On Light and Other High-Frequency Phenomena - Editorial

Mr. Nikola Tesla's lecture, delivered in February last before the Franklin Institute at Philadelphia, and before the National Electric Light Association in March, has now been published in the American papers, and the first part of an abstract of it will be found in another column. On the whole, it is a disappointment, but Mr. Tesla's work is difficult to appreciate. The lecture begins with a long introduction on the value of vision as a connecting link between our consciousness and the world we live in. This leads to the consideration of light, and our abstract begins with the experimental part of the lecture. From a very large number of experiments having no very clear connection, we have selected those which are either novel, or which may be said to be self-contained. Many of those who have watched Mr. Tesla's work would like to see him concentrate his energies on some definite object, experimental rather than speculative, and having a direct bearing either on the elucidation of some branch of electrical or electro-optical science, or some utilitarian application. When we heard that many of his new lamps were patented, we expected that he would undertake an Edison-like investigation and produce some useful result. On the other hand, he might have turned off on the purely scientific lines of Prof. J. J. Thomson, lines which, we should think, would be more agreeable to Mr. Nikola Tesla than mere inventing. If a few quantitative determinations of current, voltage, or even of frequency, had been given in the lecture, it would have had a definite scientific value. To reduce even one out of the fifty experiments to a complete research, would be worth all the other forty-nine brilliant and suggestive demonstrations.