A Marvelous Engine

A Machine By Tesla That Will Revolutionize Power Making.

Nikola Tesla, the famous electrician, is giving as much of his time and thought just now to the steam engine as he is to electricity, and has perfected the model of a machine the adoption of which will revolutionize the making of power. Some years ago he turned his attention to the steam engine as the instrument most likely to be capable of yielding the largest amount of power from the least consumption of coal. He decided that many parts of the steam engine, as it now stands, must be thrown away before it could be made to do its best work. He saw that the perfect engine must get along without a flywheel, or a connecting rod or slides, and that the power must be carried from it to the machinery without belts or shafting, which, like the flywheel and the connecting rod and the slides, use up much power. Acting on these lines he has completed and put in operation a small model of his new machine.

It is difficult to explain the workings of this contrivance. Some faint notion may be given of its nature by the statement that in this machine, which has been called the “oscillator,” the piston travels back and forth, or vibrates thousands of times a minute, and by some method of his own Tesla gets rid not only of the flywheel and other clumsy parts of the present steam engine, but of the troublesome packing boxes, also, with their everlasting waste of steam and absorption of power. To get this intensely rapid motion he uses steam of a previously unheard pressure, say 600 or 700 pounds to the square inch. The pressure might as well be 5,000 or 7,000 pounds, so far as the capacity of ordinary boilers of the present time are concerned; for not even the strongest of them could bear it. But Tesla sees no reason why there should be any limit at all to the strength of steam generators, and in this he is supported by competent steam engineers.

Tesla gets rid of the slides and the flywheel, the connecting rod and the clumsy belts by placing his new engine in what he calls the center of the electrical field and generating the current directly from the intensely rapid vibration of the piston. Then the current is transmitted in the usual way (by wire) to the machines which are to be operated, a motor being attached to the shaft of each. The saving of fuel that will be effected by this new machine when it is adopted will be 50 per cent. certainly, and theoretically should be more than 90 per cent.

Tesla believes that scientific evolution along the lines of the economical utilization of nature’s forces that are lying all about us in the coal fields, that are going to waste in the waterfalls, that sometime may possibly be got out of the sunshine, will solve all the problems of human misery. It will be possible, when man has made the discoveries that wait for him, to produce so much more than he now can with the same expenditure of energy that poverty and the suffering that goes with it will disappear from the earth. He believes, further, that when that happy time shall come men will have so much more time at their disposal to devote to the arts and sciences and the gentler side of life that civilization and morals and manners will be raised to a higher plane.