Tesla in a Blue Halo

An Astonishing Exhibition by the Noted Electrician.

With the air all around him luminous with purple haze, through which dazzling electric sparks leapt with lightning rapidity, and with brushes of electric flame playing about his fingers, and shooting from his heels to the floor, Nikola Tesla, the Hungarian electrician and the rival of Edison in the almost magic power he exercises over the subtle force, concluded his lecture on the effects of alternating currents amid the thunderous applause of the scientists who crowded the old Franklin Institute the other evening to hear him.

To make good his claim that he has discovered means to harness electric force, so that it shall serve man without injuring him, Tesla allowed a force of 200,000 volts to pass through him and illuminate a bulb containing sulphate of calcium which he held in his hand. The bulb was made to glow with a light so intense as to fill the room with brightness, and to disclose the great electrician holding it aloft unharmed and smiling, bowing in acknowledgment of the wild applause of the audience.

“I’m getting some 200,000 volts through me now, at the rate of millions of vibrations a second, enough to satisfy the most obstinate criminal, if traveling by the ordinary method. Thank heaven, though, I’m not a condenser.”

“But, gentlemen, this is nothing,” enthusiastically continued the inventor, and the audience fully agreed before the lecture was over that, comparatively speaking, the words were true. The great effort of the evening was his feat of producing an illumination in a glass bulb, in which a vacuum had been procured, by passing a powerful and rapidly alternating current through it. The bulb was hung from a wire stretched across the operating desk and connected with the terminals of the condenser. The current was turned on and, taking a pair of forceps in his hand, Tesla approached them to the bulb. In an instant it was aglow with an intense yellow light and flashes of electricity leapt across from one side of the bulb to the other and played all over its surface. This phosphorescence of the bulb set the audience wild with delight and Tesla was obliged to acknowledge the ovation again and again.

The experiment, “Phantom Streams,” was one of the most beautiful of the many with which Tesla fairly bewitched his audience. Two heavily insulated conductors were adjusted about eight inches from one another and the alternating current turned on, when the interval was filled with a column of purple haze and the scent of ozone and nitric acid filled the air. Another wonderful exhibition was the incandescence of a rarified gas in long glass tubes. Making the connection with one of the terminals and grasping it in one hand and the tube in the other the latter was in an instant transformed into a wand of soft opalescent light. The magician, for such he seemed to all who witnessed his exploits, then began to twirl the tube rapidly, producing a startling effect, not unlike that of a pin wheel, but infinitely more beautiful.

Mr. Tesla stated, in introducing the subject, that it was his intention to amuse and entertain his audience, and would refrain from much scientific explanation. He was true to his promise, and almost the whole time was devoted to experiments, all beautiful beyond description, and many of them illustrating principles that will solve great practical questions. The lecturer stated that he was sure the time would come when Niagara Falls would supply electric motive power for New York and Philadelphia without the aid of a connecting wire. — Philadelphia Record.