A New Edison on the Horizon

In the February Century Mr. T. C. Martin tells of Ithe young Servian, Nikola Tesla, who has come to the New World to make what amounts to a revolution in many world-important departments of electrical invention. Mr. Tesla is only thirty-six years old, and, like Edison, has achieved his triumphs in the face of extreme poverty and other adverse influences. One of the most important of his inventions has had to do with the polyphase currents, on the principle of which large powers are "transmitted electrically more than a hundred miles from Neckar-on-the-Rhine to Frankfort-on-the-Main; and now, by equivalent agency, Niagara is to drive the wheels of Buffalo and beyond."

Mr. Martin tells of other marvelous discoveries of the young Servian:

"Broadly stated, Mr. Tesla has advanced the opinion, and sustained it by brilliant experiments of startling beauty and grandeur, that light and heat are produced by electrostatic forces acting between charged molecules or atoms. Perfecting a generator that would give him currents of several thousand alternations per second, and inventing his disruptive discharge coil, he has created electrostatic conditions that have already modified not a few of the accepted notions about electricity. It has been supposed that ordinary currents of one or two thousand volts' potential would surely kill, but Mr. Tesla has been seen receiving through his hands currents at a potential of more than 200,000 volts, vibrating a million times per second, and manifesting themselves in dazzling streams of light. This is not a mere tour de force, but illustrates the principle that while currents of lower frequency destroy life, these are harmless. After such a striking test, which by the way, no one has displayed a hurried inclination to repeat, Mr. Tesla's body and clothing have continued for some time to emit fine glimmers or halos of splintered light. In fact, an actual flame is produced by the agitation of electrostatically charged molecules, and the curious spectacle can be seen of puissant, white, ethereal flames that do not consume anything, bursting from the ends of an induction coil as though it were the bush on holy ground. With such vibrations as can be maintained by a potential of 3,000,000 volts, Mr. Tesla expects some day to envelop himself in a complete sheet of lambent fire that will leave him quite uninjured. Such currents as he now uses would, he says, keep a naked man warm at the North Pole, and their use in therapeutics is but one of the practical possibilities that has been taken up.

"Utilizing similar currents and mechanism, Mr. Tesla has demonstrated the fact that electric lamps and motors can not only be made to operate on one wire, instead of using a second wire on the ground to complete the circuit, but that we can operate them even by omitting the circuit. Our subway boards are to find their wires and occupations gone. Electric vibrations set up at any point of the earth may by resonance at any other spot serve for the transmission of either intelligence or power. With these impulses or wave discharges, Mr. Tesla also opens up an entirely new field of electric lighting. His lamps have no filaments as ordinarily known, but contain a straight fiber, a refractory button, or nothing but a gas. Tubes or bulbs of this kind, in which the imprisoned ether or air beats the crystal walls, when carried into the area or room through which these unsuspected currents are silently vibrating, burst into sudden light. If coated inwardly with phosphorescent substances, they glow in all the splendors of the sunset and the aurora."