To Perfect His Lamp

Edison Says He Will Try to Make His Wonderful New Light Capable of General Use.

ITS VALUE IN DWELLINGS.

Wizard Says the Lamp Will Last Forever and Is Different from Tesla's.

THOSE CRYSTALS IN TUBE.

Dr. Frances Williams Makes a Guess That Edison Found What He Wanted in Iceland Spar.

Mr. Edison was, if possible, more confident yesterday than he was the day before of the success of his newly discovered light. Of course, the great thing is to make it of commercial value, and this will come about, it is expected, in a short time.

I visited the great electrician at his laboratory in West Orange. Since the day before he had changed the apparatus and was fitting up something different for the purpose of making measurements. He did this with the aid of an electrical expert, but not until next week will he have completed the observations.

"Can this light," I asked Mr. Edison, "be used in a dwelling house?"

"Yes," he said, "but of course not now, because it is not perfected — that is the apparatus to utilize it for domestic or other purpose has to be simplified and made capable of general use. There is the light, but somebody else may invent the means of making it marketable."

HE IS GOING TO TRY.

"Why not do it yourself?" I suggested.

"Well," said the wizard, "I am going to try. The lamp is simplicity itself."

In the den in which he experimented with the Roentgen rays he entered upon some tests yesterday with a visiting expert. The tests were with the current. The room is covered all over, ceiling and walls, with white paper, so as to bring out the greatest intensity of the light. When the door is closed all is blackness, and you hear only the whirr, whirr of a machine on a table. The lamp is suspended from the ceiling. Mr. Edison attached to the depending wires an ordinary Crookes tube, and turned on the current. The power was scarcely worth mentioning. A bluish glimmer appeared in the tube, and there was not enough light to see your hand one foot from it.

When the same kind of tube was suspended, the interior of which had been treated in Edison's peculiar way, and the same current turned on, the effect was magical. The big room was flooded with light of the purest, whitest kind. It was possible with a more powerful current to increase the intensity of the light.

"The lamp will last forever," said Mr. Edison, "unless you break it by accident or otherwise. Moreover, there is no heat and no burning. But the machinery-ah, yes, if we had that in a simplified and cheap form we could light your house for you next week."

Mr. Edison will not say what is the wonderful substance he has discovered, "of which there is plenty and it is cheap," with which he coats the interior of his tube. But Mrs. Frances E. Williams, a physician, of No. 35 West Sixtieth street, has made a guess at it. Dr. Williams is a student of the hidden forces.

IS THIS IT?

"I called upon Dr. W. J. Morton, yesterday," she said, "and was with him while taking the shadowgraph of a child's clubfoot with the X rays. After getting through with the experiment I asked him about using Iceland spar in the Crookes tube. Iceland spar is a transparent calcium carbonate crystallized in rhomboidal prisms.

"It has the property of dividing and doubly refracting a ray of light. By putting a thimbleful of these crystals in the tube the vibrations cause them to rotate and coat the tube. So this may be the substance Edison will not tell about."

Another supposition is that it is a modification of tungstate of calcium, which the Wizard himself discovered. He said the new substance possessed nearly three times the flourescent properties of the tungstate of calcium.

Mr. Tesla would have nothing to say about the new Edison light.