Have Control of Tesla's Inventions

Kings County Electric Company Will Revolutionize Things

IN THE ELECTRICAL WORLD.

Three Brooklynites Who Are Deeply Interested in the New Enterprise — A Plan Which, It Is Hoped, Will Result in the Manufacture of Electricity at Such a Low Rate That Present Conditions Will Be All Upset — D. O. Mills, ex-Governor Flower and Vice President Hobart Interested In the Venture. Power for Metropolitan Surface and L Roads One of the Prizes the New Company Has In View — A Great Project. 

Brooklyn will shortly be the scene of one of the greatest scientific and industrial battles of the age. The breastworks and fortifications are already being built. The genius of Tesla is to try conclusions with the wisdom and experience of Edison. This great struggle for supremacy in science and finance will have its seat of war right in Brooklyn, though its outposts will spread throughout this state and into Jersey. Just how far it will eventually extend its lines no one can at present say, for that lies principally in the outcome of the battle that is now beginning in this city. In other words the Edison Electric Company has a rival in the field whose strength will probably soon be felt. The Edison people, have an inkling of what is about to take place, but they pretend to look upon it as not very important. In Montague street the Kings County Electric Light and Power Company have established an office in the second floor of the recently rebuilt and improved building next to the Real Estate Exchange. By the general public little is known of this concern. The employees there refuse to even give the names of the officers of the company and direct all inquirers to see A. M. Young. A. M. Young has no particular hour of arriving at the office nor of departing-and even if caught by questioners he is a little less communicative, if possible, than the clerks. It is said on good authority, however, that Bridge President William Berri, Seth L. Keeney and Felix Campbell, president of the People's Trust Company, are much interested in the new company. Mr. Berri, when questioned about the enterprise by an Eagle reporter, said:

"It is a very big scheme and one in which Mr. Keeney and I are very much, interested, but we cannot say just at present just what is in the project. It is a great enterprise, with lots of money in it, but for many reasons its intentions cannot be told now."

Felix Campbell shook his head when Interviewed and said: "Yes, there is such a company organized and I have been told of it, but I have been away and do not know who is behind it."

Mr: Julian Fairchild, president of the Kings County Trust Company, who is a director of the Edison Company, sald:

"We know the intentions of the Kings County Electric Light and Power Company, and if they think they work in secret they are mistaken. Perhaps we would fear their power If we did not know that the men whom we believed at first were in it are not. have investigated and find that J. Pierpont Morgan and D. O. Mills are not behind it with their capital, and Governor Flower is the biggest man they have."

The company as-it now stands, it is understood, will put into actual practice and work the inventions of Nikola Tesla, upon which he has been working for years and which have been brought to a practical industrial basis within the last year. Vice President Hobart, it is understood, with two other prominent financiers of New Jersey, will take hold of the enterprise in that state.

Ex-Governor Roswell P. Flower and Messrs, Morgan and Mills will represent New York City and the state, while Messrs, Berri, Campbell and Keeney will see to the work in Brooklyn that has already been commenced. Behind these men will stand the genius of Tesla and their wealth will bring out the result of inventions that he has already demonstrated in a more or less forcible degree.

Ostensibly the president of the new company is Charles Cooper. It was he who secured the franchise for the electric plant in this city and it is said that he was at first more than willing to sell it for somewhere in the neighborhood of $50,000. But he did not then realize the possibilities that lay behind this franchise and they have grown to such an extent that Mr. Cooper, it is now stated, would not dispose of this franchise or his holdings in the company for $600,000 cash. Mr. Cooper is the man who pushed the gas combination through to a successful climax. Mr. A. M. Young is the business manager of the concern and is pushing on forward the work in Brooklyn.

The first demonstration on the part of the company that they meant business and big business was the purchase of a piece of property on the East River that involved an expenditure of half a million dollars. It was the block running from East River to John street, between Bridge and Gold. In the first transaction the Kings County Electric Light Company bought from Squibb & Sons, the chemists, for $185,000, the chemical plant situated on Gold and Johns streets, running down to the river front, with a frontage of 185 feet East River and John street and a depth of 475 feet. It has several brick buildings upon it at present. This is the first piece of property owned by the company and with the exception of the big piece of land bought by the Squibbs adjoining it it is the only considerable waterfront that is not controlled by the warehouse combination. It is here that the first plant will be built and it is an excellent site, for the coal may be easily and cheaply brought to the works and there are many other advantages coming from the water front obtained. Fifty miles of subway have already been laid by the company, and it is now said that just as soon as the power plant is ready fully a hundred miles of wire will be ready to receive the electric current and the big fight will be on in earnest.

President Berri said that no bonds would be offered and no shares sold, at large and that the company was already fully organized and backed by well equipped men in the financial world. The company admits, through the president, that the Tesla inventions and his new systems are controlled by them. How much this means cannot be fully stated until the company chooses to make all its plans public, but it may be said that Tesla has long been at work upon the problem of transmitting power of high voltage to any distance without the expensive loss that is a part of the systems now in use. Mr. Tesla came to America with the leda of entering a field where inventive genius would be appreciated and bad in his mind then the problem which he is said to have to a great measure solved. He worked for a time under Edison, for whom he has the greatest admiration. But soon the pupil became too great for the master and he left him to joint a company to make and sell an arclighting system, based on some of his inventions in that branch of art and which bad in them the then unworked theory of the alternating current which Tesla had experimented upon successfully in Paris. So full was he of the wonderful possibilities in his surprising discoveries that he was for publishIng then abroad, but he was induced by friends to put his inventions and discoveries to the test through interested, capital, which was soon obtained. A suggestion of what is about to be disclosed through the company now formed may be had from an address made by Tesla in May, 1891,, before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in New York, in which he spoke of the possibilities of alternating currents and the transmission of high potential currents. He stated then a step bad been made in the advance of electrical lighting and power giving.

"But there is possibility of obtaining energy not only in the form of light, but motive power," said Mr. Tesla, "and energy of any other form in some more direct way, from the medium. The time will be when this will be accomplished and the time has come when one may utter such words before an.enlightened audience without being considered a visionary. The mere contemplation of these possibilities expands our minds, strengthens our hopes and fills our hearts with supreme delight."

And this man who spoke so enthusiastically then of the discovery he was on the eve of making some time later spoke of the progress he had made in the distribution of light and. power in these words:

"I am led to believe now that in our future distribution of electrical energy by currents of very high tension, liquid insulation will be used. The cost is a great drawback, but if we employ an oil as an insulator the distribution of electrical energy with something like 100,000 volts, and even more, becomes, at least, with higher frequencies, so easy that it could hardly be called an engineering feat. With oil insulation and alternate current motors, transmission of power can be effected with safety and upon an industrial basis at distances of as much as a thousand miles."

That was several years ago, and it is now stated that this modern genius has worked out his theory to a practical basis and Edison will meet a foe worthy of him, in his own field. It is said that the railroads of this city, the Brooklyn Heights, the elevated roads and all the transportation lines will be enabled to sell their plants or dispose of them to the new company and obtain all their power the plant work with the inventions of Tesla. D. O. Mills, it is said, has satisfied himself of the practicability of the scheme and, with his interests in metropolitan railroad companies, is anxious to have it put to the test.