Electric Wonders Will Be On Show

National Exposition Opens To-Day in the Grand Central Industrial Building.

INVENTORS’ CONTRIBUTIONS.

Governor Morton, by Touching a Button, Will Discharge Artillery in Four Distant Cities.

A MESSAGE ROUND THE WORLD

Several hundred men have been at work night and day for the last week making elaborate preparation for to-night’s opening ceremony of the National Exposition of Electrical Appliances. The exposition is held under the auspices of the same organization which made the display at the World’s Fair, and is incidental to the tenth annual Convention of the National Electric Light Association. Delegates present will represent nearly ten thousand electric lighting plants in the United States, with an aggregate investment of $750,000,000.

The opening ceremony will take place at eight o’clock this evening, Mayor Wurster, of Brooklyn, presiding, and will be attended by Governor Morton and his staff and a delegation of State officers from Albany, as well as the Governors of neighboring States, representatives of the Army and Navy departments at Washington, Thomas A. Edison, Nikola Tesla, Professor A. A. Anthony, Dr. Park Benjamin, of Newark; Dr. T. B. Crocker, of Columbia College; Professor Elihu Thomson, of Lynn, Mass.; P. B. Delaney, Herbert Lawes Webb, Howard Leonard, Alexander Graham Bell and other distinguished electrical magnates. It will be in charge of a committee consisting of Frank W. Hawley, chairman; Edward D. Adams, Brayton Ives, Clinton L. Rossiter, Horace C. DuVal and H. H. Vreeland, of New York; Charles R. Huntley, of Buffalo; James I. Ayer, Boston; Edward A. Armstrong, Newark; S. Dana Greene, Schenectady, and M. J. Francisco, of Rutland, Vt.; C. H. Wilmerding, president, Chicago; Frederick Nicholls, vice president, Toronto; E. F. Peck, second vice president, Brooklyn; George F. Porter, secretary and treasurer, and C. O. Baker, Jr., of New York. The Seventy-first Regiment Band will give a concert during the evening.

Governor Morton will, in the Industrial Arts Building, Forty-third street and Lexington avenue, at eight o’clock, deliver a short address and then turn on a current of electricity generated by the falls of Niagara and put in operation the machinery in the exposition building. This will be the longest transmission of electricity for power purposes ever perfected, the line being 462 miles in length. The only line approaching it in length was one of 110 miles in Germany. The Governor will use the same golden key with which President Cleveland started the wheels in the great World’s Fair.

ARTILLERY FIRED BY TELEGRAPH.

Another incident will be the discharge of four pieces of ordnance by Governor Morton by telegraph. With the consent of the War Department at Washington companies of artillery at San Francisco, New Orleans, Augusta, Me., and St. Paul will place guns in the public parks, which will be connected by suitable mechanism with the lines. As the Governor declares the exposition duly opened he will press a button which will discharge these pieces of artillery.

The current from Niagara will be used in turning a model of the great power plant recently completed at Niagara Falls. The model shows a section of the city of Niagara, with the river and islands and Canadian shore. On either side of the model will be twenty-four telephone transmitters, the receivers of which, placed at the brink of the falls at Niagara, enable those witnessing the movements of the machinery to hear the roar of the cataract. The current will also put in operation a miniature model of a section of the Erie Canal, along which a cableway line is shown, bearing a motor electrically operated and towing a fleet of three steel canalboats. The canalboats are exact models of the new design built in Cleveland, Ohio.

DEPEW’S MESSAGE ROUND THE WORLD.

A feature during the exposition will be the sending of a telegram by Dr. Chauncey M. Depew around the world, or as nearly so as may be. On one side of the gallery will be a table, with telegraphic instruments for sending. In the opposite gallery will be a table, with receiving instruments. From the one Dr. Depew will start his cablegram, addressed to Edward D. Adams, the president of the Niagara Power Company, who, on receiving it, will read it to those present. He will thereupon send his reply, which will be read by Dr. Depew, and followed by a brief address.

Through the courtesy of Sir W. H. Preece, chief of the British government lines, this circuit of the globe is made, and it will be the longest circuit over which a current of electricity has ever been sent. On a canvas in the rear of the hall will be shown the exact route of the cable message around the world: — From New York to Canso, to Lisbon, under the Mediterranean Sea to Suez, along the line of the famous canal, under the Red Sea to Aden, thence to Bombay, across the land line to India, to Madras, to Singapore, to Northern Australia, Melbourne and Sydney. The return is by cable to the Cape of Good Hope, thence along the African coast to Lisbon, crossing the Atlantic again to Pernambuco, Brazil, thence to Mexico, to San Francisco and across the continent to New York.

A feature of interest in connection with the exposition will be the sending of a message of congratulation to Her Majesty the Queen on her birthday, May 24, the current to be used being generated by the waters of the Niagara River, which are international.

TESLA’S TEN MILLION VOLTAGE.

One of the most astonishing things which will be shown will be Nikola Tesla’s oscillator, by means of which he is able to develop a current of 10,000,000 voltage. So enormous is this power that nothing has been discovered to which it can be applied, and yet he declares that it is practically harmless, the method of transmission being so regulated that it will not kill. The popular understanding, as based upon the electrical chambers of the State prisons, is that 1,700 volts will kill. Besides this, Mr. Tesla will show a model of the machine by means of which he may be able to do away with metallic circuits in telegraphing. All he will have to do is to signal Singapore, and Singapore will answer without the medium of telegraphic wires or ocean cables. The development of this machine, Mr. Tesla says, may enable us to communicate with the stars, though no experiments to that end will be conducted during the exposition. Then he will show his experiments in the application of his principles regarding electrical vibrations, by means of which electrical lighting will be revolutionized, and instead of carbons and filaments, the vacuums of the bulbs will be filled with an electric glow like that of sunlight, and as steady as the light of noonday.

EDISON’S FLUOROSCOPE.

Mr. Edison’s division of the exhibition will include all of his inventions affecting telegraphy, telephony, lighting, phonographs and the combinations which he has effected with the camera and stereopticon. But the thing which will probably most deeply interest the majority of those who visit his section will be his adaptation of the X rays to practical use by means of the fluoroscope. There will be four of these instruments, and those persons who believe that their hands or arms contain matter sufficiently interesting for examination will be given ample opportunity to satisfy themselves. Mr. Edison has given the exhibition managers the privilege of helping themselves to anything they may find of interest in his laboratory, and he has assigned a number of his assistants to duty in the building, so that inquirers may be fully informed on any subject about which they may express curiosity.

There will be an electrical kitchen, where all the cooking is done without kindling a fire, and where a steak may be broiled or a pot of coffee made by merely turning a switch; telephone central office in full operation, with the “Hello girls” hard at work; inventions affecting street and heavy railway transportation, electric lighting, telegraphy and telephony and all the other manifold uses to which electricity has been applied. There will be no one thing which has marked an advance in the science which will not be either in the commercial part of the show or in the exhibitions of Cornell and Columbia universities.

At the Industrial Arts Building at ten minutes past ten o’clock last night a preliminary test was made of the transmission of power from Niagara Falls over an ordinary wire by the Tesla system. The test was in every way successful and developed more efficiency than was anticipated. There was a loss of less than thirty per cent. Three hundred and fifty volts were transmitted.

NIAGARA CURRENT TRIED WITHOUT TRANSFORMERS AT HIGH VOLTAGE.

(BY TELEGRAPH TO THE HERALD.)

NIAGARA FALLS, N. Y., May 3, 1896. — The first experiment in the sending of Niagara power to the New York Electrical Exposition was made late last night, when power at 200 voltage, alternating current, was sent. To-night the voltage was raised to 350, and again sent. Until the new transformers of the company arrive, however, it is not expected the best results can be obtained.