The Nobel Prize

Announcement of the award of the Nobel prize in physics to Edison and Tesla will give great satisfaction to the engineering profession in our country, to which both have contributed distinguished services. It is gratifying also to realize that, aside from pioneer work in engineering, both have done notable work in the advance of science. The name of Thomas Alva Edison has been long associated with the invention and development of the incandescent electric lamp. When he brought his inventive genius to bear on the incandescent-lamp problem results followed which have built up an enormous industry. His indefatigable persistence won where all others had failed, and not only did he solve the fundamental problem of the lamp but he turned out almost simultaneously a complete system for its practical utilization. But Mr. Edison would still rank as one of the very greatest inventors of modern times if someone else had done this splendid work and his reputation had to rest solely on other achievements. His well-known labors in purely telegraphic matters were triumphs of ingenuity, but yet more striking and original was his now almost forgotten invention of the electrolytic relay, which is reputed to have won for him one of the largest payments ever made for a patent. Later his ingenuity was lent to develop the telephone transmitter, and at about the same time came the beginnings of the phonograph, by all means his most brilliant contribution to physics. And later yet have come his contributions to art and science in the invention and development of motion pictures. There is no space here to recite the long list of what Edison has accomplished, but the Nobel foundation honors itself in appreciating what he has done for science, to say nothing of his prodigious activity in the industrial arts.

To Nikola Tesla the world owes that great impulse which has resulted in the whole modern art and science of power transmission. The use of alternating current for practical electrical distribution began with his development of the induction motor, which at once gave the general flexibility and usefulness of the system its due place in the practical world. With that invention the struggle between direct and alternating currents presently ceased, and each fell into its proper sphere of usefulness, of which the boundaries are still expanding. The development of the art was rapid, for the seed that Tesla sowed fell upon good ground. Those who followed the development of the art in its earlier years remember to their sorrow the number of times they found their earnest efforts at improvement just a lap or two behind Tesla's inventive genius in the running. His later pioneering work in the development of high-frequency currents in theory and practice displayed brilliant resourcefulness. In wireless telegraphy, on which he spent a long period of tireless research, inventors of the present and future will find themselves often confronted with the results of his inventive energy and keen scientific insight. His grasp of alternating-current phenomena has left the indelible mark of his originality on the progress of the electrical arts, and his participation in the Nobel prize is a proper and worthy appreciation of his genius. Those who remember Tesla's lecture before the Institute of Electrical Engineers on high-frequency phenomena, now nearly a quarter of a century ago, realize the extent to which his investigations opened the way to a field of which we have not even yet seen the full fruition. The country may well be proud of the recognition given in this award to men who thus have been in the front rank of its victorious march in applied science.