Nikola Tesla's Lecture in Chicago and Arrival in Colorado Springs

The arrival of Nikola Tesla at Colorado Springs, Col., on the 18th inst. has been announced in dispatches to the daily papers. Mr. Tesla has taken the trip to Colorado for the purpose, as he states, of carrying on “exhaustive experiments in wireless telegraphy.” He has found it necessary, he says, to investigate the higher strata of air, and has chosen Pike’s Peak as the location most suitable for his experiments. An eighty foot steel tower has been erected on the summit of the Peak, which, while disclosing fifty thousand square miles of mountain and plain landscape to the tourist, secures Tesla 14,223 feet altitude. Sunset and moonlight trains, as well as two or more regular day trips over the cog road, make the summit easily accessible to the electrician under varying conditions which otherwise he could not enjoy. Mr. Tesla is quoted in the dispatches as saying: “I must study the conditions of the upper-air strata. There are great laws and principles which I want to study and command. When I master these I will attempt long-distance signaling. I may send a message from Pike’s Peak to Paris. In these high altitudes there is much to be learned. The electrical conditions are more active than at the lower levels. This air is charged with electricity. I hope for favorable results.”

The Chicago Journal has some facetious comments on Mr. Tesla’s lecture before the Commercial Club at the Auditorium. It says: “Such a little thing as a quiet chat with inhabitants of the planet Mars will, if Tesla is sincere, be an everyday occurrence, and when you hang up the receiver of your Mars-communicating instrument, you may go out in the back yard and watch the weeds grow as large as poplars before you can say Jack Robinson. The vegetable kingdom will so abound with the two essential constituents, nitric acid and ammonia, that the luxuriant growth of the prehistoric eras will thrive again. Bananas will be as large as telegraph poles and peanuts like pumpkins, if Tesla can thus help the sun along.”