A New Wizard

Nikola Tesla’s Wonderful Experiments With Electricity.

The most daring of the experimenters of the last decade of the nineteenth century, perhaps, is Nikola Tesla, who was unknown to the scientific world five or six years ago, but who to-day is regarded as a second Edison, and who has achieved more magnificent results than any half dozen of his contemporaries combined. To sum up his achievements in a few words is impossible. He has discovered, or rather demonstrated, the possibility of providing illumination without wires or globes in almost exact imitation of daylight. This light he can vary to order, and although he has not yet been able to bring it to what may be termed a commercial basis, he has advanced so far in that direction that little remains to be done before the public can buy daylight by the room instead of by the lamp or light. And this is but one of his many marvels. He has produced a flame which does not consume and which gives out no heat whatever, and has thus laid the foundation for untold developments in every phase of electrical work. In the production of ozone by electricity he has also scored a distinct triumph. He has shown that nearly all sanitary problems can be solved by the aid of electricity, and he also made immense strides in the direction of solving the problem of parceling out electrical force and enabling it to be applied to manual labor in every possible direction.

He was invited to visit London and explain his experiment on the very spot made immortal by Faraday. He went, and was received by the Royal Institution with due honors. The moment his fingers grasped his long glass tubes they glowed with softened splendor, and when he waved them over his head they gleamed with a radiance which was described as weird, if not ghastly. He manufactured flames which appeared dangerous in the extreme, and then placed them in a wooden box, which was absolutely unaffected by them. He will repeat these experiments with several more while the guest of the national electric convention in St. Louis, at the end of February, and he will explain the details somewhat more fully. In experimenting under the auspices of the Westinghouse company he was struck with the marvelous increase of the power produced by alternating currents, and came to the conclusion that it would be possible by their aid to produce electric light electrostatically. Night after night he spent experimenting on an apparatus by which electrostatic thrills or waves could be produced. He went on from step to step, until he had finally demonstrated to the world that wires and globes, indispensable as they now appear to be for the production of electric light, may be dispensed with without impairing the efficiency of the light one fraction. He first experimented with the faint glow observed in the Geissler tube, and made this the basis of the method of producing a strong glow without the ordinary adjuncts. He finally perfected a machine which gave 20,000 alternations per second, or considerably over 1,000,000 a minute. The character of the spark of discharge between the two regulation knobs of the coil operated with currents alternating at the incredible speed mentioned assumed an entirely new character. Nor was this all. The persevering experimenter discovered five distinct kinds of discharge, one of them thick, star-like and luminous, and the others all varying in character until the fifth one became one huge flame issuing from the discharge knob. By attaching a wire to one end of the coil, light, at once dazzling and beautiful, issued in huge streams, not only from the ends, but from all parts of the coil itself, a phenomenon entirely without precedent in electrical research. Next Tesla attached a fine platinum wire in the glass bulb, and when this is agitated by the current the platinum spins around the bulb with the speed of lightning, producing what may be called a spiral or revolving light of great brilliancy and astounding appearance.

The producing of a light to order, without a wire of any kind passing into the bulb, is done by Tesla without any great difficulty. Just how this is done is what puzzled the Royal Institution of London. The modus operandi may be described as follows: The primary electric generator is placed at the central station as usual with wires leading to the building or room in which the light is desired, where there is inserted in the circuit a condenser and apparatus resembling more or less a Leyden jar. Adjoining there is an induction coil. In the room which it is desired to light two metallic sheets are placed on the opposite walls, and the electric impulses thrown out from these discs create electrical waves which, a St. Louis paper states, produce a steady glow in every section of the room. This experiment is in advance of any the writer has seen. Tesla even goes farther and shows that the perfection of electric lighting without wires or globes can be achieved without the discs at all, but with metallic wall paper as the final connection with the unseen apparatus and the room itself. He is still experimenting to bring this light to further perfection. Tesla does not pretend to manufacture electricity out of nothing, but he is of the opinion that the unused force in nature is absolutely immeasurable. In one of his lectures he said candidly: “We shall eventually hook our machinery onto the machinery of nature.” Then again, Tesla has entirely upset all preconceived notions of insulation. Vulcanite is regarded as the best insulator known and it will stop almost any discharge or current. But the stream of sparks between two poles with the Tesla current passes through a thick sheet of vulcanite with a contempt of the obstruction which would seem almost heartless. It does not perforate the vulcanite or injure it in any way; it simply ignores its existence and emerges on the other side undisturbed and unchanged. He has produced for the first time in the world’s history a flame which he claims does not even consume the vital ingredients of the air we breathe, so that the problem of securing pure air and perfect ventilation in a crowded room can be solved. — Detroit Free Press.