“Flippant Disparagement” of Mr. Tesla

A New York daily - The Sun - complains that other papers utter “flippant remarks of disparagement” regarding Mr. Nikola Tesla’s recent inventions. In commenting on this, The Electrical World and Engineer observes that the reason for this disparagement lies in the nature of things. It says that modern electrical inventors are generally diffuse in their efforts from the fact that opportunities to win new triumphs present themselves so abundantly in every direction that the most enduring energy and the highest genius are in danger of dissipation without net results. And this is the reason why the public once in a while gets impatient with the inventor and says rude things. The Electric World and Engineer continues:

“The tide of this flippant disparagement has been rising high of late, possibly because Mr. Tesla, with the onrushing enthusiasm of a man who sees things ahead to be done and is fertile in expedients for doing them, inclines to discuss them as tho they were already disposed of. With men of this stamp of intellect it will be so to the end, and it would be a prosaic world of mediocre achievement if it were otherwise. Just at present Mr. Tesla and his brilliant fellow countryman, Dr. Pupin, have their names associated in the public mind with new means of communicating across the ocean, and the newspapers, as the popular sources of scientific information, are full of the subject - a thing we heartily prefer to seeing the same columns filled with murder cases. But it is certain, in advance, that before they get through both Messrs. Pupin and Tesla will encounter a good deal more of ‘flippant disparagement.’ What is now being heralded as a novelty in each instance has been known to the electrical community for some time past, as we show in reproducing our articles of nearly a year ago; and probably before the goal is reached there will be several successive outbursts of sensational writing, followed by more of the ‘flippant disparagement.’”

Obviously, the writer goes on to say, the tasks of telegraphing to Europe without wires or telephoning to Europe with a “loaded” cable are serious problems, but the impatient public does not realize that such things may linger unaccomplished many years to come, without any fault on the part of those who are striving to bring them to pass. He adds:

“In Mr. Tesla’s case the injury done him by the jokes and jibes one finds in almost every paper picked up is the more severe because so much is promised in his name without his direct personal sanction. There seems no way to stop this abuse of confidence, from which Mr. Edison has also suffered to such an extent that a shotgun is his preferred reception for the average reporter. But just now Mr. Tesla holds the center of the sensational stage, and the talk about him is all the looser for the reason that it has so little that is tangible behind it as food. He has read no scientific papers before the societies for years, and, since his monumental series of patents on polyphase work, has taken out extremely few patents. We can recall only one or two in recent years. Hence the gossip that always besets a great genius has little to feed upon save the wild and absurd stories to which few of the authors hesitate even at signing Mr. Tesla’s own name. In this way, as all such men discover, the lot of the genius trying to crack the nuts of modern civilization is not much better than that of his predecessors treated as lunatics or witches. And this ‘flippant disparagement’ falls hardest upon those who are not drawing-room inventors with drawing-board inventions.”