Progress in the Arts and Sciences

The Latest Ideas of the Most Inventive People on Earth.

SOME NEW WAYS OF DOING SOME OLD THINGS

A New Electrical Carryall-Transferring Handwriting to Iron-The Fastest Run Ever Made by a Heavy Train.

J. E. H. Gordon in the Nineteenth Century.

Nearly all scientists now regard heat, light, magnetism and electricity as different manifestations of the same elementary forces. Owing, however, to the forces being in every possible direction they neutralize each other, and no result of them is perceivable to our senses; but if ever we discover how to so direct their courses as to send the majority of them in the same direction we shall have at our disposal forces as much exceeding any we are now acquainted with as the blow struck by a bullet exceeds the force required to pull the trigger of a gun. In fact, as Mr. Tesla put it in his lecture, "We shall then hook our machinery on to the machinery of nature."

In Mr. Tesla's experiments the electricity by which the directing force was imparted to the molecules was electricity of a comparatively slow alternation period, namely, electric currenta oscillating about 60 to 100 times per second. It was as if we had tried to ventilate a room by causing a man to walk slowly through it with an umbrella. He would undoubtedly move the air, but would move it so slowly that ordinary methods would be insufficient to enable us to perceive its motion. In order to cause a rush of air we must put up a rapidly moving fan or other suitable machinery.

Mr. Tesla, seeing this, abandoned the ordinary dynamo, which gives about eighty alternations per second, and the ordinary induction coil, which gives about the same number, and boldly constructed a dynamo which gives 20,000 alternations per second, and by connecting this to suitable condensers he multiplied its alternatiens until they reached 1,000,000 or 1,500,050 per second.

One of the first things woticed was that either because these vibrations are too rapid to excite corresponding vibrations in the nerves of the body, or from some other cause, no shock is felt from the current; and that though an ordinary current at 2,000 volts will kill, yet this current at 50,000 volts cannot be felt at all.

When the discharge issues from a suitable terminal it has the appearance and roaring of a gas flame burning under too high a pressure, and gives off a considerable heat. To use Mr. Tesla's words again: "This is not unexpected, as all the force and heat in the universe is due to the falling together of lifted weights, and the same result is produced whether these weights have been lifted apart by chemical energy, and rest in the form ot oxygen and hydrogen ready to combine chemically or in the form of mechanical energy of moving molecules directed by the electric current."

The knowledge of the power of electricity has grown from Faraday's simple discoveries in 1834. To-day electricity lights inillions of lamps and drives cars on thousands of miles of railroads. May we not hope from the new discovery as great results?

When it is perfected manual labor will become unnecessary, as unlimited power will be available at every man's hand. Engineering works will be able to be carried out on a far greater scale than has yet been even contemplated, and doubtless a corresponding era of material prosperity will set in; but, whether these dreams are ever fulfilled or not, few who attended Mr. Tesla's lecture will forget the possibilities which seemed to open to their minds when they saw a living man standing in the midst of the electric storm, receiving unharmed in his hands flashes of veritable lightning, and waving above his head a tube, through which the very life blood of creation pulsed in waves of purple fire.