To Electrify Children

Tesla Will Try to Get Permission for Stockholm Experiments Here.

William H. Maxwell, City Superintendent of Schools, will ask the Board of Education when it meets in the fall to sanction an experiment in electrifying a school room for the purpose of stimulating mentally defective children. Nikola Tesla, the inventor, who is the originator of the idea, has been conferring with Mr. Maxwell and Dr. L. B. Blan and has succeeded in winning them over to the project. Mr. Tesla says that the plan has been tried in Stockholm and that it was found practicable there.

First of all Mr. Maxwell had to be assured that the experiment could not possibly harm the children, and Tesla convinced him that there was no such chance. The apparatus is installed in the walls of the room which is selected for the experiment and is hidden so that neither the children nor the teacher know that it is there. Mr. Maxwell wants to put a class of about fifty deficient children in such a room and to place another similar class at the end of the corridor in an ordinary room as a check on the experiment. At the end of a certain time the records of the two classes will be compared, and in that way the efficiency of the apparatus will be determined.

If the Board of Education approves of the plan Mr. Tesla will personally superintend the installation of the apparatus.

"I feel sure that the electrification of a room stimulates the children's nerve cells," he says, "and that it aids them physically as well as mentally. The cost of the experiment would be about $10,000."

Dr. W. C. Bagley, professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, said in commenting on the proposed experiment that great care should should be exercised reised in reaching any conclusion reaching conclusion regarding it and that the experiment should last for several years for the purpose of discovering whether it had any detrimental effect.