Possible Inventions

From the beginning of the steam engine its service has been marked by a constant and large wasteful consumption of fuel, and this loss has defied mechanical skill thus far. Use of oil instead of solid coal in marine practice is not new, and the latest claim is that a recently launched vessel with “explosion” engines of very large size may prove the pioneer in a change which will greatly reduce the costs of carrying and conserve the known coal that remains. Somewhat akin to this is a claim that a jet of coal gas or vaporized oil, directed upon “a redhot, porous solid,” produces an incandescent heat so intense that one difficulty is to find a material that can endure it. The claim is that one-half the former rate of gas consumption will suffice to obtain a given temperature, and that this is the most economical mode of steam-producing yet discovered.

More startling is the vision of the English scientist, Sir William Ramsay, of producing power by turning coal into gas where the coal now lies in the earth. He would utilize seams or beds which are worthless in the sense of profitable working. Having sunk three concentric tubes, he would force down air for the combustion between the second and third tubes; then the coal would burn where it lies, and the resultant “producer” gas would rise in the space between the first and second tubes. This gas might possibly be carried profitably for ten miles in pipes, but the effective method would be to turn it into electricity right there and transmit that. He conceived that it might be possible to produce electric power at a tenth or a fifth of its present cost. If any such reduction as either of these could be made, it would mean electrification of railways, supply of electric power instead of coal to factories, and domestic lighting and heating at far less than present cost.

The electric power obtainable from waterfalls is unlimited and inexhaustible, and the melting caps of ice and snow on mountain peaks have received the significant name of “white coal.” Much has been accomplished already in utilizing this power commercially, but the difficulties of transmission, because of the cost of copper wire and the material resistance to the current, have as yet been overcome for only a few hundred miles of distance. Just at this stage wireless enters and Nikola Tesla offers concepts which stir the imagination. He has demonstrated in actual tests, he says, that a powerful current from a proper wireless transmitter sets the entire planet into vibrations like a wire, and to the electrician “this means that the current wave traverses the globe without appreciable loss, and therefore that all kinds of impulses, from the feeble electrical tremors caused by the human voice and affecting the sensitive diaphragm of a telephone, to the powerful waves of a trolley wire, can be transmitted integrally from one end of the globe to the other.” Except for the mention of “the powerful waves of a trolley wire,” this merely reaffirms the wireless telephone, but Mr. Tesla goes on to the last great step of wireless power. He declares it a reasonable deduction that power derived from the waterfalls of the Columbia and the great falls of the Zambesi, in Africa, can be made to run subway trains in New York. For another step, he declares that ocean-going ships need no longer carry fuel, but that the consumption can be at a central station, from which the power impulses will go to the ship’s engines. The power supply could not be exhausted by any delays, since “the ship would be in constant touch with her source of energy-supply, as well as in communication with the outside world at every point of her course.”

Mr. Tesla proceeds to mention airship propulsion and control by wireless, and some reported experiments from Stockholm, which are believed to show that “high frequency currents” have a valuable potentiality in therapeutics, and in aiding development of backward children. It would be easy to add to this a belief in the possible value of electricity in agriculture, and there have already been positive stories of stimulating plant growth by applying it.

To accept these stories unreservedly, and expect speedy verification, and to decry them as incredible, would be alike irrational. They seem as dreams, but so many dreams have already become real that we should be slow to declare anything impossible.