The Oelwein Daily Register, Oelwein, Iowa. May 26, 1916.
Yes, reply the experts; the present war is based on chemistry; but future warfare will wield the enormously more gigantic power of destruction provided by electricity, according to a writer in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Then it will not be a question of the annihilation of armies; it will be one of the extermination of whole populations. It will not be a matter of demolishing cities and fortresses, but of wiping whole nations at one stroke from the face of the earth. The scientists, in fact, offer us one ultimate alternative: Either man must conquer his innate murderous instincts and cease from war, or else in the end the human race will perish in a universal act of suicide such as Schopenbauer foretold--self-slain by the unspeakable agencies of destruction with which science will inevitably arm us.
For 600 years, gunpowder and its derivatives have ruled the destinies of mankind. A flash from the pestle of the scientist-monk, Roger Bacon, blew feudalism off the globe, and made possible the coming of democracy. Gunpowder gave to the European races away over the whole world; it subjected to them America, Asia and Africa. Little did Bacon dream of these consequences from his experiment with saltpeter and sulphur. Perhaps as little do we today realize the possibilities of the wireless current which in an instant bears the spoken word from Arlington to Honolulu.
In the imagination of every scientist in the world today there is a vision of a machine with a key by means of which a wave of electricity will be flashed through the air to explode the enemy's bombs, torpedoes, cartridges and magazines. The man who first perfects this device will go down in history--if any historians are left alive--as a greater man than Roger Bacon, for his invention will make lyddite and picric acid obsolete, and will send rifles, cannon and dreadnaughts to the junk heap.
Only one scientist so far makes a claim to have advanced some steps towards the perfect electric man-killer. But that man is no other than Nikola Tesla, electrical wizard, who has just been awarded a part of this year's Noble (sic) prize for physics. In an interview the other day he laid down these prophesies:
1. This is the last war in which the explosive power of chemicals will decide the issue.
2. In the next war electricity will be the force of organized slaughter.
"It is, of course, possible," he said to a representative of the Post-Dispatch Sunday Magazine a few days ago, "to produce electrical effects at a distance by means of wireless energy. But the insurmountable difficulty thus far has been to aim an electric wave in one direction only, with all of its force concentrated on a given target.
"I will go so far as to say that after twenty years of application to the problem of transmitting energy by wireless, I have just made a valuable advance in this direction. The stage has been reached where to an extent it is practicable to use this force in war, and to predict such a development as will make electricity supplant cannon in battle.
"It is impossible to give details at this time, but in a general way my invention can be used in three methods.
"In the first place, it will be possible to send an explosive body through the air--an aerial torpedo flying many times faster than an aeroplane--and to direct this projectile to the spot desired, where it can be exploded by wireless. It will be possible to guide the projectile by wireless after it has passed beyond the range of the eye, and the aim is so accurate that it is possible to reduce the error to a few feet in a thousand miles.
"In the second place, it will be practicable with this apparatus to produce effects at a distance which will interfere with the enemy and tend to make him ineffective.
"In the third place, it promises to be able to produce at a distance such effects of electrical tension as will jeopardize life and property."
The inventor declined to go into specific details, saying that it is safer to be specific after the fact. But one would gather from the words he did speak that he has contrived a torpedo of the air flying under its own power as a torpedo swims in the water, which can be steered by wireless and exploded by the same force. Such a projectile would have a range not of some twenty miles, like the highest power cannon, but one limited only by its own flying endurance. It would be harder to hit with shell and rifle fire than an aeroplane, because of its smaller size and swifter velocity, and it need not be manned by a crew who would be exposed to death at every instant.
The second and third methods of which Tesla speaks are discussed in rather cryptic language, but leave the inference that he believes himself already able, in some degree, to produce at a distance by wireless and electric shock similar to that produced by touching a charged wire. One can think of no other way in which effects perilous to life and property could be obtained with electricity.
With this idea worked out to its ultimate perfection, one might foretell such appalling events in warfare as this: An entire army, in its trenches, is without warning seized with the death agonies of a wretch in the electrical chair, and is exterminated by a silent enemy, using no bullets. Or, at a given moment, every living thing in a great city is struck dead as if by lightning, by means of a force unleashed hundreds of miles away by an officer who merely pulls a lever in a wireless tower.
Tesla appears to see in the future a warfare of electrical appliances more deadly than all the cannon every made; he sees entire areas electrified and made untenable for any living creature. Death and destruction will be dealt out at unheard of distances, with zones of action more spacious than we now dream of. There is foreshadowed a conflict in which not armies but nations may be destroyed in a single action, by men armed with thunderbolts more mighty than those of the heavens. No wonder that Tesla, his own imagination recoiling in horror, says:
"I hope this is the invention that will make war impossible."
Another device for which inventors are seeking is one that will be able, by means of the wireless current, to explode at a distance the enemy's magazines of ammunition. If this were perfected, one man in London, by pressing a button, could set fire to all the explosives in the Krupp factories and blow that institution into bits; or he could blow up all the cartridges and explosives in the German army. Or another man in Berlin could with one stroke blow the English fleet out of the water with its own powder. In an article in a Paris newspaper recently, Marconi, father of wireless telegraphy, declared that such an invention would mean the abolition of firearms and a reversion to hand-to-hand fighting.
A Dutch inventor named Lanzius, now in New York, claims to have made such a device. An Italian inventor won considerable notoriety for himself two years ago by demonstrating an apparatus which he declared would explode ammunition at a distance by means of a wireless current--but he was shown to be a fraud. A young New Yorker, who already has several authentic inventions to his credit, declares he has perfected a method of emitting wireless current which will melt all metals within a certain radius. A California inventor asserts that he can create a flame at a distance by means of wireless, and offers to set fire to any fleet approaching the Pacific coast.
The Germans are reported to have used heat to destroy the barbed-wire entanglements of the Russians. Tesla believes that the result was obtained, if at all, by the projection of a flame produced by hydrogen gas under high pressure. Such a flame can readily be projected for 10 feet, which might be sufficient when the trenches are close enough together. In such a flame barbed wire would melt like wax.
In all of the belligerent countries, and in those which fear they may sometime become belligerents, the best brains are hard at work on the problem of contriving new methods of murder more deadly and more wholesale than those now employed. Some of their dreams of future warfare may seem fantastic. But the rude cannon of the Turks seemed an incredible prodigy at the siege of Constantinople in the fifteenth century; and to the artillerymen of our Revolutionary war the machine gun of today would appear an equal marvel. On (sic) can scarcely doubt that if man continues to maintain his delight in war, science will be at hand to supply him with weapons as advanced in murderous power over those today, as the arms of today surpass the sling and stone with which David, introducing the artillery of his era, slew the armored giant. Will human nerves be able to endure these colossal horrors? Probably; today they endure the shock of explosives, the sound of which would have sent Achilles to the madhouse.
