Nikola Tesla Books
222 HIGH FREQUENCY APPARATUS should also bear careful consideration. The style of talk favored by the intelligent and well-read Chautauqua assembly would be hopelessly out of place in even a highclass vaudeville theatre. This is not due to the lesser degree of intelligence to be found in the theatre audience so much as to the fact that such an audience demands to be shown rather than told. The experiments must speak for themselves and any lecture accompanying their presentation must be more in the nature of an explanatory "chatter" rather than a discourse on the theory and scientific reasons for the phenomena demonstrated. With the typical lecture audience, on the other hand, the explanatory remarks may be more comprehensive in nature, as such an audience comes to listen and be instructed, as I well as to see and be entertained. At the same time the performer must not lose sight of the fact that many of the people in even a scholarly audience are totally unfamiliar with even the fundamentals of electricity except in a vague way, and his discourse should therefore be interspersed with frequent analogies in everyday life in order that the terms and phrases used may be clearly comprehended. A clever touch of comedy is of almost inestimable value; for the theatre audience it should be of the "slapstick" variety, while for the lecture assembly it should be genteel or even subtle in nature. As an illustration of the former style of comedy, the writer has seen many a mediocre electrical act carried through to a riotous curtain simply because a handful of boys from the audience were knocked off their feet supposedly through contact with a wire. The same bit of comedy presented for the approval of a more cultured audience would have resulted in a few disdainful smiles. Short Introduction Preferable.-The performer should beware of a lengthy introduction in either of the two cases.
