Magical Power System

Nikola Tesla, famous electrical scientist and inventor, announced the other day that he had perfected a system of transmitting power without wires. He is now preparing to erect a power station, he says, to operate by the new method.

Marconi has been working along the same line for a dozen years or more, but with incomplete success. The utmost he has been able to do, according to his announcements, is to point or focus a discharge of wireless power in a given direction, as a searchlight points its beams. The power, with his system of reflectors, is necessarily spread over an arc of several degrees, and most of it is therefore dissipated in space before it has gone very far. A receiving apparatus at a distance could catch only a small part of it.

Tesla's system, as he explains it, is more like the charging of a battery with power that can be drawn from it at will. The earth is his storage battery. From an electric generator, he explains, he delivers energy into the earth which is transmitted to great distances with smaller losses than now occur in short wire circuits, and which can be drawn and used for illumination, machinery, ships and aircraft by anyone who has the proper electrical key.

If Tesla is not dreaming, here surely is the most magical magic ever wrought by human science. It opens up limitless possibilities to the engineer and makes a powerful appeal to any person of imagination.

There may be trouble with such a system, in its early stages. Some brigand manufacturer may steal the "key" and unlock and use the power without detection, as fast as it is stored.

But suppose the system succeeds and spreads. Eventually it would enable man kind to utilize waterpower, wave power, wind power and other natural sources of energy everywhere, turning them into the great earth-storage battery for universal use. By international co-operation, such power might then be made available to the whole human race, for manufacture and transportation, for work and play. No wealth ever dreamed of could equal the possibilities of such a system. Limitless power, which is what civilization now wants most, would supply limitless wealth, convenience and ease.