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The controlled use of power and light was but a part of electricity's allure. The mystery and seeming wildness of it was another, and that was Nikola Tesla's province. The Tesla exhibits in the Westinghouse section of the Electricity Building, inexplicable to almost everyone who saw them, included Tesla's whirling "egg of Columbus"—a copper egg spun on its end within a rotating magnetic field. Lightning crackled between two insulated plates, and various balls and disks spun simultaneously in different places in the room. "When the currents were turned on and the whole animated with motion, it presented an unforgettable spectacle," recalled one witness. "Mr. Tesla had many vacuum bulbs in which small light metal discs were pivotally arranged on jewels and these would spin anywhere in the hall when [an] iron ring was energized."

Tesla also displayed various discharge lamps, offspring of the Geissler tube—the creation of Heinrich Geissler, physicist and maker of scientific instruments in Bonn, Germany, in the mid-nineteenth century. Geissler had taken an evacuated glass cylinder and attached electrodes to both ends, then filled the cylinder with combinations of rarefied gases such as neon and argon. The gases conducted a current from one end of the tube to the other, producing visible colored light in the process. Tesla shaped tubes of light into coils, circles, and squares and spelled out the names of famous electricians, the name of his favorite Serbian poet, and the very word "light."

More intriguing than all his devices was Tesla himself, frail and hollow-cheeked from an exhausting year of ceaseless work. When he arrived at the fair to give a lecture, even the professors gazing at the hodgepodge of equipment he was about to use in demonstrations "lumped off the whole lot under the generic term of 'Tesla's animals.'" Tesla, the announcement for his lecture proclaimed, promised to pass a current of 100,000 volts through his body, "without injury to life, an experiment which seems all the more wonderful when we recall the fact that the currents made use of for executing murderers at Sing Sing, N.Y., have never exceeded 2,000 volts." The promise drew crowds of people clamoring to get into the auditorium, although the demonstration was open only to members of the International Electrical Congress, who were convening at the fair.

Whereas low-frequency current would have meant certain death, Tesla, dressed in a white tie and tails, employed a very high frequency current, which traveled along the surface of his body, not through it. He explained:

The streams of light which you have observed issuing from my hand are due to a potential of about 200,000 volts, alternating in rather irregular intervals, sometimes like a million times a second. A vibration of the same amplitude, but four times as fast ... would not burn me up.... Yet a hundredth part of that energy, otherwise directed, would be amply sufficient to kill a person.... The amount of energy which may thus be passed into the body of a person depends on the frequency and potential of the currents, and by making both of these very great, a vast amount of energy may be passed into the body without causing any discomfort.

Those lucky enough to get a seat were astonished to witness him onstage engulfed in light and perfectly sensible. One reporter of the time wrote: "After such a striking test, which, by the way, no one has displayed a hurried inclination to repeat, Mr. Tesla's body and clothing have continued for some time to emit fine glimmers or halos of splintered light." Engulfed in light is how he is imagined still. Photographs of Edison, whose successes inched forward by dint of ceaseless trial and error, depict him posing with his crew, or perhaps napping on a laboratory table, the background cluttered with bottles and vials and hand tools. The most renowned photographs of Tesla show him alone and somehow saturated with electricity. One, a double exposure, portrays him calmly seated in his