Principles are Indestructible

The burning of the laboratory of Nikola Tesla, the Hungarian electrician, and the consequent destruction of the several new electrical appliances upon which he was engaged, Is scarcely less than a public calamity. It is an open secret with electricians that he had solved some very important problems in the conservation of energy, and that he had nearly perfected appliances which would greatly advance the art of electricity. In less than an hour the work of years vanished In smoke.

The career of Nikola Tesla, since he came to the United States, has astonished even members of the profession in which he has achieved such magnificent triumphs. The greater part of his preliminary and early experiments had been in the direction of the development of the alternating electric current and its application to practical electrics. Tesla has not been a self-asserting scientist. Great as his discoveries on alternating current lines have been, they have come to the notice of the world almost unheralded. It was only after their utility had been demonstrated by the unfailing test of practical work under load conditions, that these inventions have been exploited. As a consequence the Hungarian wizard has not been so extensively and systematically advertised as some of his contemporaries in the electrical field. At the same time, the discoveries of this modest inventor underlie some of the most gigantic electric interests of the day. It was his experiments and pronounced successes in the alternating field of electrics which made the immense electric Plant at Niagara Falls, with all of its possibilities of the transmission of power, a possibility, and It is upon the principles developed and made clear by his genius that, the five thousand horse power generators at that point are constructed.

It is owing to this modest and secretive disposition of Tesla that the public generally was unaware of the progress which he had made in solving momentous problems in the conservation of energy. His experiments had been carried on with more than his usual caution. It is probable that even the men who were engaged in the laboratory which burned Wednesday morning were not possessed of these secrets in their entirety. He was working on the problem of saving a large proportion of the energy contained in coal, which, in present practice, is absolutely lost. A saving of fifty per cent of this loss would revolutionise the power-using world, and would probably mark an era not second in importance to that begun by the discovery of the principles of the dynamo or the invention of the steam engine. It is not strange, therefore, that when Tesla was informed by a messenger that his laboratory had been destroyed by fire, and his appliances literally annihilated, that he went to his room and wept like a school-boy.

Fortunately for the scientific and manufacturing world, and fortunately also for Nikola Tesla, he is still in the strength of young manhood. The terrible prostration which inevitably followed his great loss will pass. The discovery which he was engaged in reducing to practical form in his appliances is not lost. He will again take up the burden, which is implied in reducing all great electrical principles to practice, supported and strengthened by the sympathy of thousands of his adopted countrymen, who fully appreciate the importance of his labors. The world will be obliged to wait a little; but the world has already waited long for even an approach to the solution of the problem of the conservation of energy.