Featured on PDR in the collection Earthen Messages: Nikola Tesla in his Laboratory (ca. 1899)

It becomes more and more difficult to answer a neglected message as time ticks on. You have broken the circuit of communication, kept your correspondent in the lurch. Electrical engineer Nikola Tesla, “the man who invented the twentieth century”, reignited his correspondence with friend and mentor William Crookes in an arresting way. On a photograph of himself seated beneath a giant “magnifying transmitter”, arcing twenty-two-foot-long bolts of electricity, Tesla inscribed: “To my illustrious friend Sir William Crookes of whom I always think and whose kind letters I never answer!”