Tesla Memorial is Unveiled Here

Inventor in Electrical Field Honored as Centenary of His Birth Approaches

A memorial to Nikola Tesla, leading inventor in the field of electricity forty years before his death in 1943, was unveiled here yesterday. The centennial of his birth will be on July 9.

Friends who knew him well depicted him as an authentic genius whose misfortune may have been that he lived too long, long enough to develop eccentricities.

The memorial is the inventor's death mask, heavily copper-plated and mounted on a marble pedestal. The monument was unveiled in the offices of Radio-Electronics, a magazine, at 154 West Fourteenth Street, by Lazar Lilac, consul general of Yugoslavia. Hugo Gernsback, the publisher, was an intimate friend.

A native of Crotia, Mr. Tesla came to the United States in 1884. Within four years he introduced his concept of alternating current and the induction motor with its rotating magnetic field. These made possible the transmission of electric power from Niagara Falls, touched off a feud between Mr. Tesla's Westinghouse supporters and Thomas A. Edison's General Electric, and produced fundamental changes in American industry across the nation.

Radio, television, fluorescent lighting and guided missiles stand so squarely on Mr. Tesla's concepts that a respected scientist remarked yesterday that "there is hardly a modern invention he didn't pioneer."

"One hears many strange things about him," recalled Mrs. Agnes J. Holden, daughter of the late Robert Hall Johnson, once editor of Century Magazine. "It's not right to judge a man who has passed 80 by what he did in his 80's. I remember Tesla when he was 35 years old, young and gay, and full of fun.

"Our family recognized him as a very great genius. Of course, when he was in the midst of inventing and discovering he went into a dream, eating very little and working always."

A lifetime later, said Mr. Gernsback, Mr. Tesla was having trouble with his pigeons. The birds shared his rooms in the Waldorf-Astoria and St. Regis hotels until the managers cleared them all out. Finally, the inventor set them free at the New York Public Library, where "possibly the greatest inventor who ever lived went to feed his pets," Mr. Gernsback said.