Minutes of the Evening Session w/ Nikola Tesla Lecture

Evening Session,

At Columbia College, New York City,

June 20th, 1891

The Chairman (Vice-President Thomas D. Lockwood): - I have the honor now of introducing to you Mr. Nikola Tesla, who will deliver a lecture on "Experiments with Alternating Currents of High Frequency." Members of the Institute will recollect that it was Mr. Tesla who first brought before the Institute and the public at large the possibility and probability of electric motors operated by alternating currents. I am quite sure that the lecture he has to give us this evening and the experiments which will illustrate it, will be worthy of our most earnest consideration and our most profound attention. I wish to call attention on this occasion to the fact that the circumstance that Mr. Tesla is not an American-born is only one more ingredient in the history of electricity which shows that electricity is cosmopolitan. The different mile stones of progress in electricity as applied to the arts, show us nothing more clearly than they show that. From the time when electricity was given its name by Gilbert, to the present, every civilized nation and many individuals of many nations have contributed to the grand whole.

A lecture delivered before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, at Columbia College, N. Y., May 20th, 1891. Vice-President Lockwood in the Chair.