Weird Discoveries in Tesla's Brain

Eddy, Kite Flyer, Formidable Rival, Talking with Mars.

MARCONI'S SYSTEM EASILY OUTDONE

Reporter Assigned to See Famous Inventor Writes of What He May Have Dreamed.

And now it is Eddy, the kite-flyer, who says he has been receiving electric signals from the planets. Hitching his imagination to the tail of his kite, he soared beyond the clouds yesterday in telling of these signals.

They came, he said, in groups of three, and for the last two years he has been puzzled by the regularity of the flashes. He flies his kite with a steel wire, and when the wire is cut and the ends connected with silk strands, the electric sparks leap the silken cord at regular intervals of "one, two, three," much as if some Morse operator on Mars with a consuming thirst was telegraphing for relief so he could go out and get a drink.

Then the amazing idea seized quick hold of the listeners to the Eddy lecture that the Marconi system of wireless telegraphy was like to a baby playing leap frog, to the hurtling of electric signals through illimitable space.

In plain English, the Morse system is used in telegraphing in this country and in a modified form all over the world. Why should it not be, then, that the Martians, who are supposed to be infinitely more advanced than we are, through their perfect system of wireless telegraphy have been able to catch and comprehend these Morse signals? And why should it not be that these signs of the telegraphic code come back from Martians in their efforts to signal back, they no doubt believing that the Morse code of telegraphic signals is the language of the people on this common earth?

And if, believing this, the inhabitants of Mars had selected the means of Eddy's kite to communicate with this earth, should their words from the etherized vaults of heaven be rejected because of the humble way of transmitting the heavenly message without tolls? The theory that the steel wires of the kite had absorbed by induction from the telegraph wires below an order for a keg of beer is scouted. Of course it is possible, but it is far more enthralling to believe the signals come from Mars, or from some one of the planets.

Unquestionably, then, the discovery immediately places Eddy in the field with Tesla, who has been receiving strange signals from outer space on Pike's Peak; with Marconi, who does not believe his wireless telegraphy system is confined to earth, and with Edison, who is figuring on the commercial possibilities of a patent right monopoly line to the moon.

In view of this new rival, an effort was made last night to see Tesla, the Servian and genius, in the Waldorf-Astoria. The corridors of the hotel breathed with life and heat us usual, but somewhere upstairs the wizard who had received signals from planets, had rooms. So the reporter's card was sent up, and he waited for the answer, meantime jogging his memory with the points of the Eddy discovery, so as to enlighten Tesla.

"Never mind," said the wizard, "I read it, also the laundry check you noted on the other side. Just a moment, please. Yes, I thought so. You have a spot as big as a silver dollar on your left lung and a board bill in your pocket. Your vaccination mark shows it didn't take, and you are going to die from Bright's disease — everybody does. That aura of yourself over the left shoulder says you will die soon. It's electrical, you know, purely electrical. It's too strong for you, and it's pulling away, Sit down.

The reporter was sitting in some mysterious way.

"Excuse me for diagnosing your troubles, mental and physical," went on the wizard quietly, "but you passed through the phosphorescent glow from tridoodlum, my new metallic discovery, over the doorstep. You have some name in your mind — Eddy. Forget him."

"I will now," said the wizard, "unfold the secret of my life, only don't tell Marconi about it. Here is how I put myself in communication with Mars and the other fellows up there, as you will see," and he pointed to the sections labeled with the names of stars and constellations, which looked much like the switchboards in a telephone or telegraph office.

"The receptive part always is the negative," continued the wizard. "There is only one thing that can leap through etherized space, and that is electricity. And there is only one all-powerful impelling thing that can hurl electricity through billions of miles of dead space, and that is thought. So, to get the negative pole, through an invention of my own, I insulated one-half of the earth from the other half, removing, by induction, all the electricity from the one-half to the other, cutting the line as clean as a knife thrust, clear through to China. The consequence is that one-half of the world is positive and the other half negative. One-half thinks and the other half is thought at.

"This workshop is on the dividing line. When I cross this luminous bar to the north I am on the negative side. I am in a receptive condition. One-half the world is concentrated in me in being thought at. So, through my etherial wires, I connect myself with Mars, of Saturn, and know what the people there think.

"Then I step over the luminous bar to the north side, and immediately am charged with the positive electricity of the other half of the world. I now am the one who thinks through space. I connect myself with Mars or Venus, and the people there hear what I think. It is a wonderful discovery and very simple. It does away with all the trouble we feared in communicating with other worlds because of the difference in languages, as we don't have to talk. I can think all the human passions without thinking of a word of our language. That thought is recognized after hurtling through illimitable space, and I am answered back in kind. In fact, I have made love to some damsel or other in a hundred different worlds besides our own, and got a responsive chord back. Heaven knows what extraordinary looking creatures they are, or what they imagine I look like."

There came one mighty, reverberating sound that never before met human ears, and the clerk of the Waldorf-Astoria said to the sleepy reporter:

"Sorry, but Tesla isn't here. Out of town, I guess."