Human Side of News - Can Science End War by Making It Universally Destructive?

There is only one man alive who has 700 basic patents to his credit. He is 79 years old. His name is Nikola Tesla and he promises us, on the threshold of his 80th year, magic ray which will supply humanity with a new means of guiding ships at sea and bringing them to port; a dependable divining rod for locating gold and other precious metal under the surface of the earth; and fourthly, a means of revealing to science all of the earth's physical contents.

Now if these were promised to us by any other man than Nikola Tesla, the polite smile and uplifted eyebrow might be in order. But you don't uplift eyebrows at the Edisons and Teslas of this world. They have the goods. They have what it takes. This reporter was strikingly impressed by that fact just the other day when, with brethren and cistern of his craft, he greeted Mr. Tesla at a birthday luncheon in Mr. Tesla's New York home.

Ordinarily, the table chit-chat of a distinguished scientist is not particularly entertaining. Indeed, it is apt to be quite over the head of his casual guest. But Mr. Tesla has a vein of table talk which pans out mucho dinero to the ton. He can make even Einstein intelligible. In fact, he quite frankly kids the eminent expatriate, plays around in the solar system, drives a route along the Milky Way and mixes cosmic rays with his breakfast food.

In fact, one of the latest products of his brain will, he asserts, knock the Einstein theory of relativity for a double loop. Quite picturesquely, Mr. Tesla describes relativity as "a beggar wrapped in purple whom ignorant people take for a king." Relativity, indeed, is just plain bunk to Mr. Tesla.

"The whole business," he told this writer, "is a collection of errors and wild-eyed theories violently opposed to the sane teaching of real scientists, and truly hostile to plain common sense, And the relativity theory takes all these errors and fallacies and clothes them in magnificent mathematical garb which fascinates and dazzles people and blinds them to the underlying errors."

I suppose that Mr. Tesla has a right to be included in a trio of the greatest American electrical scientists. Thomas A. Edison has passed on, and so has that magical little genius, Steinmetz, whose intelligence dominated the great General Electric plant at Schenectady and, in truth, directly influenced the whole electrical world. But one of these wizards we have with us still in the person of Nikola Tesla.

He is working on a means to end war. Mr. Tesla is reaching into the infinite to snatch a bolt of lightning for the salvation, not the slaughter of mankind. It will be, if and when perfected, the Tesla death beam a lightning bolt, literally, of millions of volts.

It will be imbued with such horrific energy that a thousand airplanes invading the air of an enemy would be annihilated, sent earthward in flaming fragments within ten heartbeats. Two hundred thousand men, horse, foot and artillery, crossing the border of a defending enemy, would be dropped dead in their tracks.

Dr. Tesla will tell you, and you cannot help but believe him, that he is on the way to create a force, a weapon which will be so irresistible that war will become not only insane but ridiculous. Submarine warfare, for example, would be impossible if the Tesla death beam materializes. One human being sitting in a glass tower at Montauk Point, L. I., let us say, could, by the gentle pressure of a forefinger on an ivory button, project hundreds of miles to sea and 200 feet below the surface, a lightning bolt, which would destroy the undersea terror in a blinding flash.

Mr. Tesla, being a practical man and having little use for woolly-brained idealists, however well-meaning, and knowing his fellowmen pretty well, has little faith in peace pacts and treaties. He is convinced that war can be ended only by making it too frightful for the human mind and body to endure.

"War," says Mr. Tesla, "must be converted into plain suicide. No nation, whatever the provocation, the greed or the ambition, will plunge into war if that nation knows positively that it is putting a gun to its temple or a knife to its heart."

Nikola Tesla is an Austrian. He was only 28 years old when he came from the University of Prague to enter the laboratory of the great Edison. Possibly the fiction (for fiction it was) that Mr. Edison needed little sleep and, in fact, took very little sprang from the real truth that the terrifically ambitious and energetic young Tesla actually spent whole nights in the Edison laboratory, falling asleep only when sheer fatigue fell him; eating only when the weakness of famine came upon him. That was his start.

For more than 50 years he has been a man of magic. Full-fledged from his amazing brain have come marvel after marvel. It was Tesla who gave us the induction motor. It was that discovery which made possible alternating current and transmission of light and power by that method. It was Tesla who gave us innumerable indispensable electrical appliances — dynamos, transformers, induction coils, oscillators and are lambs.

In his later years, he became fascinated with the possibilities of a transmission of power without wires.

It was 30 years ago, when he was conducting experiments at Pikes Peak, that he believes be filched from the air, at that 14,000-foot elevation, electrical signals from Mars. Mr. Tesla believes, with the late Prof. Lowell, that there are living, humanlike creatures on our nearest neighbor in the family of planets and that they are much more intellectually advanced than we are. He believes, indeed, that they have been trying for many centuries to reach our dull intelligences.

It would be a bold skeptic who could lightly discard the theories and predictions of the man who has worked such wonders, this man of fascinating mind who stands today America's greatest inventor.