Can See Through A Man

Nikola Tesla's Remarkable Achievements with the X Rays and a Luminous Screen.

Nikola Tesla, who was among the first to experiment with the Roentgen rays and who achieved some remarkable results, has an interesting article in the current number of the Electrical Review, in which he describes in detail his recent experiments. As a result of them he says he can see clear through the human body.

Tesla's ambition has been to develop electrical power enough to enable the rays to fully illumine the human body, and thus enhance their value to surgery. He shadowgraphed a man's ribs and the bones of his shoulder and arms some time ago, but he was not satisfied with the picture, because it failed to show the bones distinctly. This result, he says in his article, he has just obtained, and he has a shadowgraph in which the bones appear clearly outlined. This picture was taken four feet from the vacuum tube and after a comparatively short exposure.

An equally satisfactory shadowgraph, Mr. Tesla says, was obtained at a distance of twelve feet from the vacuum tube and after an exposure of only five minutes.

But the interesting portion of Mr. Tesla's article is that in which he tells how he was enabled to see through a man's body. He did this with the aid of a luminous screen, somewhat on the principle of Edison's fluoroscope, recently described in the Herald. In the fluoroscope Edison used tungstate of calcium crystals only; in his luminous screen Tesla used these crystals, with barium platinum cyanide. The man through whom Tesla looked was placed between the luminous screens and the vacuum tube. Tesla says that when he looked at the screen it made the man's body luminous, so that he distinctly saw his backbone and all the details of his skeleton. A metal plate placed on the man's back and a coin were also, he says, revealed. This screen, he says, fluoresces at a distance of twelve feet from the rays.

Mr. Tesla says these remarkable effects were produced by reflecting the rays and contracting them in a funnel. Mr. Tesla is still pursuing his researches and expects to obtain even more sensational results soon.