A Life's Labor Gone - Tesla's Bitter Grief Over the Ruins of His Workshop

ONE FORCE HE CANNOT CONTROL

He Almost Made Artificial Sunshine, but Fire Was His Master.

Electrical Inventions of Priceless Value Laid in Ashes by the Burning of an Ordinary Looking Manufacturing Building — It Is Thought That Edison Will Give His Brother Inventor House Room.

Whispered words of commiseration and looks of pity followed the tall, lean figure of Nikola Tesla yesterday as he listlessly prowled around the ruins of his workshop in the building Nos. 33 and 35 South Fifth avenue. The fire of a few hours previous had entirely destroyed his models, the completed inventions of improved electrical machinery, laboriously calculated data and his plans for advancing the science of electricity. This great loss, after many years of constant toil and personal application to the work, seemed to have affected his mind.

In the ruins, beneath the piles of blackened debris, bricks and iron girders, were the twisted rods, broken wheels and destroyed machinery. Each wheel had received his careful attention, each rod had been polished under his supervision, probably with his own hands. These broken and worthless relics had been his friends. They had toiled with him from daybreak to the dim twilight and even into the gray of morning, talking to him in their whirring speech and telling him of the expected success, now swept still further into the future, and lost, perhaps, forever.

The dust and ashes swept into little eddies around his feet as he stepped carefully about. Overhead were the swaying walls crowned with toppling bricks which threatened to fall. Words of warning to him entered ears deafened by preoccupation.

IN UTTER DESPAIR.

He knelt down on a broken iron girder and picked up from the grimy soot and dirt a little brass cog-wheel. He blew away the dust, looked for an instant at the thing and then threw it away to the far corner of the ruined building, as the tears rolled down his cheeks. Then he walked slowly from the place, heedless of the shouts from the firemen as a wall reeled and tumbled almost at his feet.

A reporter for The Press approached him as he stood across the street from the burned building.

“Please don't think I mean to be unkind to you,” he said with a tremor in his voice, “but I cannot talk to you. I cannot say anything about my loss — please don't ask me any questions.”

Then he turned away and walked dejectedly up the street.

His employes hesitated to tell him of the fire, and he did not know about it until he arrived on the spot at half-past eight yesterday morning. He came expecting to spend the day at his bench and with his beloved machinery. He had no insurance on the property. His direct financial loss will be about $50,000. What the loss is to science no one can compute.

EXPECTED TO MAKE SUNSHINE.

Among the apparatus destroyed were improved dynamos and other machines, all of which he had made in the workshop. There were queer instruments for manufacturing the electric fluid and for propelling it, independently of wires, to a considerable distance. He promised to make sunshine as soon as the problem of caring for 8,000,000 volts of electricity had been solved. His experiments had reached a stage where success seemed to be imminent. It is his belief that 99 per cent. of the power consumed in making electricity is wasted. He says he can save one-third of this waste and greatly lessen the cost of production, while giving a better light.

His establishment was on the fourth floor. Several incompleted machines, improvements on his rotating magnetic field for the economic transmission of power, which first brought him prominently before the public, were in the building and were destroyed.

Tesla is a Servian. He has been in America about ten years, and was at first associated with Thomas A. Edison. He is the controlling electrical engineer to the Niagara Power Company, and is connected with many other important concerns.

EDISON MAY HELP.

It is expected by friends that Thomas A. Edison will aid the unfortunate inventor and take him into his own workshops until new ones can be fitted up by Tesla.

The building in which the fire occurred was occupied principally by Gillis & Geoghegan, manufacturers of steamfitters’ supplies. John Mahoney, the watchman, discovered the flames at 2.30 o’clock a.m. Elevated trains on the Sixth avenue line were delayed three hours, as the firemen took possession of the tracks.

The actual damage will probably amount to $150,000. Over 400 men are thrown out of employment by the fire.