The Tesla Journal - Number 1 - 1981 Page 21

RECENT, CURRENT, AND PROJECTED ACTIVITIES REPORTED BY MEMBERS Dr. H. James Birx, Professor of Anthropology at Canisius College, Chairman of the Western New York Chapter of Delta Tau Kappa (the international social science honor society), and member of the Executive Board, is author of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's Philosophy of Evolution (1972) and Man's Place in the Universe (1977). He is presently writing Theories of Evolution, a volume with a Preface by Dr. George V. Tomashevich, to be published by Charles C. Thomas for the 1982 Darwin Centennial. His article "The Creation/Evolution Controversy" appeared in the premier issue of Free Inquiry and his recent return to the Galapagos Islands will result in an article on this unique archipelago for Collections, the publication of the Buffalo Society of Natural Sciences. He will deliver a paper entitled "Teilhard and Evolution: Critical Reflections" on September 22 at the Arcosanti Teilhard Festival in Arizona (both his forthcoming book and this paper will refer to Nikola Tesla and Božidar Kenežević). Dr. Birx and Gary R. Clark have submitted their feature "The Cosmic Quest" to Carl Sagan's The Planetary Society for publication in its bimonthly The Planetary Report. Dr. Birx will also participate in the Tesla Symposium at Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, in December, with a paper entitled "Tesla and Einstein" which will highlight their cosmic speculations and achievements. Mrs. Peggy McKinnon Clark of Shoreham, Long Island, one of the founding members of the Tesla Memorial Society and now a member of its Board of Directors, has long been a tireless fighter for justice to Nikola Tesla. In the course of the past couple of years, she gave five public lectures, with slides, on the life and work of this great Yugoslav American scientist and inventor, always somewhat adapted and revised to suit the nature of her changing audiencess. Everywhere her message has provoked a lively and favorable response. Her first lecture, in October 1980, was sponsored by the Friends of the Library of Shoreham-Wading River High School. Her second talk, in Dec., 1980, was delivered before the Rotary Club in Rocky Point, New York. In February, 1981, she addressed. the Brookhaven Town Historical Society and in April, 1981, she spoke to some 200 fourthand fifth graders of the Miller Avenue Elementary School in Shoreham. On this occasion, particularly, her young and curious audience of pre-teenage school children listened to her story of Tesla with great interest and rapt attention. Finally, on Wednesday, August 26, 1981, she spoke on Tesla in the Brookhaven Recreation Center in Shoreham, Long Island. This well publicized and unusually successful presentation was sponsored by Radio Central Amateur Radio Club at Shoreham Recreation Center. In response to a Yugoslav initiative taken in 1976, Peggy has been seriously exploring the possibility of having Tesla's original Tower, torn down in 1917, rebuilt of Yugoslav aluminum on its old foundation. For all these and other commendable efforts on behalf of Tesla's memory and reputation, Mrs. Peggy McKinnon Clark deserves our heartfelt thanks. Dr. Richard E. Dollinger, Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Buffalo, member of our Board of Directors and Chairman of the TMS Science and Technology Committee, has been diligently engaged in the preparation of a working and safe Tesla Coil for demonstration purposes. All this has been above and beyond his normal load of academic and professional activities, which include: working on a Vacuum Arc and Fault Current Limiter for use in electrical power systems. These projects are being sponsored by the Electrical Power Research Institute in conjunction with Westinghouse Electric Corporation. Dr. Edward Gobetz, member of our Board of Directors, leading Slovenian American scholar and author, co-author, and editor of a considerable number of professional works in the fields of learning disability, geriatrics and Slovenian American Studies, recently published the first part of a most impressive and comprehensive work on his small but highly civilized people's important cultural contributions to America and the rest of the world: Slovenian Heritage, Vol. 1, edited by Edward Gobetz, Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, Kent State University, with the assistance of Milena Gobetz and Ruth Lakner, Slovenian Research Center of America, Inc., Willoughby Hills, Ohio, 1980. This beautifully prepared and superbly illustrated book contains valuable scholarly contributions to the study of Slovenia's high culture by Professor Gobetz himself as well as a number of other noted specialists in the field of Sloveniana. Among many other fascinating and little known facts about the Slovenian people's admirable contributions to modern civilization is a reference to Lovrenc Kosir (Laurenz Koschier, 1804 1879), the Slovenian born conceptual Father of the Postage Stamp, usually treated as an Austrian. The book is a scrupulously documented gold-mine of otherwise almost inaccessible ethnolinguistic, socio-cultural, historical, economicopolitical, scientific, literary and artistic information about a relatively small but culturally formidable people that certainly deserves to be better known and more widely appreciated. 21