Is This the Doom of the Most Powerful Navies?

“There is one thing that you should appreciate and that is the improvement in guns and in the materials of war, in dynamite and other explosives, and in breech loading guns, is rapidly bringing us to a period when war will eliminate itself, when we can no longer stand up and fight each other in battle and when we will have to resort to something else.”

This prediction was made by General Sheridan twenty years ago, and now comes Magician Tesla with the announcement of its possible fulfillment. In to-day’s Herald Mr. Tesla says: —

“War will cease to be possible when all the world knows to-morrow that the most feeble of the nations can supply itself immediately with a weapon which will render its coast secure and its ports impregnable to the assaults of the united armadas of the world. Battle ships will cease to be built, and the mightiest armorclads and the most tremendous artillery afloat will be of no more use than so much scrap iron.

“And this irresistible power can be exerted at any distance by an agency of so delicate, so impalpable a quality that I feel that I am justified in predicting that the time will come, incredible as it may seem, when it can be called into action by the mere exercise of the human will.”

This is to be done, the Wizard explains, by an irresistible instrument of destruction charged with dynamite and sent against the enemy’s war vessels—a deadly assailant which “we can operate day or night, on the surface or below it, and from any distance that may be desired.”

“I can apply this system of control to any type of vessel and of any size. It is not even necessary to make a close approach to the vessel to be destroyed. At the distance of 100 feet the explosion of 200 pounds of dynamite will exert a shattering effect on a battle ship, but there is no reason why we should not load a vessel with 200 or 300 tons, or even more, of dynamite, which, exploded even a mile or so away, would raise a wave that would overwhelm the biggest ship ever built.”

That sounds like the talk of a lunatic, crank or dreamer. But Mr. Tesla is none of these. He is a scientist and inventor of world wide fame and he talks with earnest conviction and confidence.

Incredible and impossible his promised achievement may well seem to the average mind. But the recent history of electrical progress is a story of miracles wrought by inventive genius. In view of this, we may well ask what marvel is not possible and what bewildering triumphs of genius has the future yet in store?