He Lives on Electricity

Without It Nikola Tesla Is Moody and Listless.

IT TAKES THE PLACE OF SLEEP

He Acts Like a Broken-Hearted Man, and Hasn't a Definite Opinion Upon Anything.

Electricity is Nikola Tesla's life. Without it he is as miserable as Paul Verlaine and his absinthe stomach would be in a Maine temperance town. It is now three months since his laboratory in South Fifth avenue was gutted by fire. His friends said at the time that it would break his heart. It did. Fortunately, it is a break that can be remedied, and the only remedy is electricity. Just as soon as he can get his new laboratory in working order he will once more be the old Nikola Tesla. But now, when he shakes hands with a friend, instead of the warm, hearty grasp of the Tesla who existed before the great disaster came, his hand has about as much warmth as an ice cake, while his arm flops up and down like the sleeve of a one-armed man in a breeze.

If the fire hadn't occurred he might now have announced to the world the consummation of one or two of his greatest exploits. As it is, he doesn't know when his new laboratory will be as complete as the old one, when he will be able to regain the ground that was lost, to say nothing of covering the distance between that point and the goal. So he doesn't want to talk to newspaper men about his plans. He will not say anything definite about anything. If he announces that he hopes to perfect a thing in a year and he feels that he doesn't keep his word he believes that the public — particularly that portion of it which is specialists in electricity — is inclined to believe that he has been story telling. He works by moods, the same as other geniuses. He might perfect what he had promised in a year in six months, and he might not perfect it in five years. Hereafter, he proposes to say nothing — to put it in store phrase — until he can deliver the goods.

HIS NEW WORKSHOP.

His new laboratory is on Houston street, near Mulberry. It consists of two lofts in a new building. You will find him most likely sitting with his lank form half wrapped around the office boy's table, grimly staring at the wall. If he isn't there he will be at his own desk, which is in the main room of his laboratory, staring at his famous oscillator, surrounded by detached pieces of electrical apparatus in the rear of the room. Whether or not the weather is warm he is wearing a white silk handkerchief around his neck. The white silk is becoming to the swarthy complexion of the Roumanian, but that is hardly why he wears it. He alwayı dresses the same — in a long cutaway coat.

His mechanical apparatus, which is on the second floor, is all prepared, but he doesn't seem to know — and if he does know he doesn't care to say — when his electrical apparatus will be in shape so that he can pick up his work where the fire left it for him.

Every glance that he gave the oscillator while he was conversing with The Press reporter seemed to take about three pounds of energy out of him. And when he walked over toward the oscillator and made a little gesture of despair he looked as much like wilting as a man who has walked to Harlem from Fourteenth street in the late hours of a Sunday to get a drink — and doesn't get it.

HIS "ELIXIR OF LIFE."

"Electricity is everything to me," he said. "I can do nothing until my apparatus is ready. When I'm in the midst of my work, as I was in South Fifth avenue, electricity seems to me a sort of a Brown-Sequard elixir of life. It seems in a measure to take the place of sleep, and I confess that without it when I am doing nothing fatigues me far more than when I work hard all day. I do not go to bed until after one, and I arise at a quarter before six — or, at least, by half-past six.

Then he threw up his hands with another little gesture of despair, and ten pounds more of energy seemed to scintillate off his finger ends, as he said, with a pathetic and listless little toss of his head:

"But I do not sleep; I just try to sleep."

He leaves the Gerlach usually before 7, and sometimes he comes beck at 7 in the evening, and again not until 12. Sometimes he goes directly to his laboratory; again he doesn't. Sometimes he will leave his laboratory at 4 or 5 in the afternoon; again he will not leave it until nearly midnight. He directs his workmen in that same listless sort of manner which has come over him since his misfortune; and when he is not doing that he is either wrapping his form about the office boy's desk or sitting huddled up in his own chair, gazing sadly at his oscillator.

MAY BE A HERMIT YET.

Some of his friends suspect that he is not being so diligent in the preparation of his apparatus as he might be were he not so sad-hearted. They fear that he spends too much of his time huddled up in his chair and only thinking, as they say on the Bowery, "W'at t'ell's de use?" But Nikola Tesla is as deep as he is long, argue other friends, and he is getting his new laboratory in shape as fast as he can. As there is no other laboratory like it in the world, to replace its network of wires and its wonderful assortment of instruments and modern magic could hardly be intrusted to a village blacksmith. In the hands of expert workmen it is a matter of about equal amounts of time and patience, and a great deal of both. However, Nikola Tesla's friends are not a great authority on Nikola Tesla nowadays. He allows them to see little of him. He is more of a recluse than he has ever been before. It is a positive effort for him to talk to anybody. He loses about as much energy in one sentence as he does in one glance at his oscillator. But if one wishes to destroy his energy by the wholesale, ask him when he expects he will have his laboratory completedly restored. The reporter asked him once. He throw up both hands in despair, and seemed to lose so much energy that the reporter was not unkind enough to ask him a second time or to continue a subject which was to him like ripping open a partially healed wound.