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alternating current and whose many contributions to our electrical age are almost inestimable. Thomas Alva Edison walked away with most of the glory, and Tesla ended up a burnt-out eccen- tric alone and ignored in a dingy Manhattan hotel room. But while the spark was in him it shed a blinding glare. That summer, using thirty thousand dollars given to him by Colonel John Jacob Astor,, Nikola Tesla was experimenting with radio. He had built a powerful transmitter and receiver and was trying to develop a method for broadcasting electrical energy through the air to eliminate the need for expensive wiring systems. Energy that could run motors and light lamps. He succeeded at least partially, for the lights and equipment in his later laboratories worked without wiring. * " Thousands of miles away a young man named Marconi was also toying with batteries and coils. That summer Marconi managed to broadcast the letter V (three dots and a dash) to a crude receiver operated by his assistants less than fifty miles away. These were the only operable radios on the planet Earth. One night while Tesla was working alone in his mountain lab, his equipment suddenly came to life, and he received an apparently intelligent signal, though indecipherable. 1 was familiar, of course, with such electrical disturbances as are produced by the sun, Aurora Borealis, and earth currents,’ he later wrote, 'and I was as sure as I could be of any fact that these varations were due to none of these causes. *. The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another,* baffled generations of scientists. He was a very odd man. sexless, and mystical. In 1900 he told a reporter, 'We cannot even with positive assurance assert that some of them [ultraterrestrials] might not be present here in this our world in tie very midst of us. for their constitution and life manifestations may be such that we are unable to perceive them.’ During my boyhood I suffered from a particular affliction due to the appearances of images, which were often accompanied by strong flashes of light. When a word was spoken, the image of the object designated would present itself so vividly to my vision that I could not tell whether what I saw was real or not... Even though I reached out and passed my hand through the image, ta 22 ---V A et te ate. Two years after Tesla's Colorado experiments, Marconi broadcast the letter S {three dots) across the Atlantic, and a new era of communications was born. From the very beginning radio operators throughout the world received signals which no one could identify or understand. But somewhere there must have been a third transmitter. Tesla became the first scientist to intercept the mysterious intelligently organized radio waves CAA ek ee De Dee which permeate our planet and have " See Joihn J. ©'Neil's Mogtaphy. Prodigul Genius, Neville Spearman. He amplified this in 1921 when American Magazine quoted him: it would remain fixed in space,