Nikola Tesla Envisioned Present Electrical Era 40 Years Ago

Sending Power Without Wires An Early Dream

Worked Out System to Create and Distribute Electric Energy to World in 1899

His Wire Methods Used

Made Possible Tremendous Development in Power Field

When it is considered that Marconi was not granted his first wireless patent until 1896 — and then for a much inferior apparatus, which was soon to be abandoned in favor of Tesla's — this is especially remarkable.

In a letter Sir Oliver Lodge points out that during that period Tesla first made known the fact that powerful electric currents could be taken into the human body, providing they were of sufficiently high frequency — a discovery in physiology.

By 1897, Tesla had built and operated a wireless-controlled boat, laying the foundation for what later became the science of radiodynamics, By the beginning of this century, he had performed epochal experiments at Colorado Springs — the meaning of which have even yet not been fully plumbed. He had produced bolts of artificial lightning. over a hundred feet long; he had lighted electric lamps at a distance without wires; he had sent out electrical vibrations which had enveloped and penetrated the entire earth.

In a commercial statement he outlined his plan for a first "world wireless station: which he proposed to build immediately. It would include not only the transmission and reception of ordinary messages, but would include the transmission and reception of pictures, checks, whole pages of newspapers, an International stock ticker system, an international time service, by means of which all the clocks in the world could not only be synchronized but run by the power transmitted from this central station.

Tesla's Genius Was Basis of Meteoric Rise

Scientine Vision

With all his achievement, Tesla remains personally an enigma. Through his years he has talked and written and created apparatus as a poet. Standing absolutely alone — having never joined syndicate or a corporation — he has plunged along into an unknown world. His Ideas were the despair of his associates. He spoke in terms of particles of electricity before electrons were thought of. When Edison was struggling to hold ground for direct current, and Steinmetz for single phase alternating current, Tesla knew that the only system for the future was his own poly-phase current.

Naturally he encouraged misundering. He seemed an arch-conspirator against the established order of things. He seemed proud, distant, his method of working (almost purely mental, contrasted with brute experimentation) was different. But the men whom he was willing to admit under the skin, knew him to be most human and kind.

Today we are just entering a world which Tesla created in his mind so long ago. It is not crazy now, as it was less than forty years ago, to consider harnessing a waterfall, and transmitting the electric current generated by its power over a distance of several hundred miles; radio is a part of our daily lives; television is almost a fact: our time is now kept electrically; lamps such as were used to light Tesla's downtown laboratory, in his earliest experimental days, now dazzle Broadway, and new tube lamps are being developed for the home, as Tesla, at that time, said they would be.

Seventy-five years old, Nikola Tesla still plunges on into the unknown. He talks again of interplanetary communication, and of a new source of universal power, the nature of which he does not as yet divulge. With a great mind — blending male audacity, female sensitiveness, with the simplicity of a child — he is confident that he makes no mistakes. Dr. Addams S. McAllister, of no the Bureau of Standards, however, is nearer the truth when he tells Tesla that he has made a single great mistake; he was born about a quarter of a century too soon.