Tesla's New World

This revolving globe generates every moment enough electricity, if it could be stored in batteries, to run all the machinery of the world for the balance of time. At the North Pole this electricity streams off in beautiful red ribbons called the auroras, and we see this phenomenon on account of the highly attenuated condition of the atmosphere. But everywhere, as high as the air reaches, around this earth is this immense wealth of nature, yet man, in his blindness and puniness, continues to manufacture with his little dynamos what nature has placed before him in such abundance. He does not need to manufacture another spark; he needs only to use an infinitesimal fraction of what is already made and the world of intelligence will become a whispering-gallery, and the world of his machinery will move in its appointed motion out of the forces of the invisible air.

For more than ten years scientists have known that man was wasting his time and energy burning coal and wood, denuding his forests, impoverishing his soil, and blackening the air of his cities, and then, with all his boasted speed, to move comparatively as a cripple. A few of them knew this, and one of them, Nikola Tesla, was bold enough to say that he could change all this. Well, it hasn't yet been changed, but while I was in his laboratory the other day he looked up from one of his machines with the confidence of Archimedes lighting his face. "I have found the way of my dream and will soon show it to the world." Mr. Tesla, as is well known, has harnessed Niagara and now he is read to harness the globe.

A few hundred feet in the air, just above what is known as the magnetic disturbance of the earth's surface, the electric waves run in long, straight lines. They are called the Hertzian waves, after young Hertz, their discoverer. These waves are, in fact, found everywhere in the air, but up there they can he used without the danger of local disturbance, and Mr. Tesla has, by a long series of experiments, learned to take hold of them and flash a light precisely as a sunbeam is flashed from a mirror. He has also learned to throw the electric energy of these waves into a battery and turn a distant machine connected with this battery by a wire. Mr. Tesla has a machine in his laboratory, that he calls an oscillator, that generates these waves and projects them into the atmosphere just as nature does. With this oscillator he has succeeded in making every calculation necessary to flash a message without a wire to any part of the earth, or to take the electric waves generated by the great power of Niagara and grind wheat in Argentina, or run the trolley-cars in Sydney. This is no longer speculation, but science, and with time and capital such a gigantic scale will be realized.

What is necessary is to build here and there, on the high points of the earth, tall towers and put into the cops of these towers machines to gather and focus these waves, just as the mirror gathers and focuses the sunbeams. Mr. Tesla said to me that, with a tower tall enough and with machines big enough, he could send a message from New York to London without a wire, but for transmitting electric energy for running machinery at this distance it would require a series of towers. But there never will be any necessity for running machinery at that long distance from the source of energy. It is over long distances that we want to telegraph. With such a station at New York not only could we talk to Europe without wires, but every ship on the Atlantic could communicate with us, and assistance could be rendered to any one of them in distress. The seas would be robbed of over half their terrors. But this means of communication would render it impossible for a few persons to conceal important information long enough to take advantage of the public. Every financial panic has had its origin in the way the telegraph or cable news has been concealed, but a tall tower flashing its messages on the city would protect the public and would immensely help nations to readily understand each other in an international crisis threatening war.

It is now known that light is sound carried to a point of vibration beyond hearing. There are scientists, and among them Mr. Tesla, who believe that the two terms may be convertible that is to say, that we might take a sunbeam and so graduate it down as to hear something of the terrific storms that are constantly sweeping over that luminary. So it may not be impossible to attach the telephone and phonograph to these waves that may be made to blink around the globe as the winking diamonds in the girdle of a woman's waist. If we ever talk and sing across the wide seas this is possibly the only way, for it should be understood that wires can be distributed from these high stations into every house.

Mr. Tesla has gone so far as to say that it is possible to communicate with other planets of our system by throwing gigantic letters with these tall-tower lights on the face of the earth. This is downright dreaming, and here we part company with this great artist of science.

D. F. St. Clair.