict herself undergoing a brilliant electrical ordeal that is possible only with the body entirely naked. This grotesque kind of misrepresentation has had vastly more terrors for Mr. Tesla than even the grim episode of last month. Nothing is so absurd as to suppose that inventors of his stamp relish the derogatory persiflage of the highly-colored articles that purport to reveal them and their work to the lay public. On the contrary, if it were not all so puerile, it would agonize men striving simply after scientific results and appreciative solely of scientific approval thus to be depicted in the rôle of charlatans, that of a

Katerfelto, with his hair on end,
At his own wonders wondering for his bread.

Happily, the Tesla laboratory was visited not alone by irresponsible purveyors of popular misinformation, eager for a new topic to be handled with exhaustive inaccuracy. Happily, the selfish lion-hunters of society have not been the only other class to which Mr. Tesla had an opportunity of presenting, with his unwearied good nature, new theories, new phenomena, and new apparatus. Happily, before the copper, glass, and insulation melted, physicists, electricians, and representative men in art and literature were able to see and judge for themselves what was forward. Indeed the pressure to secure an entrée to the laboratory had of recent months been extreme; and, now that the fire has occurred, perhaps it is as well that Mr. Tesla's imperative refusals once and again had their edges turned. The occasions are certainly rare when an inventor draws general notice to himself; and this is natural, for inventions deal chiefly with outward, material things. A poet or an artist can enter by his work into the life-blood of a people, and becomes part of their soul and growth. An ordinary inventor is more often like a man cutting his initials high up in the young bark of a sapling. The stem rises and expands, but the notches harden and stay ever at the same height, and are foreign to the tree's vital processes. At rare intervals the public becomes dimly conscious of new inventions that touch the arteries of social being; and then it is vaguely, but deeply, stirred. These inventions are generically such as affect and change our methods of obtaining light, heat, and power, our modes of travel, and the transmission of intelligence. The public had learned, more by intuition than knowledge, that Mr. Tesla was at work in each of these fields.

The Tesla laboratory was, in a sense, a private museum. The owner kept in it many souvenirs of bygone toil and experiment, and an important part of his records. During the past ten years Mr. Tesla has done an enormous amount of original experimentation, and it was all represented in the contents of the laboratory. His priority and preeminence in the polyphase current domain, which has been created by the development of his principle of the rotating field," was richly exemplified by models and parts of single, two, three, and multiphase motors of all kinds. Some of the pieces showed how careful of his material the inventor always was. A close observer could discern that he had used it sometimes a dozen ways in a dozen forms. Readers of the Engineering Magazine may remember to have seen these relics in Electricity Building at the World's Fair, as well as the curious ring wound for two-phase circuits over a smooth disc upon which copper balls revolved at wild speed, or near which other bodies could be set spinning rapidly. This illustrated graphically the manner in which Mr. Tesla was able in his motors to dispense with commutators and brushes. Another notable class of apparatus in the laboratory was that employed for researches into the qualities and effects of currents of high potential and high frequency. Mr. Tesla's name is peculiarly associated with this work, and his too infrequent lectures have described a wide range of results obtained in lighting novel electric lamps, or empty bulbs, in free space, without any connection with the distant wires or machinery. In this group may be included his early dynamos for generating high-frequency currents, one of them giving as high as thirty thousand alternations per second; and of equal interest were the disruptive discharge coils designed and built specially to demonstrate a number of recondite and startling discharge phenomena. There were also several unique appliances with which novel conditions could be studied in insulation, induction, impedance, and resonance.

But that which was of largest interest to everybody was the group of oscillators. In the new machine to which he gave quite appropriately the name of "oscillator," Mr. Tesla had blended or merged the dynamo and steam engine, seeking thereby to secure a far higher efficiency than both could give individually at their best. It is curiously typical of the man that he had no sooner placed in the hands of electricians the means for the economical long-distance transmission of water powers — his system being adopted widely, for example, at Niagara — than he threw himself on the problems of getting electrical current more cheaply from steam; and that, while lavishly generous in personal intercourse, he is ever fighting savagely the waste that goes on in our utilization of Nature's resources. It is something to have rendered the waterfalls more useful, but one's sympathies must equally go out to work that is aimed at greater economy of coal. If each 10 hours' work of 1 h. p. from a steam engine requires a total of 6 tons of coal every year, and if that is subject to further tremendous losses when turned into electric current, it is worth the effort to aim at less wasteful processes. This is the goal of Mr. Tesla's oscillator, and he is sanguine enough to believe that he has reached it.

The oscillator is simply a steam chest dissociated from all the orthodox governing mechanism, and joined in a new partnership with sets of electro-magnetic coils, into whose fields of force it thrusts reciprocatively armatures carried by its pistons, the regulation being subtly accomplished by the currents that are thus set up. The reduction in bulk is very striking, but obvious; while the reduction in steam consumption and the higher value of the currents are both elements that Mr. Tesla believes he has insured to a significant degree. He makes few mistakes.

Only one oscillator had ever been shown in public, — that, namely, which Mr. Tesla used in his lecture before the Electrical Congress at Chicago, in August, 1893, employing compressed air as the working fluid, for convenience. That machine and later types were all to be seen at the laboratory. The most advanced form shown to visitors was a very neat mechanism, entirely practical and successful, by means of which the laboratory had been lighted for months as well as furnished with current for the work done with the high-frequency apparatus alluded to above. It was run at 350 lbs. steam pressure; but, although there was no packing, no leakage of steam could be detected. Two pistons vibrated in opposite phase eighty times per second. The vibrations of these pistons past two sets of electromagnets developed current that was led to a bank of fifty or sixty incandescent lamps, which were lighted up to full candle-power and were steadiness itself in illumination. Current was also furnished by the machine to four arc lamps and to motors, as well as to devices of a fascinating nature, by means of which Mr. Tesla would light up tubes or ordinary incandescent lamps in the centre of the laboratory, — a room perhaps 40 feet by 80. He also used the current to experiment boldly with the electrical charge of the earth itself. One cannot but regret that all these first fruits of penetrative investigation have gone down in the wreck at South Fifth Avenue. They are being swiftly reproduced by incessant labor on the part of the dauntless inventor, but as the first, and, for awhile, the only exemplars of their kind, they are now touched with a sentimental interest unworthy neither of those who feel it or of the objects themselves.

Perhaps the most painful loss of all is the destruction of Mr. Tesla's notes and papers. His memory is all right, and flashes on any experiment of the past with the revealing power of a search-light; but when can leisure now be won to jot things down that, marking achievement on one hand, might also save other experimenters years of toil, and that would show to capital as well the doors open as the paths that are blind. The loss falls least heavily on the loser. Like many another tireless experimenter, he hoped to give the world with due rapidity the report of his failures as well as of his discoveries, but he had not counted on casual destruction of memorabilia by fire as one of the obstacles in his way. Mr. Tesla had taken the papers to his laboratory so that he might work on them in brief leisure spells, and was thus the victim of his own conscientious endeavor to be of use to his fellow-electricians. There seems to be a fate about such things. Galileo's own son, from filial religious motives, destroyed some of his father's dearest manuscripts; and it was no less a friend than John Stuart Mill who burnt up for poor Carlyle the first volume of the unprinted "French Revolution." It took Carlyle four weeks, and heaps of the trashiest novels, to quiet his mind after the miserable accident. Tesla was at work again with clenched determination while the ashes of his hopes lay hot.