London. Nikola Tesla delivers a lecture at the Institution of Electrical Engineers. James Dewar, Fullerian Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution, to persuade Tesla to give a repeat performance the following evening, offers him a glass of whiskey and sits him in Faraday’s chair. Tesla agrees, writing of a marvelous brownish fluid that shimmers with every iridescent color and tastes like nectar. At the lectures, naturally and as is his style, Tesla also performs experiments and demonstrations, such as 30-cm lightning bolts between charged spheres, a self-illuminated “William Thomson” sign, vacuum bulbs with internal electrodes (forerunners of Lee De Forrest and J.A. Fleming’s vacuum tubes of 15 years later), extremely high-frequency currents, the use of a single wire, and the disk motor. Tesla also attends an informal dinner. In these lectures, Tesla also inspired J.A. Fleming himself, who declared that no one could doubt Tesla’s qualifications as a magician of the first order, the Order of the Flaming Sword. Tesla also spent time with Crookes, and was impressed by how a high-level professional like Crookes could take spiritualism seriously.
