Tesla Plays the Wizard

HE MAKES ELECTRICITY DO WEIRD THINGS BEFORE THE PUBLIC.

Marvellous Recent Inventions of Himself and Others Exhibited Before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers.

Fully four thousand visitors went to the Columbia University campus last night to attend the Conversazione of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. Both men and women crowded the halls of Havemeyer Hall and the Engineering building to see the thirty-two new inventions employing electricity which were being exhibited and operated there. Nicola Tesla was the man most sought after. He was scheduled to perform experiments with his electric oscillator and show new aspects of electric wave vibrations. The exhibition was to be held at 9 o’clock, but was postponed until 10:30, and the crowds made every approach to the large chemical lecture room impassable.

Thomas A. Edison, President Seth Low of the university, and Baron von Holleben, the German Ambassador to Washington, occupied front seats. Tesla’s entrance was greeted with tremendous applause and cheers by the Columbia students. Tesla spoke a few words only, saying he was there to amuse, not to instruct. He explained that he was going to use an electric oscillator to produce wave vibrations which were to be discharged in various parts of the room by means of a large transmitting cable. Thirty thousand volts were employed, and the women in the audience began to feel uncomfortable when the demonstrator cleared the first three rows of seats and moved his apparatus nearer the centre of the hall. Beautiful leaping sparks were thrown from the positive and negative current poles, and the brilliance of the electric light employed was made to decrease and diminish by Tesla’s rubbing his hand along an innocent-looking table in a mysterious fashion.

Steel hoops and Geissler tubes were made fluorescent, and a thrilling effect was produced by radiating colored lights by waving vacuum tubes charged with the electric current. At times the experiments failed to work owing to a hasty preparation of the apparatus. The audience was left in the dark for minutes at a time, while the breakdown in the tremendous current was repaired. Different colored tubes were then used with platinum electrodes at each end, which the performer waved around his head, producing circles of fire.

The later experiments partook of the nature of the results obtained by induction currents. A glass moon was lighted from a huge wire coil, the current passing through the air as in wireless telegraphy. Tinfoil was heated from the centre of the coil, but Tesla failed to make it melt as he tried to do. When the coil was short-circuited the foil heated so quickly that the demonstrator dropped it with smothered exclamations. By far the most spectacular performance was the last. A huge flat coil ten feet high was constructed in the front of the room and the current turned on in full force. Sparks leaped six feet in all directions from the end of the wire and the heat was so intense that the insulation began to burn. The audience felt uncomfortable and Tesla smothered the flames, remarking that “It’s just nothing.”

In the Engineering Building R. M. Hutchison exhibited two new instruments which are promised to work wonders. They are known as the akouphone and akoulalion, and are intended to make the deaf hear. W. H. Van Tassel of the New York Institute for the Deaf and Dumb, brought eight of the deafest boys in the institution for experimental purposes. One lad was born deaf, dumb and blind. He was led to the apparatus and the ear pieces fixed over his head.

The operator spoke into the akouphone, which is described as a microtelephonic instrument so constructed as to reproduce and largely intensify sounds and still preserve their quality. The boy jumped when words were spoken showing the novelty of all sound to him. When the word “hello” was repeated many times he made an effort to repeat the sound, with only partial success. A phonograph was attached to the receiver and band music was played. A faint smile appeared on the boy’s face and he spelled out the word music with his fingers to his preceptor. He began to keep time with his hands and his face was soon wreathed with smiles. He resisted when the cap was removed from his head.

Mr. Van Tassel said experiments with the akouphone on another inmate of the asylum had resulted in great success. The patient had learned a vocabulary of thirteen words after five hours of instruction. The list is: Bow, burn, bone, boil, Ben, brave, bright, hello, boy, bleak, bold, mamma and papa. The principles of the instruments were kept secret as yet, but it was said the akoulalion, which is to reproduce sounds emanating in the distance, has not been thoroughly perfected as yet. An immense crowd watched the demonstrations and the eight dumb boys engaged in animated finger conversations when the electric current was shut off.

From the top floor of the Engineering building H. R. Palmer sent over the wires a life size portrait of President William R. Harper of the University of Chicago to Chicago, where it was immediately reproduced, and the photograph of President Seth Low was flashed simultaneously from Chicago to this city. The original pictures were somewhat enlarged for the purpose of transmission and when received were photographically reduced to their normal size, thus giving an exact reproduction of the original. The enlargement is for the purpose of obtaining a greater contact surface for the transmitting stylus employed. Mr. Palmer explained that indentations were made in the photograph on tin foil outlining the principal features of expression.

The foil is run over a recording instrument which receives impressions after the manner of photograph rolls. A tap key is placed over each indentation in the impression scroll and currents passed through it to different wires—one for each indentation. A similar impression roll is kept at the receiving station, and the portrait is reproduced by photography. By the system half-tone pictures, sketches, handwriting and the like can be transmitted over long distances, employing ordinary telegraph circuits.

Peter Cooper Hewitt, son of former Mayor Hewitt, occupied a large room for the exhibition of new electric lights of his invention. The lights produced were unusually bright, but of a peculiar and marked greenish glare, which had the effect of producing a death-like pallor on the faces of all those in the room. Lips became purple and the eyes dull, and many visitors left the room early to avoid the uncanny aspect. Mr. Hewitt’s lights are produced with very little electric power and appeared much like ordinary daylight in contrast with the electric lights in the building. The devices employed are long tubes filled with mercury. When the current passes through the tube, the liquid is vaporized and becomes incandescent. This takes the place of platinum films. Instead of the alternating currents and high voltage generally employed, an induction coil is now used which automatically gives a high voltage and heats the mercury gas, which in turn lowers the resistance to the current and cuts off the voltage, with the result that a light brighter than the Edison or arc lights is produced by less electrical energy.

One large tube lamp of 1,000 candle power brilliantly lighted the room, using an ordinary 115-volt direct current. Experiments were also conducted illustrating the conduction of electricity by gases, and a new apparatus was shown illustrating the relation of voltage to the length and diameter of the tubes. The original apparatus used by Prof. Michael Idvorsky Pupin in developing the recent invention for the improvement of long distance land and ocean telephony, consisting in the location of inductance coils in the line at distances, which are definite small fractions of a current wavelength, was explained by the inventor in his laboratory. The explanation given by the professor was extremely technical and has been announced before.

A great deal of attention was attracted by the first exhibition of the Nernst electric light, recently perfected in Europe. William J. Hammer was in charge of the exhibit and announced that the new light was remarkable in that it gave the brightest light known for illuminating purposes by employing a total voltage of 200 and using less power than any other. Mr. Hammer also showed Waldemar Poulsen’s new telephonograph and telegraphone, which had been loaned by Lemvig Fog and Emil S. Hagemann of Copenhagen, Denmark.

The instruments receive telephone messages in the absence of the recipient and record them on a kind of phonograph, which repeats them when the one for whom they are intended returns to his office or home.

Dr. William E. Guyer astounded the crowd by telling that he could split an electric current that fed a single lamp and make two lights, each brighter than the original, while using the same energy. This was done, he said, by circuits containing self-induction and capacity and employing an alternating current. Prof. W. S. Franklin exhibited his new magnesia arc light—an electrolytic lamp on the Nernst principle, operating on 1,000 volts.

In the vault between the two exhibition buildings, A. F. Clift had constructed a novel method for the transportation of freight by means of an electric motor. It was styled the telpherage system. The word telpherage might be explained as the automatic conveyance of merchandise by electricity. While this idea is not altogether new, the present application of the principle is of comparatively recent date. The exhibit was a perfected system of running a small motor on an overhead steel cable stretched taut, with the load carried underneath it.

Many other novelties were placed on exhibition for the first time. Prof. Elihu Thomson had erected two new machines, a dynamo static machine and a rotary electrical apparatus. H. F. Sanville had an electric copper splicing machine, and other exhibits of importance were as follows: Floating magnetic field of E. T. Schoonmaker, revolving spark experiment of W. S. Andrews, radiographs illustrating special features of the Roentgen ray phenomena, by Profs. George F. Barker and Arthur W. Goodspeed; magnetic liquids by Prof. Francis B. Crocker, chloride accumulators of Herbert Lloyd, a new storage battery designed by Frank Perret, J. A. Barrett and W. H. Meadowcroft; a new X ray apparatus employing a modified interrupter, by Martin P. Rice; an alternating current wave tracer of Dr. Fitzhugh Townsend and radiographs of alternating current wave forms and oscillatory discharges by Prof. Frank A. Laws.

A collation was served at 11 o’clock. W. S. Barstow was chairman of the meeting.