Tesla's Latest "Discovery"

Tesla's Latest "Discovery." Within the past year or two, the opinion has been more than once expressed in these columns that no man of scientific attainments now before the public is so greatly overrated as Nikola Tesla the electrician — and this despite the fact that to his ingenuity and inventive research is due the electric oscillator, an instrument of really marvelous possibilities.

The trouble with Tesla is that he is continually promising to do great things, but that he never does them. Thus within a comparatively brief period he has confidently claimed to have solved the problem of utilizing the vast power contained in the ocean waves; to have devised an electric light which would waste but a minimum of energy in the form of heat; to have discovered a system of wireless telegraphy far superior to that of Marconi, and to have detected and put to use various mysterious forces and forms of energy at present but little understood.

None of these investigations or inventions, needless to remark, have amounted to much, but Tesla's genius is evidently perennial. He is at it again — this time with the assertion that he is upon the very point of transmitting the power derived from waterfalls or mechanical appliances to the four corners of the earth without tubes, wires or any other medium of transmission than the ether. His laboratory experiments lead him to the conviction that his intention, when perfected, will cause the exportation of power to become "the chief source of income for many happily situated countries, as the United States, Canada, Central and South America, Switzerland and Sweden."

He is also of the opinion that in that event "men could settle down everywhere, fertilize and irrigate the soil with little effort and convert barren deserts into gardens, and thus the entire globe could be transformed and made a fitter abode for mankind."

Sad to relate, however, Tesla seems to think that the inhabitants of Mars may have been beforehand with him in this wonderful invention, but nevertheless he intends to keep pegging away until a Central African cannibal can cook a missionary for dinner at a fire which has been started by power derived and conducted without wires from Niagara Falls.

The possibilities of this great invention are so colossal as to almost baffle the imagination, but it is earnestly to be hoped that for humanity's sake, Mr. Truls will emulate the excellent example of Mr. Edison and instead of promising to do things, will go ahead and do them. If he can transmit power through the ether, not for a distance of 3,000 miles but for say 300 feet, he will be hailed as the genius par excellence of the age; but he must prove that he can do so by a practical demonstration, before the world will believe it. Ocular proof and ...