A NEW WARLIKE DEVICE.

Otago Witness, Volume 30, Issue 2353, 30 March 1899, Page 11

A NEW WARLIKE DEVICE.

Nicola Tesla, the electrician whose wonderfully inventive brain has done so much for (he practical development of electric science, lias lately beon busy in maturing the details of some big implements of destruction, which he hopes, by their very, horror and the comprehensiveness of their devastation, will do something towards the establishment of a general peace. Tho fundamental idea is to v.so electrical power from some central point for the manipulation of gigantic engines of destructio'nVjyitliout any close intervention of human hands. For instance, he takes a singleunarmoured vessel of great speed— so fast, indeed, that no war vessel now afloat could catch her. She keeps far beyond the range of her opponents' guns, but launches at them a email fleet of little ships, all unsinkable, but filled with terrific explosives. No man is to be aboard these small ships, but they are to bo entirely steered and worked by wireless electricity from the main vessel. The enemy may riddle there with shot, and tear them to pieces, but they have unassailable parts that keep them floating, and they reach their goal, when, if they are only within 30 or 40 yards at the time of their explosion, they will weep wreckage and disaster around them. Tesla exhibits a working model of a ship thus controlled in one room by mechanism, in another, with no direct communication. All the control is effected by electric waves sent from oi>e room to the other. With sufficient strength of current he considers he can do the same at sea over 20 or 30 miles. He promises that at the Paris Exhibition of 1900 ho will Bhow a model torpedo-boat floating there, and going through ' complicated movements, all directed from New York by means of electricity transmitted through the air without wires. It seems a very tall story that an operator sitting in New York should control the mo\'cments of a boat in Paris ; but nowadadays, when the masters of science promise a thing we have learnt not to be sceptical, but to wait in expectancy. In military warfare, not only does he propose to send in the game way huge cars filled with explosives to be discharged as near the enemy as possible, but he has the idea of using the electricity itself ac a deadly power. He will drive forward through the air electric currents of enormous -voltage, which will strike battalions and lay them low in an instant, as if every man of them had grasped a highly-charged electric wire. Devices of this or allied sorts are most certainly coming, and when war no longer has the picturesque element -about it, the flutter of pennons, the jangle of aabres, the flash of bayonets — when it is all the cold, calculating work of chemists and electricians and engineers sitting in ironclad rooms and manipulating little bras,handles and knobs and cranks — then war i. quite likely to be soon played out.