Tesla and Wireless Telegraphy

Announcement has been made in the daily papers, apparently by Mr. Tesla’s request, or at any rate with his sanction, that he is prepared to telegraph across the Atlantic without wires. Assertions regarding remarkable discoveries by Mr. Tesla have been so numerous of late and so lacking in material confirmation that the scientific press has come to allow them to pass unnoticed, save by a word, here and there, of sarcastic comment. The daily papers treat the various pronunciamentos each after its kind, the yellow journals with weird pictures and big headlines, the more serious ones with skeptical paragraphs. Exactly what the inventor believes that he is prepared to do may be learned from the following, which The Sun (New York) publishes as a leading editorial (February 14):

“The Sun is authorized to state that the plans for the machinery of wireless telegraphy to signal across the ocean have been completed and a site for the plant selected by Nikola Tesla, and that the project will at once be actively begun. It is estimated that the time required to perfect the apparatus will be about eight months. We have received inquiries of late as to Mr. Tesla’s place among inventors, and as to his credentials to fame. We don’t know fully about those things, but we do know that it is Tesla who has given the world what is perhaps the most precious invention of the time, the electrical transmission of power, and we have seen the letter in which Professor Slaby, of Berlin, calls him the ‘father of wireless telegraphy.’ Will his gorgeous vision, described above, be realized? We don’t know. So we must let doubt and incredulity gnaw upon the bare statement.”

The attitude of the technical press is generally that of the electrical paper which recently remarked editorially that scientific men must be excused from giving opinions regarding announcements made through the medium of the daily press, and that when Mr. Tesla reads a paper on his alleged discoveries before some scientific body, it will be time enough to consider them seriously.