Nikola Tesla Says He Was The First One to Make Lightning

BOSTON, Mass — Much interest was incited in manufactured lightning recently, when engineers of the General Electric Company produced artificial lightning in the laboratories of the General Electric Works at Pittsfield, Mass., but Nikola Tesla, when told of the experiment, said that the manufacture of lightning is nothing new, he himself having succeeded in producing lightning discharges over a hundred feet long twenty-three years ago.

The G. E. engineers constructed a miniature village, including a steeples. church, and in the course of the exhibit made the lightning strike the steeple of the church, demolishing it. They also produced rain from manufactured clouds.

"Old Stuff," Says Tesla

"When the average man hears of a manufactured thunderstorm he is naturally dumbfounded." Tesla said. 'What he doesn't realize is that the village struck by the artificial bolt was only a tiny model, that such experiments are not at all new, and that there is not any prospect of their being of any particular utility. I understand that electrical discharges obtained were 15 feet long and under a pressure of 2,000,000 volts.

"I might also point out that electrical effects such as are here considered grow in Intensity with the square of the pressure. Thus the discharges I produced were eighty-one times stronger than those described. I communicated the results to the scientific world at the time and they were widely commented upon."