Tesla's Death Ray

Nikola Tesla’s birthdays continue to be occasions for announcements so startling as to greatly stir man’s powers of imagination. At 78 Tesla reports the discovery of a “death ray” capable of carrying destruction over an area of two hundred miles.

Intimations of important and astounding results of his research have come from Tesla in recent years. Some of his public statements disclose his firm conviction (a mathematical certainty, he says) that other planets are inhabited and that interplanetary communication is an objective of science the realization of which is not far in the future. All this is merely a matter of an engineering problem of applying the fundamentals and principles of wireless transmission of energy and power, which he claims to have solved beyond question of doubt. The practical application may come, of course, decades after the successful demonstration of these principles, as it has in the high tension electrical and radio fields.

The boldness and brilliance of Tesla’s ideas, while arousing widespread interest, have also in some degree diverted attention from his many useful contributions to the world’s fund of scientific achievement. He led the way to the discovery of wireless by indicating the field for study and experiment. He was the first to conceive an effective method of utilizing the alternating current, and his many other practical inventions are well known to electrical engineers.

So we should give some heed to this bold adventurer while awaiting the promised elucidations of his death-ray discovery, for it is men of the Nikola Tesla type, the Einsteins, the Edisons, the Jeanses, the Millikans and others in whom the fires of imagination and tremendous endeavor burn fiercely, who carry us further and further into the expanding realm of the infinite. In them we find a combination of romance and science and the ability to convert seemingly wild imageries into scientific formulae.