Electric Invention

To the Editor of The Evening Post:

Sir: It was with considerable surprise that I read in your last night’s issue an account of a lecture delivered by Mr. Nikola Tesla before the New York Academy of Sciences on Tuesday last. On reference to the “Evening Post” of May 29, 1896, you will observe most of the matter credited to Mr. Tesla was then credited to Mr. D. McFarlan Moore. In the “Electrical Age” and “Western Electrician” of June 6, 1896, a letter appears over my signature headed “Claims of Moore, Tesla, and Edison.” That letter showed conclusively that to Mr. Moore alone belonged the credit of discovering a commercial method of obtaining light without heat.

Mr. Tesla concluded his lecture by lighting the hall with twenty-seven of his vacuum tubes, none of them less than 8' in length. The photograph of the hall, taken by the light of his tubes, appeared in the “Electrical Engineer” of May 5, 1896. My letter also proved that Mr. Moore lighted up Gov. Morton in a frame of 7' 6" tubes and showed above his head the signs “N. E. L. A.” and “Let There be Light.” It also proved that Mr. Moore lectured before the National Electric Light Association at their annual convention in New York city, and that he lighted the stage of the Exposition building with vacuum tubes. It also proved that he kept his tubes (in the form of flying arrows) lighted while Dr. Depew made his speech. It also proved that Mr. Moore’s Chamber of Light was visited by 85,000 people during the electrical exposition in this city, and that those visitors made a crowd of unimpeachable witnesses.

At that time I publicly challenged Mr. Tesla to make good his statement that he had a tube, and requested him to show even a solitary one, if he could not do better. That tube has never been shown.

Reference to the files in the United States Patent Office and those of foreign countries will show absolutely that Mr. Moore’s patents are not only the earliest, but that they control the vacuum tube-lighting field.

I desire to place the above facts on record. Had Mr. Tesla been generous enough in his lecture to give due credit to Mr. Moore (as he very reluctantly did to Profs. Lenard and Roentgen), I would have been spared the necessity of writing this letter.

E. J. Wessels,
President of the Moore Electrical Company.
New York, April 8.