by Nikola Tesla

Suppose some one should discover a new mechanical principle–something as fundamental as James Watt’s discovery of the expansive power of steam—by the use of which it became possible to build a motor that would give ten horse power for every pound of the engine’s weight, a motor so simple that the veriest novice in mechanics could construct it and so elemental that it could not possibly get out of repair.  Then suppose that this motor could be run forward or backward at will, that it could be used as either an engine or a pump, that it cost almost nothing to build as compared with any other known form of engine, that it utilized a larger percentage of the available power than any existing machine, and, finally, that it would operate with gas, steam, compressed air or water, any one of them, as its driving power.

It does not take a mechanical expert to imagine the limitless possibilities of such an engine.  It takes very little effort to conjure up a picture of a new world of industry and transportation made possible by the invention of such a device.  “Revolutionary” seems a mild term to apply to it.  That, however, is the word the inventor uses in describing it—Nikola Tesla, the scientist whose electrical discoveries underlie all modern electrical power development, whose experiments and deductions made the wireless telegraph possible, and who now, in the mechanical field, has achieved a triumph even more far reaching than anything he accomplished in electricity.

There is something of the romantic in this discovery of the famous explorer of the hidden realms of knowledge.  The pursuit of an ideal is always romantic, and it was in the pursuit of an ideal which he has been seeking twenty years that Dr. Tesla made his great discovery.  That ideal is the power to fly—to fly with certainty and absolute safety—not merely to go up in an aeroplane and take chances on weather conditions, “holes in the air,” tornadoes, lightning and the thousand other perils the aviator of today faces, but to fly with the speed and certainty of a cannon ball, with power to overcome any of nature’s aerial forces, to start when one pleases, go whither one pleases and alight where one pleases.  That has been the aim of Dr. Tesla’s life for nearly a quarter of a century.  He believes that with the discovery of the principle of his new motor he has solved this problem and that incidentally he has laid the foundations for the most startling new achievements in other mechanical lines.

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