Inventors and Others

John W. Keely of motor fame is dead, and the world wonders once more. Mr. Keely managed to get more discredit in his career than almost any one else. If he didn’t convince the public he had a secret he convinced a very small portion of it, and that portion was rapidly growing less at the time of his death.

The world doesn’t scoff so much at new ideas as it did. Now an inventor who has something to show for his work will find a ready hearing and generally all the capital he wants. It was the reverse once, but the world has grown more credulous, because so much of the apparently impossible has moved over into actuality.

This is proved by the serious attention given Mr. Tesla by most people. Mr. Tesla is undoubtedly a man of ideas, and whenever he has an idea he tells the nearest and largest newspaper all about it. In the present month alone Mr. Tesla has discovered how to annihilate war by a dirigible torpedo, how to run mills at Cape Town by Niagara Falls power.

Mr. Tesla does not add to his fame by his explosive egotism. There are really some very practical people who think Mr. Tesla is not quite as much as he thinks he is after all.

But that is because they are practical people.