Can Bridge the Gap to Mars

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Nikola Tesla on His Wireless System for the Transmission of Energy.

To the Editor of The New York Times:

You have called me an "inventor of some useful pieces of electrical apparatus." It is not quite up to my aspirations, but I must resign myself to my prosaic fate. I cannot deny that you are right.

Nearly four million horse power of waterfalls are harnessed by my alternating current system of transmission, which is like saying that one hundred million men-untiring, consuming nothing, receiving no pay-are laboring to provide for our wants, incidentally saving the waste of one hundred million tons of coal annually. In this great city the elevated roads, the subways, and the street railways are operated by my system, and the lamps and other electrical appliances get the current through machinery of my invention. And as in New York so all the world over where electricity is introduced. The telephone and the incandescent lamp fill specific and minor demands, electric power meets the many general and sterner necessities of life. Yes, I must admit, however reluctantly, the truth of your unflattering contention.

But the greater commercial importance of this invention of mine is not the only advantage I have over my celebrated predecessors in the realm of the useful, who have given us the telephone and the incandescent lamp. Permit me to remind you that I did not have, like Bell, such powerful help as the Reis telephone, which reproduced music and only needed a deft turn of an adjusting screw to repeat the human voice; or such vigorous assistance as Edison found in the incandescent lamps of King and Starr, which only needed to be made of high resistance. Not at all. I had to cut the path myself, and my hands are still sore. All the army of my opponents and detractors was ever able to drum up against me in a fanatic contest has simmered down to a short article by an Italian-Prof. Feraris-dealing with an abstract and physically meaningless idea of a rotating magnetic poles and published years after my discovery, months even after my complete disclosure of the whole practically developed system in all its essential universally adopted features. It is a publication, pessimistic and discouraging, devoid of the discoverer's virility and force, devoid of results, utterly wanting in the faith and devotion of the inventor, a defective and belated record of a good but feeble man whose only response to my whole-souled brother greeting was a plaintive cry of priority-a sad contrast to the strong and equanimous Schallenberger, a true American engineer, who stoically bore the pain that killed him.