Nikola Tesla Wilts Fourteen Reporters With Fabulous New Science Theories

Attacks Relativity Idea at 79th Birthday Luncheon

Says He Has Found a Speed Greater Than Light’s

Fourteen young men staggered out of the Hotel New Yorker. Their collars were wilted. Their wet shirts stuck to their skins. Their pale faces dripped perspiration.

In their hands they carried rolls of paper covered with scrawled pencil notes. Their coat pockets, too, bulged with bundles of paper.

The fourteen young men were reporters who had just had a six-hour chat with Nikola Tesla.

It was 6 o’clock. They had come to the New Yorker at noon yesterday in response to an invitation from Dr. Tesla to have luncheon with him on the occasion of his seventy-ninth birthday.

Scientist on Diet

The host, a tall, thin, ascetic looking man with a bird-like face, who resembles the old engraved portraits of Hans Christian Andersen, the writer of fairy tales, took his place at the head of the table.

He was dressed in a blue cheviot morning coat of ancient cut and trousers of the same material. He wore a silk shirt with a deep collar and a blue four-in-hand tie with tiny white figures. His only concession to the heat and the humidity was the omission of a vest. Instead, he wore a broad leather belt with a huge brass buckle.

As a sumptuous meal in the nature of a holiday dinner rather than a luncheon was being served to the representatives of the press, Dr. Tesla told his guests that his diet nowadays consisted of some warm milk for breakfast and for luncheon and a small portion of vegetables for dinner.

A waiter carried in a quart bottle of certified milk. A second one brought in a chafing dish and a spirit lamp. The contrivance was lighted and the milk poured into the silver dish.

Dr. Tesla continued talking. He did not notice that one of the rare breaths of air that penetrated the room had extinguished the flame under the milk.

When some one called his attention to it, he rose and prepared to relight the flame. He struck several matches, fiddled with the lamp for quite some time. After repeated attempts the man who has 700 patents to his credit had to admit that he was unable to make the gadget work. A headwaiter turned the trick in a twinkling.

The luncheon finished, the newspaper men grouped themselves closely about Dr. Tesla. He began to dictate. He was speaking of cosmic rays, which, he said, he discovered fifteen years before Dr. Robert Millikan.

“In 1906,” he said, “I discovered a truth the disregard of which in modern research has been responsible for many fallacies and illusionary theories that would never have been announced if that truth had been kept in mind.

Tesla Theory

“It is this: There is no energy in matter except that which is received from without.”

The reporters wrote fast. They realized that Dr. Tesla was hacking away at the very foundations of modern science.

“I am absolutely ignoring,” he continued, “every one of the tenets of the relativity theory, which to me is just a mass of error.”

Ah, an attack on Einstein! This was news. The reporters wrote faster.

Swell Rhetoric

“It is a mass of deceptive ideas diametrically opposed to the teachings of the great men of science who have gone before and even to common sense,” he went on.

“The relativity theory wraps all these errors and fallacies and clothes them in a magnificent mathematical garb, which fascinates, dazzles and blinds people to the underlying errors.

“The relativity theory is like a beggar clothed in purple whom the ignorant take for a king.”

Swell rhetoric! The pencils flew over the paper.

On and on Dr. Tesla went. It developed that the announcement had to do with the scientist’s belief that the velocity of cosmic rays (he has measured that of the cosmic rays from Antares) is fifty times greater than the speed of light, which, according to all accepted theories, is the highest known speed.

It was 3 o’clock. Pencils had been worn to stumps. All note paper had been used. Peter Hilton, press agent for the hotel, after surveying the situation, came in with dozens of fresh pencils, stacks of white paper.

Dr. Tesla continued talking.

“Impossible” Invention

His second announcement concerned an invention, he said, which would be “considered absolutely impossible by any competent engineer.”

A reporter furtively slipped off his coat. Several others followed suit.

Dr. Tesla, in infinite detail, described a new method of inducing direct current without a commutator.

The announcement had taken exactly one hour. Dr. Tesla declared a half-hour recess, during which he posed for the photographers and newsreel men.

Dinners Are Canceled

It was 4 o’clock. The reporters, many of whom had taken off their neckties and unbuttoned their shirt collars, rose, stretched, walked about. Some telephoned to their offices. Others telephoned their homes and friends, canceling dinner engagements.

On the dot of 4.30 Dr. Tesla plunged into a description of a device by which “mechanical energy can be transmitted to any part of the terrestrial globe.”

The apparatus, said the inventor, consisted of “a stationary part and a floating part.” The floating part, he told the startled press representatives, was a thirty-pound cylinder of the finest steel.

It was kept floating, he said, not by a new force, but by “a new method of amplifying an old force.”

What It Will Do

The apparatus, Dr. Tesla declared, will provide humanity with an “unfailing means of communication.” It will furnish a new, absolutely safe and infallible method of guiding ships at sea. It will enable mining engineers to locate ore deposits in the earth and it will aid scientists in determining the earth’s physical constants and in ascertaining the condition of the earth’s layers.

Six o’clock. Dr. Tesla, in his blue cheviot cutaway, was as fresh as he had been at noon. His collar was unwilted, his shirt dry and unwrinkled.

The reporters decided that the makes’ a good luncheon for hot and humid days deserved at least a minor place among his achievements.