This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 8/28/2021
TESLA, Nikola (1856–1943). Typed Letter Signed (“A. Tesla”) to Hereward Carrington, 6 August 1908. One page, 8vo (254 x 203 mm), on Tesla’s personal stationery with the Tesla Laboratory (Long Island, New York) vignette heading (old folds, several pinholes); original envelope with Tesla’s return address (partially torn at upper right corner). Tesla responds to a well–known investigator of psychic phenomena agreeing that “the subject is most interesting”. Carrington (1880–1958) believed that “the activity of the mind does actually modify the ether and send forth definite vibrations, not unlike impulses which are capable of registration” and imagined a technology that would transform subtle energy associated with the spirit world into a form of physical energy apprehensible to the living. During the height of this spiritualism craze of the 1900s, Tesla was experimenting with wireless power as a way to transmit worldwide communications. It is evident that Carrington tried to make a connection with using Tesla’s experiments and his own devices to make contact with the spiritual world and was most likely what Tesla was responding to in this letter. Although Carrington did not succeed, both he and Tesla used imagined technology to generate new ways of thinking about and using electrical communication technologies.