These Electricians are Alike

Yesterday afternoon a gentleman holding an important position in the electrical department of the Western Union Telegraph Company was in a communicative mood as he sipped his liqueur in Delmonico's cafe. Said he:

"I perceive that Nikola Tesla is on the verge of discovering Signor Marconi's system of wireless telegraphy. These two gentlemen resemble each other in more ways than one. They are not unlike in personal appearance, and their methods are very similar. Both of them perpetually are just going to do something that will rip up electrical science, revolutionize all known theories of telegraphy and make it possible to send perfectly coherent and strictly private messages clean through the earth or all the way around it, just like rolling off a log. Each of these inventors has a string of patents something less than a mile long and both are supplied with beautiful imaginations, of which Tesla's is probably a shade the most active. I haven't been in Delmonico's very much of late, but when the establishment was situated at the corner of Twenty-sixth street and Fifth avenue I used to go there pretty regularly around the luncheon hour solely for the joy of watching Tesla. He came in every day and planted himself at a prominent table, where he posed dreamily for an hour or so, resting his delicately moulded chin upon the palm of his hand and gazing into space, conveying the impression that he was thinking large, obese thoughts. The matinee girls used to fall into a deathlike hush at sight of Tesla, who, but for the fact that he occasionally took a sip of white wine or masticated a chunk of chicken, might have been thought to be in a trance. He had a sort of fascination even for me, until a well known physician dropped in one afternoon and briskly said: 'Hello! There's Tesla. The last time I saw him was when a committee of the Electro-Therapeutical Society went down to his place to have a look at his oscillator, which makes no end of revolutions every second. Coming out I happened to meet the superintendent of the building, with whom I was acquainted, and he said he wished to the Lord Harry that Tesla would move. He added that the 900 horse power engine in the basement, which kept the oscillator going, required the constant service of a lot of stokers and kept a constant procession of coal carts backed up to the sidewalk all day long. Of course the superintendent may have been stringing me, but somehow the incident caused me to kind of lose interest in Nikola's genius.'"