Tesla: The Life and Times of an Electric Messiah (13 page)

Following Tesla to the stand was
John Stone Stone
, who could himself claim to be the inventor of the radio. He filed a crucial patent on tuning 2 years before Marconi, and he acknowledged that it was Tesla, not Marconi, who was a trailblazer.

Due to World War I, the legal battle was abandoned before the case was decided. Fearing a German attack, Marconi did not return to Europe on the
Lusitania
. Instead under a false name and in heavy disguised, he set sail on the
St Paul
. On 7 May 1915, the
Lusitania
was sunk by a German submarine with the loss of 1,134 lives, including 128 US citizens. America was outraged. It was already suspected that the Telefunken radio station was passing coded messages to submarines. Two weeks later
The New York Times
reported that the Germans had developed ‘air torpedoes' which were dropped from zeppelins and controlled by wireless – the very thing Tesla had claimed to have invented.

When the US joined World War I in 1917, the former head of the Tuckerton station was arrested for spying and the Sayville station was taken over by the government. Tesla's monthly royalty cheques from Telefunken stopped. Edison, Fessenden, Pupin, Thomson and others got jobs as advisors to the government, but Tesla – possibly because of the connections with Telefunken – was left out.

Chapter 11 – The Nobel Prize

 

I have concluded that the honour has been conferred upon me in acknowledgement of a discovery announced a short time ago which concerns the transmission of electrical energy without wires. This discovery means that electrical effects of unlimited intensity and power can be produced, so that not only can energy be transmitted for all practical purposes to any terrestrial distance, but even effects of cosmic magnitude may be created.

Nikola Tesla

 

On 6 November 1915,
The New York Times
announced that Tesla and Edison had been awarded the Nobel Prize for physics. The source of the story, apparently, was the Copenhagen correspondent of the
Daily Telegraph
. Tesla had received no notification, but when interviewed by the
Times
he said that he thought he had been given the Nobel Prize for a device he had filed a patent for a month earlier that made it ‘practicable to project the human voice not only for a distance of 5,000 miles, but clear across the globe. I demonstrated this in Colorado in 1899.' He went on to explain how it would work:

The plant would simply be connected with the telephone exchange of New York City and a subscriber will be able to talk to any other telephone subscriber in the world, and all this without any change in his apparatus. This plan has been called my ‘world system'. By the same means I propose also to transmit pictures and project images, so that the subscriber will not only hear the voice, but see the person to whom he is talking …

A further advantage would be that the transmission is instant and free of the unavoidable delay experienced with the use of wire and cables. As I have already made known, the current passes through the earth, starting from the transmission station with infinite speed, slowing down to the speed of light at a distance of 6,000 miles, then increasing in speed from that region and reaching the receiving station again with infinite velocity.

It's all a wonderful thing. Wireless is coming to mankind in its full meaning like a hurricane some of these days. Some day there will be, say, six great wireless telephone stations in a ‘world system' connecting all the inhabitants of this earth to one another not only by voice but by sight. It's surely coming.

 

Illuminating the Sky

This discovery had a direct bearing on the problems uppermost in the public's mind, he said, the perfection of wireless telephony. On 7 November, he told the
Times
:

We will deprive the ocean of its terrors by illuminating the sky, thus avoiding collisions at sea and other disasters caused by darkness. We will draw unlimited quantities of water from the oceans and irrigate the deserts and other arid regions. In this way we will fertilize the soil and derive any amount of power from the sun. I also believe that ultimately all battles, if they should come, will be waged by electrical waves instead of explosives.

He would say nothing further on the matter. However, he agreed that Edison deserved a dozen Nobel Prizes, though he said he had no idea which one he had been awarded the prize for. When shown the despatch, Edison wisely declined to comment. Meanwhile the idea of winning the prize had gone to Tesla's head. He wrote to the Johnsons:

In a thousand years, there will be many recipients of the Nobel Prize. But I have not less than four dozen of my creations identified with my name in the technical literature. These are honours real and permanent, which are bestowed not by a few who are apt to err, but by the whole world which seldom makes a mistake, and for any of these I would give all the Nobel prizes during the next thousand years … Josie will never had the chance of turning me away as a beggar, but I shall give her soon, the opportunity of slamming your door in the face of a millionaire.

This was no joke to Robert Johnson who had fallen on hard times. He wrote later: ‘When that Nobel Prize comes, remember that I am holding onto my house by the skin of my teeth and desperately in need of cash!'

As it was, neither Tesla nor Edison was awarded the prize. That year the Nobel Prize for physics went to William Bragg and his son Lawrence for their research into crystalline structures using X-rays. Tesla had not even been nominated, though Edison was. Tesla was not nominated until 1937 and did not get it then either.

However, Tesla's long-standing friend and first biographer John O'Neill said that Tesla actually turned down the award. ‘To have the award go first to Marconi, and then to be asked to share the award with Edison, was too great a derogation of the relative value of his work to the world for Tesla to bear without rebelling,' he wrote in
Prodigal Genius
. According to O'Neill, Tesla did not put himself in the same category as Edison. He considered himself a discoverer of new principles, while Edison was an inventor who exploited new discoveries for commercial gain.

 

The Bolts of Thor

Although
The New York Times
had announced that the Braggs had won the Nobel Prize on 14 November 1915, it continued to say that Tesla was a 1915 Nobel Prize winner in an article on 8 December, headlined
Tesla's New Device Like Bolts of Thor
, when the paper reported that he was taking out a patent on a ‘manless airship'. It had neither an engine nor wings and could be sent at a speed of 300 miles (480 km) a second to any place on the globe using electricity. According to the
Times
:

Ten miles or a thousand miles, it will all be the same to the machine, the inventor says. Straight to the point, on land or on sea, it will be able to go with precision, delivering a blow that will paralyze or kill, as is desired. A man in a tower on Long Island could shield New York against ships or army by working a lever …

Tesla refused to go into further details. However, he dismissed electrical engineer Charles H. Harris's suggestion that, in time of war, the country would be surrounded by ‘an electrical wall of fire' as ‘not practical' as it would take more than all the generators in the US to power it.

 

Describing Radar

While Tesla's ideas on unmanned airships and bolts of Thor seem unworldly, he also described a way of detecting ships at sea. His idea was to transmit high-frequency radio waves that would reflect off the hulls of vessels and appear on a fluorescent screen. In 1917, he said: ‘We may produce at will, from a sending station, an electrical effect in any particular region of the globe; we may determine the relative position or course of a moving object, such as a vessel at sea, the distance traversed by the same, or its speed.' This was one of the first descriptions of what we now call radar. Again it was too far ahead of its time to be taken seriously. However, in 1934 the French engineer Émile Girardeau (1882 – 1970) built an obstacle-locating radio apparatus – ‘conceived according to the principles stated by Tesla,' he said – and obtained a patent for a working system, part of which was installed on the liner
Normandie
in 1935.

 

In 1917, Tesla was awarded the Edison Medal by the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. According to O'Neill, Tesla was reluctant to accept it at first, but was persuaded to do so by the chairman of the medal committee,
Bernard A. Behrend
, who was an admirer and close personal friend. Tesla turned the medal down initially because it was nearly 30 years since he had announced his rotating electric field and his AC system to the Institute. ‘I do not need its honours and someone else may find it useful,' he said. Pressed by Behrend for further explanation, Tesla said:

You propose to honour me with a medal which I could pin on my coat and strut for a vain hour before the members and guests of your Institute. You would bestow an outward semblance of honouring me but you would decorate my body and continue to let it starve, for failure to supply recognition, my mind and its creative products which have supplied the foundation upon which the major portion of your Institute exists. And when you would go through the vacuous pantomime of honouring Tesla you would not be honouring Tesla but Edison who had previously shared unearned glory from every previous recipient of this medal.

Despite his rancour, Tesla was cajoled into accepting the Medal. After all it could hardly be awarded to Edison. But the acceptance speech presented Tesla with something of a problem. When he had addressed the AIEE in 1888, he had a lab where he could prepare his demonstrations. Now he had none. Nor could he expect to equal the lectures he had taken on the road in the 1890s. He had no props.

After a private dinner at the Engineers' Club, the medal winner was to give a formal address in the auditorium of the United Engineering Societies Building. However, as the members of the Institute assembled there, Tesla was nowhere to be seen. Behrend found him feeding the pigeons in the plaza of New York Public Library. As Behrend approached, Tesla had pigeons perched on his head, shoulders and arms, and he had a carpet of them pecking at seed around his feet. It was clear that the pigeons meant more to him than the members of AIEE. Behrend begged Tesla not to let him down.

 

The Wheels of Industry Will Cease

In the auditorium of the United Engineering Societies Building, Behrend said that Tesla had been taken temporarily unwell, but he was now okay and the proceedings would be delayed by about 20 minutes. When the presentation began
Dr Arthur Kennelly
from the Edison company said that Tesla was being awarded the Edison Medal for the development of rotating magnetic fields, which had made it possible to use AC in electric motors, and for his investigations into high-frequency currents.

Charles A. Terry, who had worked with Tesla on some of his early research, ran through Tesla's achievements to date. Behrend followed up by pointing out that, by an extraordinary coincidence, Tesla had given the first lecture on polyphase AC there exactly 29 years earlier, adding:

Not since the appearance of Faraday's experimental researches in electricity has a great experimental truth been voiced so simply and so clearly as this description of Mr Tesla's great discovery of the generation and utilization of polyphase alternating currents. He left nothing to be done for those who followed him. His paper contained the skeleton even of the mathematical theory.

Three years later, in 1891, there was given the first great demonstration, by Swiss engineers, of the transmission of power at 30,000 volts from Lauffen to Frankfurt by means of Mr Tesla's system. A few years later this was followed by the development of the Cataract Construction Company, under the presidency of our member, Edward D. Adams, and with the aid of the engineers of the Westinghouse Company. It is interesting to recall here tonight that in Lord Kelvin's report to Mr Adams, Lord Kelvin recommended the use of direct current for the development of power at Niagara Falls and for its transmission to Buffalo.

The due appreciation or even enumeration of the results of Mr Tesla's invention is neither practicable nor desirable at this moment. There is a time for all things. Suffice it to say that, were we to seize and to eliminate from our industrial world the results of Mr Tesla's work, the wheels of industry would cease to turn, our electric cars and trains would stop, our towns would be dark, our mills would be dead and idle. Yea, so far-reaching is this work that it has become the warp and woof of industry … His name marks an epoch in the advance of electrical science. From that work has sprung a revolution in the electrical art.

Behrend then asked Tesla to accept the Medal, not for the purposes of perpetuating his name – ‘the name of Tesla runs no more risk of oblivion than does that of Faraday, or that of Edison'. Nor was the Medal evidence that Tesla's work had received official sanction – ‘his work stands in no need of such sanction'.

No, Mr Tesla, we beg you to cherish this medal as a symbol of our gratitude for the new creative thought, the powerful impetus, akin to revolution, which you have given to our art and to our science. You have lived to see the work of your genius established. What shall a man desire more than this? There rings out to us a paraphrase of Pope's lines on Newton: ‘Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night. God said, Let Tesla be, and all was light.'

 

Tesla's Acceptance Speech

Accepting the Edison Medal, Tesla said he was grateful for the sympathy and appreciation shown him. Great strides had been made in the transmission and transformation of energy, he said, but ‘we are pressing on, inspired with the hope and conviction that this is just the beginning, a forerunner of further and still greater accomplishments'. He had not written an acceptance speech and spoke off the cuff, saying:

I come from a very wiry and long-lived race. Some of my ancestors have been centenarians, and one of them lived 129 years. I am determined to keep up the record, and believe there is a prospect of accomplishing it. Then, nature has given me a vivid imagination which, through incessant exercise and training, through the study of scientific subjects, and the verification of theories through experiment, has become very accurate in results, so that I have been able to dispense, to a large extent, with the slow labours, wasteful and expensive processes of practical development of the ideas I conceive. It has made it possible for me to explore extended fields with great rapidity and get results with the least expenditure of vital energy. By this means, I may tell you also, I am able to picture the objects of my desires in forms so real and tangible that I can rid myself of that morbid craving for perishable possessions to which so many succumb.

My life was also wonderful in another respect, for physical endurance or energy. If you inquire into the career of successful men in the inventor's profession, you will find, as a rule, that they are as remarkable for their physical as for their mental capacities … When I turned my thoughts to inventions, I found that I could visualize my conceptions with the greatest facility. I did not need any models and drawings or experiments, I could do it all in my mind, and I did. The way I unconsciously evolved what I considered a new method in materializing inventive concepts and ideas, is exactly opposed to the purely experimental method, of which undoubtedly Edison is the greatest and most successful exponent.