Tesla's Wireless Telegrams

Nearly every telegraphic inventor has for years dreamed in his waking hours of the possibility of communicating without wires. From time to time there has appeared in the technical journals a reference to experiments showing the almost universal belief among electricians that, some day, wires would be done away with. Experiments have been made attempting to prove the possibilities, but it has remained for Mr. Nikola Tesla to advance a theory, and experimentally prove it, that wireless communication is a possibility, and a by no means distant possibility. Indeed, after six years of careful and conscientious work, Mr. Tesla has arrived at a stage where some insight into the future is possible.

A representative of the Electrical Review receives the assurance personally from Mr. Tesla who, by the way, is nothing if not conservative, that electrical communication without wires is an accomplished fact, and that the method employed and principles involved have nothing in them to prevent signals and messages being transmitted and intelligibly received between distant points. Already he has constructed both a transmitting apparatus and an electrical receiver, which at distant points is sensitive to the signals of the transmitter, regardless of earth currents or points of the compass. And this has been done with a surprisingly small expenditure of energy.

Naturally, Mr. Tesla is averse to explaining all details of his invention, but allows it to be understood that he avails himself of what, for the present, may be termed the electrostatic equilibrium; that if this be disturbed at any point on the earth, the disturbance can with proper apparatus be distinguished at a distant point, and thus the means of signaling and reading signals becomes practicable once the required concrete instruments are available. Some years ago Mr. Tesla announced his belief in the possibilities, but he did so only after having satisfied himself by actual tests of apparatus designed by him. Much work had yet to be done, and he has since then given close attention and study to the problem.

Details are not yet available, for obvious reasons, and we now merely chronicle Mr. Tesla's statement that he has really accomplished wireless communication over reasonably long distances with small expenditure of energy, and has only to perfect apparatus to go to any extent. Morse's 40-mile experiment in the old days was on a far less certain basis than the wireless possibilities of to-day.

Tesla's work with high frequency and high-potential currents has been notable. As long ago as 1891 he foretold the present results, both as to vacuum tube lighting and intercommunication without wires. The former had in his hands assumed a condition capable of a public demonstration of the phenomena of the electrostatic molecular forces. Numberless experiments were carried out, and from what then was a startling frequency of 10,000 per second, Mr. Tesla has advanced to what now is moderate work at 2,000,000 oscillations per second. Such almost inconceivable results are plainly out of all possible reach by any mechanical rotation of a commutator. And so long as efficiency of lighting is, as Mr. Tesla observes, dependent upon extremely high frequency, it would seem his efforts are in the one and only direction likely, in vacuum tube lighting, to lead to success. Success, according to Mr. Tesla, is already assured, but he will not come before the public until every detail of a practicable and commercial system is complete, and the day for such a consummation, he now states, is near at hand.