Tesla Mimics the Sun

Inventor Perfects His Wonderful New Light.

IT LOOKS LIKE ICE CRYSTALS.

Neither Wires Nor Carbon Filaments to Break or Burn — Electricity Discharged Into Hollow Glass Tubes Bursts Into White Flame — Result Is Light Resembling a Cloudy Day.

Nikola Tesla has at last perfected his new system of electric lighting — daylight illumination, it may be called — and he hopes to have it soon introduced into general use.

Under a full head of electricity the lamp has the color of ice in the sun. The light is soft and absolutely steady. So diffuse is it that it deceives the eye and at first seems without much power of illumination.

This is the light — the “perfect sanitary” light, as Tesla calls it — which he has been seeking for ten years. There are neither wires nor carbon filaments to break or burn out. The lamp may be described as a nest of glass tubes bent in rectangular form.

Each lamp has about 20 feet of the white flaming tubes. Into this square coil of hollow glass of the diameter of one’s finger electricity is sent quivering from Tesla’s oscillator.

Bursting into light, it floods the apartment with the clear light of day. It is daylight — not the splendor of the sun, but the light of the sun as on a cloudy day when one forgets that the sun is shining.

Tesla’s oscillator, which he believes is the key for solving the most important electrical problems of the day, causes electrical vibrations of inconceivable speed. These vibrations turn the atoms of the gases in the tubes into, as it were, little comets, which shoot through the inclosed space with tremendous rapidity, leaving trains of light behind.

This sudden starting and stopping of the current produce continuous light, not of the incandescent nor of the arc light character, but purely solar. In other words, each lamp is a little sun.

When a New York Herald reporter recently saw the little white icy tubes shining along the ceiling of Tesla’s laboratory, they appeared no more responsible for the daylight in the room than the glass pendants of a chandelier. In a far corner an ordinary incandescent bulb was glowing. It was extinguished, but the daylight remained. When Tesla’s icy tubes were extinguished, the place was in darkness.

Several interesting experiments were also made. The sudden lighting of gas or of the ordinary electric lamp so shocked and strained the eyes that one seemed for the moment afflicted with a sudden yellow blindness.

The Tesla lamp is not like any of the known lights in use. It seems only a bunch of crystals glowing on the ceiling at midday. But remove them and all light vanishes.