Mr. Tesla and the Drehstrom System

As Mr. C. E. L. Brown, in communications to the Electrical World and other journals, seems determined to insist that I have neglected the work of Mr. Tesla on rotary current, I wish here to state that there is no one more ready than myself to give Mr. Tesla due credit for his work, and I have always considered him to be an original inventor of the rotary field system, and the first to reduce it to practice, and I believe I so stated it in my articles. If I have at any time failed to give him credit for the extent to which he developed it, it has been because Mr. Tesla has been too modest (or perhaps prudent) to let the world know what he had accomplished, and we ought, therefore, not to be blamed if we do not always know what he has done. When the articles which have caused this discussion were being written, Mr. Tesla’s patents were not accessible to me. Just where Mr. Dobrowolsky’s improvements begin I have not yet been able to ascertain.

The fact that I have personally tried to persuade Mr. Tesla to write a paper on his work in this field, will show that I am very anxious myself to know just how far he carried his work, and why it was not continued. In justice to Mr. Dobrowolsky, it ought to be said that if Tesla did not publish his researches other than his patents, Dobrowolsky ought to have the credit at least for what he did that was not included in Tesla’s patents. Dobrowolsky, though he may have been an independent inventor, admits that Tesla’s work is prior to his, but he claims to have made improvements. In my articles I distinctly stated that I did not wish to enter into a discussion of the subject of priority. Dobrowolsky’s system has proved itself to be a success; it was natural to assume that he had made some improvements. It must be left to a discussion between Tesla and Dobrowolsky, and not to others, to determine, if necessary, just where the one left off and the other began. The modesty of both of these gentlemen would, I feel sure, lead to a clear understanding.

Regarding the subject of priority, it may be of interest here to say that in a conversation with Prof. Ferraris, last summer, that gentleman told me with very becoming modesty that, although he had experimented with the rotary field several years before Tesla’s work was published, he did not think it was possible that Tesla could have known of his work, and he, therefore, believed that Tesla invented it entirely independently. He also stated that Tesla developed it much farther than he (Ferraris) did.