Tesla Keeps His Secrets

Refrains from Gratifying the Curiosity of Electricians About His Experiments.

It is only once in two or three years that Nikola Tesla, the electrician, can be persuaded to give a lecture. He contributes occasionally to electrical publications, but he carefully refrains in these communications from letting his fellow-electricians know what he is driving at in his experiments.

When it was announced that he was to deliver a demonstrative lecture recently before the Academy of Science, in this city, the large lecture hall in the American Museum of Natural History was crowded until there was not standing room. Tesla is not an agreeable lecturer. Despite his long residence in this country, he speaks decidedly broken English, and as he persists in using technical words, many of them coined by himself, it is very difficult to follow him.

Two hundred or more electricians who went to hear him speak before the academy in hope that he would reveal something of the nature of his investigations were disappointed. They failed to discover what he Is "driving at." Tesla made apparently free use of his wonderful high power instruments for producing rapid vibration, but beyond suggesting their value in scientific experiments, and remarking that their practical value would be made apparent to everybody before long, he kept his own counsel. His closing sentence was an epigram: "What Nature does not choose to reveal to us, it is no use trying to force from her by bolts and screws."