Power by Radio?

There were mysterious doings in the vicinity of Boise City, Okla. last week. An inventor from California, his assistant and a handful of Santa Fe Railroad officials gathered on a lonely stretch of Santa Fe track for a secret test. When the secret was divulged in part, it appeared that two handcars coupled together had traveled seven miles on power transmitted by radio.

Inventor Marion C. Gregory's sending station was a short-wave transmitter powered by a small gasoline engine. Except for its aerial the receiving station was entirely concealed in a housing mounted on one of the cars. The driving belts which turned the axle were quite visible. Some of the railroad men expressed satisfaction. Some expressed enthusiasm.

Remote control by radio of ships, automobiles, airplanes furnished with power of their own is becoming commonplace. A vastly different thing is transmission of power by radio, an old dream of famed inventor Nikola Tesla and a favorite preoccupation of Columnist Arthur Brisbane. Westinghouse engineers who have long worked on the problem were able last summer at Chicago's Century of Progress to operate a tiny fan requiring two or three watts by shooting a beam of short radio waves toward a parabolic reflector which focused on a small antenna. Scientists doubted last week that Mr. Gregory, who is a nurseryman as well as an inventor, could have done any better, and their doubts were magnified by a report that his hidden receiver worked by means of selenium cells.

Meanwhile tight-mouthed Inventor Gregory dismantled his secret, entrusted it to his assistant, sold a share of the prospective proceeds to a man named Morris Weingood, went home for a rest before beginning work on a receiver capable of clutching enough power from the air to drive a five-car train.

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