Electricity and Life

Word comes from London by way of the newspapers of a new cure for consumption - the use of high tension electric currents, 80,000 volts or so. The matter is exploited in the usual fashion. To encourage the reader’s imagination, he is treated to graphic comparisons of the “awe-inspiring force” of 80,000 volts. It takes but 500 to run an electric locomotive or a trolley car. Only 1,500 volts are used in the electrocutions. The inference is that the force of 80,000 must be dreadful. It is not.

One of Tesla’s really solid contributions to scientific progress in this field was to produce currents of enormous tension and great frequency of alternation, and to show that these are harmless as they pass through the body. A man may allow Tesla’s currents, as they are called all the world over, amounting to hundreds of thousands and even millions of volts, to flow through him and hardly be aware of the fact. Indeed, where a shock from a thousand volts may be fatal if the quantity be sufficient, of a million one may be unconscious.

Above a moderate “tension” the current becomes less and less painful and dangerous, the higher the voltage, until with the electro-magnetic currents of incredible frequency, which we call light, they may act upon even so sensitive a surface as the eye without harm. - Harper’s Weekly.