Tesla's Latest - Niagara Falls Power May Be Available All Over the World

NEW YORK, Oct. 24. — Nikola Tesla, the electrician, describes in the Electrical Review a possibility in electric power transmission. His inventions for transmitting electricity at high pressure over long distances have been successfully applied at many natural sources of power. Probably the most important of these plants in the United States is at Niagara Falls, costing over $6,000,000, to install which supplies electricity to many large factories and supplies electric power for running the trolley lines of the city of Buffalo, 24 miles distant. The announcement is now made that by employing apparatus which he had invented, capable of generating electrical pressures vastly in excess of any heretofore used, located at natural sources of power, the current can be conducted to a terminal maintained at an elevation where the rarefied atmosphere is capable of conducting freely the particular current produced; then, at a distant point where the energy is to be used commercially, to maintain a second terminal at about the same elevation to attract and receive the current and to convey it to earth through special means for transforming and utilizing it. With the article an illustration is presented showing streams of electricity issuing from a single terminal, giving an estimated electrical pressure of 2,500,000 volts.

The Electrical Review comments on Mr. Tesla’s novel idea as follows:

“Tesla now proposes to transmit without use of wires — through the natural media, the earth and the air — great amounts of power to distances of thousands of miles. This will appear a dream — a tale from the Arabian Nights. But the extraordinary discoveries Tesla has made during a number of years of incessant labor which are authoritatively described in our present issue makes it evident that his work in this field has passed a stage of laboratory experiment, and is ready for a practical test on an industrial scale. The success of his efforts means that power from such sources as Niagara will become available in any part of the world regardless of distance.”