Nikola Tesla's Airy Telegraph

Nikola Tesla, the Roumanian scientist, has been discovering things enough about electricity to depress the price of electrical stocks all over the world. No sooner do we get the arc light planted along our boulevards-and incandescent lamps strung-through our club rooms and libraries, than he comes out with a light that gives more illumination and goes all by itself, without machinery or expense to speak of. Telephones, motors and machines of various kinds are to pass Into desuetude and give place to Instruments and appliances that do twice the work and do it better. And now the telegraph Is to be done away with that is, the telegraph as we know It, and the Western Union and the cable companies are to go into the limbo of the outworn and figure in history, along with sugar and other sins, as trusts that oppressed the multitude. For Mr. Tesla has perfected a mysterious device by which people who live miles apart may discourse silently and at will, and one enthusiast adds that we may even talk with the stars, if those are inhabited. As the stars are suns enveloped in masses of flame, it is pretty safe to say that they are not inhabited, numerously, and that for the present we will be content If we can talk with friends and relatives who remain near us in the flesh. Perhaps one of these days we shall converse with Mars, for that Is so nearly like our own planet that we may easily assume it to be populated.

Mr. Tesla starts out with a frightening simile, wherein he likens the earth to a rubber ball filled with water. By instituting vibrations among plungers that pierced the rind he could burst the world opén. He did, In fact, break a steel ring with vibrations. The new instruments will catch the vibrations that he proposes to set up in the earth's static electricity and use it commercially and It Is believed without explosive consequences. He has even a hope for the transmission of power from place to place by this subtle means. The new device will not do away with wires for the present, but may ultimately. The crass outsider, reading of these matters, wonders if private messages may not be overheard and switched away, when they are careering through atmospheric emptiness and if his advice to his brokers as to cornering the market may not be awaited by robbers of currents and informations. Clphers will have to be invented to cover that difficulty, perhaps. The transmission of power through the air is more awe inspiring, for if one were to get in the way of a big current on its way to supply a planing mill there is no telling where he would bring up or how much would be afterward found of him.

But marvels multiply so fast in our time that we cease to lose sleep over them. That electrical science 16 in its infancy Is obvious and that better results than those we now secure will presently be obtained from instruments and machines cheaper than the familiar ones cannot be doubted. We shall have electric lights so bright and cheap that every family can use them; we shall be able to run vehicles of all sorts with storage batteries and do away with the perilous, unsightly overhead wires; we shall attach light motors to sewing machines and parlor organs and quite likely we shall do some of our cooking and heating by means of this mysterious and universal agency. Then the long neglected dynamie power of the sea, which goes to waste In incalculable amount every Instant in the year, will perhaps be set to the task of converting the static power of electricity into usable currents. But the Western Union stock quotation was the same this morning that It was on Saturday.