The Coming Tesla Period

Tesla, the wizard, threatens to revolutionize all human affairs, and to banish wars and rumors of wars, by making them so expensive that no nation can afford to indulge in them. It is so already that only about half a dozen of the principal nations can afford to prepare for a war footing, and the lesser nations must keep safely near to good terms with one of the principal nations. The nations which possess purses long enough to make it possible to indulge in war are the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany and Russia. Such other nations as Austria, Italy, Spain, Greece, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, Denmark and Sweden, endeavor to maintain the appearance of keeping up with the procession, but they will have to come down at the drop of the hat of one of the great powers unless some other great power is ready to defend them. Spain has moved nearly the whole earth and tried to move heaven to procure a friend among the great powers to help her in her war with the United States, but so far her efforts have resulted in only failure.

Tesla, though a Serbian by birth, has become an intense American and the Spanish war spurred him to develop a crude idea that had been scrambling about in his intelligence for considerable time. He has now harnessed it, and he believes that he has got it under control. He has applied for a patent, and of course he will obtain it, for his invention is utterly unlike anything else on the earth, or under it, or over it. It is to send out from a generator of electricity, currents of great force in a desired direction, without wires or tracks to guide. His idea is that he can start out a balloon with nobody in it, and can guide it in any direction or to any point he pleases, and can discharge from it dynamite bombs or gun cotton torpedoes to annihilate everything below it. He can send out a ship with no other helmsman than the man near the generator to fire broadsides or send torpedoes into an enemy, or to cut up a fleet with a ram. Of course in time of peace such inventions will be employed to send balloons and trains of cars through the air to make the North Pole a much frequented Summer resort and to make private air carriages, directed by the mind of the rider, as plentiful by about 1900 as bicycles are in 1898.

Tesla’s invention runs far beyond Bellamy’s Utopia, and will transport mortals to the realms of wishes, where one has only to desire a thing, and reach out and catch it as it is treated by electrical fiat. The era is just coming within hailing distance when dreams of the Greenbacker and free silver Populist will be fully realized. Undoubtedly the next era will be one of great prevalence of insanity, for the world will move at such a terrific pace that none but the fittest can survive.