Lessons for Doubting Thomases

It never pays to sneer at Dr. Nikola Tesla. That aged scientist has, in his 73 years of life, had a disturbing habit of making what has seemingly been impossible come true. Absent from active life for numerous years, it has become the habit of the present generation to take his promises and proposals for new discoveries with the traditional "grain of salt." Yet he can look back on an active life of research and invention that has made him one of the modern Titans. His life work was aptly summarized some years ago by another electrical expert, Dr. B. A. Behrend, when he wrote:

"Were we to eliminate from our industrial world the results of Mr. Tesla's work, the wheels of industry wouli cease to turn, our electric trains and cars would stop, our town would be dark, our mills dead and idle. So far-reaching is this work, that it has become the warp and woof of industry."

That is fulsome praise indeed, but no more than Dr. Tesla merits. Achievements that attract such glowing tribute one would suppose enough for one man's lifetime, but Dr. Tesla is not content. He presses on to new and even greater marvels.

A strange and baffling secrecy surrounds him, however. In his birthday interview last week, for instance, he announced perfection of three world-shaking discoveries: a means of transmitting energy to any terrestrial distance, a new method of utilizing direct current that will revolutionize automobile engines, proof that the relativity theory is false. These are large orders. But they are no larger than the order Dr. Tesla filled when he did what other electrical wizards had declared impossible and which Edison had sought in vain — knocked the gadgets off the commutating motor, upset direct current, developed the alternating current and freed electrical energy from the narrow bounds that restrained it.