Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla (11 page)

William Kemmler, a hooligan who had axed his mistress to death, became the test case for the use of electricity as a means of capital punishment.

Ostensibly, because the Westinghouse motors could produce the more deadly frequency, Brown surreptitiously purchased some working models in order to continue his gruesome experiments. Naturally, Westinghouse was upset over the devastating publicity. He and Tesla faced the possibility that the new AC polyphase system might never succeed in competition with existing AC and DC technologies, as both former systems required much lower voltages.

As Brown prepared to experiment with larger animals in order to assure the commission that electricity could kill criminals in a “humane” way, the Kemmler trial proceeded to question various electrical experts on the use of the Westinghouse currents for the electric chair.

Edison saw the controversy as a slick way to capitalize on the campaign against Westinghouse and the new Tesla technology. “Edison’s scheme for electrical execution of criminals is the best so far presented. He proposes to manacle the wrists, with chain connections, place…the culprit’s hands in a jar of water diluted with caustic potash and connected therein…to a thousand volts of alternating current…place the black cap on the condemned, and at a proper time close the circuit. The shock passes through both arms, the heart and the base of the brain, and death is instantaneous and painless.”
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Able to fuel his vendetta, Edison provided access to his famous laboratory for Brown to “Westinghouse” twenty-four dogs, which he purchased from the local children at twenty-five cents apiece. Edison also “Westinghoused” two calves and a horse!
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Perturbed, George Westinghouse wrote a letter of appeal to the
New York Times
which stated that AC was no more dangerous than DC, since people have been shocked and injured by DC as well.
²⁷
Westinghouse assured the public of the safety of his system; so Brown, also in the
Times,
challenged Westinghouse a few days later “to meet me in the presence of the competent electrical experts and take through his body the alternating current while I take through mine a continuous current. The A.C. must have not less than 300 alternations per second.”
²⁸

On July 23, 1889, Edison was questioned under oath by Kemmler’s attorney, W. Bourke Cockran, an Irish immigrant schooled in France, in his second term in the House of Representatives. Having gained a reputation locally for fighting Tammany Hall, Cockran had also achieved national recognition as the “Boy Orator” for taking on William Jennings Bryan’s presidential opponent, William McKinley in well-covered debates. Now he set his sights on tackling the Wizard of Menlo Park.
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QUESTION: Has Harold P. Brown any connection with yourself or the Edison Company?

EDISON: Not that I know of…

QUESTION: What would happen in case Kemmler should be kept on the chair several minutes with the current working on him?…Would he be carbonized?

EDISON: No. He would be mummyized…

QUESTION: This is your belief, not from knowledge?

EDISON: From belief. I never killed anybody…

“Finally, Mr. Cockran alluded to the rivalry between the Edison and the Westinghouse Companies and asked Mr. Edison if he loved Mr. Westinghouse as a brother. There was more than usual stillness, followed by Edison’s answer: ‘I think Mr. Westinghouse is a very able man.’…Mr. Cockran gave the ‘wizard’ a light from his cigar stump he had been chewing and dismissed him.”
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It would be another full year before the actual execution took place, but public opinion continued to run against the dangerous Westinghouse current. Although Edison did not author the electric-chair ideas, he did everything he could to help the cause, providing his staff, especially the ingenious A. E. Kennelly, later a professor at Harvard, to aid Brown; in addition, he lent his name.

Outcries began to appear in various periodicals concerning the “electrical executioners.” For example, the following editorial was published in a number of the papers and journals: “It is hard to conceive of a more horrible experiment than that which will be made on Kemmler…In a secret place, he will be compelled to go through a process of mental and moral, if not also, bodily torture and nobody can tell how long it will last.”
³¹

This ominous passage actually was not severe enough, for the execution of Kemmler became a nightmare. The job was completely bungled when, after electrocution, “to the horror of all present, the chest began to heave, foam issued from the mouth, and the man gave every evidence of reviving.”
³²

The execution was likened to the work of barbarians and torturers and to scenes “worthy of the darkest chambers of the Inquisition of the 16th Century.” One eyewitness who was completely disgusted was Dr. Jenkins, who told the
New York Times,
“I would rather see ten hangings than one such execution as this.” Top electricians were also interviewed.

“I do not care to talk about it,” Westinghouse said. “It was a brutal affair. They could have done better with an axe.”

Even Edison was affected. “I have merely glanced over an account of Kemmler’s death,” he said, “and it is not pleasant reading…One mistake in my opinion was in leaving everything to the doctors…In the first place the hair on Kemmler’s head was non-conductive. Then the top of the head I do not believe a good place to give a shock…The better way is to place the hands in ajar of water…and to let the current be turned on there…I think when the next man is placed in the chair to suffer the death penalty that death will be accomplished instantly and without the scenes at Auburn today.”
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Although Westinghouse tried to distance himself from the nefarious deeds, his company still suffered greater damage than Edison’s from a publicity standpoint because it was AC that was used to electrocute Kemmler. Mass hysteria threatened to overpower the attempt to institute the new Tesla AC invention, let alone the prevailing Gaulard-Gibbs AC system.

Tesla realized that eventually the company would have to come around to the lower frequencies if they wanted to use his creation, but to his shock, “in 1890, the induction motor work was abandoned.”
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Westinghouse let it be known that his hands were tied, that his backers would not continue throwing tens of thousands of dollars away on futile research. They had given Tesla a fair chance to alter his equipment to satisfy the needs of the company. It seemed folly to destroy all prevailing equipment to satisfy the untried requirements of this new technology. Furthermore, they were against the idea of paying royalties should the motor eventually prove profitable. Enough was enough.

In a quandary, Tesla negotiated with Westinghouse a compromise solution. He would abandon the royalty clause of the contract if Westinghouse promised to commit his workers once again to the invention.

Westinghouse was in a corner. He knew that he had to curtail all work on the motor at this time to satisfy the tide of hostility that was rising against Tesla. He also realized that the invention was too important, and he
believed that eventually a solution would be found. No one knows for sure exactly what happened, but it appears that Westinghouse made a tacit commitment to Tesla that he would get the company to resume work on the motor if Tesla removed the $2.50-per-watt royalty clause in the contract. If the motor came on the market and the polyphase system was adopted, the yearly figures cited above, as payments against royalties (worth approximately $255,000), would be honored instead.

Tesla was aware of the historical importance of his invention. He realized that it would
alter the world
beneficially in measurable ways. His motor, for instance, would provide an inexpensive replacement for potentially hundreds of thousands of hours of manual labor. At the same time, his creation would carve his name deep into the history books, alongside such heroes as Archimedes and Faraday. Moreover, he knew that his system was the most efficient, that it was fundamental, and that, if adopted, it would prevail. He also wanted very much to resume his preferred path of pioneer inventor.

Tesla was not counting out debits and credits on a balance sheet; rather, he viewed his partnership with Westinghouse in a more flexible way. He was also negotiating in good faith and assumed that if he lightened the potential financial burden, the company would somehow reciprocate. By offering goodwill, he was hoping to reap what he had sown. Speaking of Westinghouse many years later, Tesla said: “George Westinghouse was, in my opinion, the only man on the globe who could take my alternating current system under the circumstances then existing and win the battle against prejudice and money power. He was a pioneer of imposing stature and one of the world’s noblemen.”
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This, however, was a public statement; his private feelings were more complex. It is clear from reading through decades of letters to the corporation that Tesla maintained a close relationship with Westinghouse. Yet often there were undercurrents of resentment due mainly to lack of appreciation by the Westinghouse concern of Tesla’s sacrifice and continuing contribution to the company. Tesla was also upset because the full scope of his patents became simplified and implications arose to suggest that he merely invented an induction motor and not an entire power system.

Finally, after nearly two years of inactivity, the Westinghouse people resumed their efforts to make the Tesla motor practicable. In 1891, Benjamin Lamme, a portly, easygoing, but studious youngster, began to reexamine Tesla’s patents and Tesla and Scott’s experimental motors. After conversing with Tesla in New York and talking over the matter with Scott, Lamme approached his overseers with a plan to resume work on the motor.

Lamme realized that Tesla had “exhausted all the possibilities” of trying to adapt his motor to the higher frequencies and that he was forced
to “return to [the] low frequencies…insist[ing] on the superiority of his polyphase system.”
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This idea, as stated above, was rejected—most likely by Shallenberger and Stillwell. Lamme, as the junior engineer, had to proceed carefully. With Scott’s aid, he “finally obtained permission” to take up the work on his own, although there is little doubt that a number of officials opposed the idea. “By this time, the 60-cycle system was coming in quite rapidly,” Lamme said, so he suggested this frequency to the staff. Shallenberger “lost his temper and talked some plain-language to me.” No doubt he said that there would be no possible way that they would utilize the lower frequencies. “This looked pretty serious to me, who as a mere boy in the test room, had got into a row with a chief technical authority of the company. I explained my situation to Mr. Schmid who simply laughed about it…However, somewhat to my surprise, Mr. Shallenberger always took my part, thereafter…This, of course, gave me a larger idea of the man himself; and I have always looked back with the greatest pleasure to my acquaintanceship with such a man.”

What happened, most likely, is that Schmid, along with Scott, went behind the scenes and explained to Shallenberger that here was their opportunity to finally make use of the motor without giving any more credit to Tesla. They would simply let it be known that a new and brilliant engineer working at the company had “discovered” the efficiencies of lower frequencies, and so the credit would go to Lamme. No wonder Schmid laughed about it. With a way out, Shallenberger reversed himself and patted Lamme on the back, Lamme somewhat naively concluding that he built “the first induction motor…which bears any close example to the modern type…I [also]…designed the great generators for Niagara which were without precedent. They were marvels of engineering achievement.”
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Having rediscovered what Tesla had suggested all along, Lamme often made it seem as though he were the originator of the idea.

Uneducated readers, left with incomplete source materials, of which there are many, were forced to conclude that when it comes to the AC polyphase system, it was “that versatile genius B. G. Lamme, [who was the]…pillar of the Westinghouse company” who made it possible.
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But people who read Scott carefully knew the truth: “Strenuous efforts to adapt the Tesla motor to [the prevailing] circuit were in vain. The little motor insisted in getting what it wanted, and the mountain came to Mohamet.”
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Keely has discovered that all sympathetic streams, cerebellic, gravital, magnetic, and electric, are composed of triple flows; this fact governing all the terrestrial and celestial orders of positive and negative radiation…He has discovered that the range of molecular motion in all quiescent masses is equal to one-third of their diameters, and that all extended range is induced by sound-force, set at chords of the thirds which are antagonistic to the combined chords of the mass of the neutral centres that they represent.

“Who Is the Greatest Genius of Our Age?”

R
EVIEW OF
R
EVIEWS
, 1890
¹

T
esla left Pittsburgh in the autumn of 1889 to return to New York and start his second laboratory, now on Grand Street. There he would begin work on high frequency apparatus, wireless transmission, and theories on the relationship between electromagnetic radiation and light. In particular, the inventor wanted to replicate the findings of the German academician Heinrich Hertz, a student of Hermann Ludwig von Helmholtz’s who had recently published his landmark experiments in wave propagation. Tesla said that this work “caused a thrill as had scarcely ever been experienced before.”
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“I was not free at Pittsburgh,” he continued. “I was dependent and could not work…When I [left] that situation ideas and inventions rushed through my brain like a Niagara.”
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Before he set up shop, the inventor traveled to Paris to attend the Universal Exposition and witness the unveiling of a gargantuan architectural triumph, the Eiffel Tower. Returning to a city filled with fond memories, Tesla could say hello to old friends and tell them how far he had come. There the budding creator could stop once again at the Louvre to gaze upon the “marvels” of Raphael, his self-perceived counterpart in the fine arts.
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Nevertheless, Tesla also had mixed feelings, as he was traveling
in the shadow of his nemesis, Thomas Edison, who not only attended the fair but who also provided a one-acre site for displaying his various inventions. In particular, the phonograph created a sensation, and Edison was received as a veritable demigod.

While Edison, who was accompanied by his new wife, Mina, just twenty-two years old, lunched with Alexandre Eiffel in his apartment at the top of the tower, Tesla met with Prof. Wilhelm Bjerknes at the fair to “witness the beautiful demonstrations [of his] vibrating diaphragms.”
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A Norwegian physicist from the University of Stockholm, Bjerknes had, along with Jules-Henri Poincaré, not only replicated the work of Heinrich Hertz on the propagation of electromagnetic waves through space; they had also, according to Hertz, discovered
multiple resonance
and had worked out the mathematics of the phenomena.
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Tesla was able to study Bjerknes’s oscillator, which provided a variety of electromagnetic waves and a resonator for augmenting them, and also discuss with him theoretical implications concerning the properties of the electromagnetic waves thereby produced.

And while the Wizard of Menlo Park met with Louis Pasteur at his laboratory in Paris and received the French Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor for his achievements, Tesla developed one of his most important discoveries, namely, that so-called Hertzian waves not only produced transverse oscillations, suggested by Bjerknes, but also longitudinal vibrations structured much like sound waves, “that is to say, waves, propagated by alternate compression and expansion…of the ether.”
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This conceptualization would come to play a pivotal role in the wireless transmitters Tesla would construct over the next decade.

As Tesla packed his bags for a brief visit to see his family,
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Edison continued on his tour. In Italy he was honored by Queen Marguerite of Venice and King Humbert of Rome, in Berlin he met with Helmholtz at his laboratory, and at Heidelberg, Edison displayed his phonograph before a “monster meeting” of fifteen thousand people at which the machine “delivered a speech in good German.”
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Edison’s favorite moment, however, was when he attended a large dinner given by Buffalo Bill, who was touring Europe with his Wild West Show. And as Tesla left for New York, Edison continued on to London, where he could visit his central stations but also learn firsthand that the new use of the Tesla AC was here to stay.
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In Deptford, for instance, in this year, an engineer by the name of Ferranti installed probably the first-ever working single-phase generating station; with a Tesla system, he was able to transmit 11,000 volts seven miles away to London.
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Although a truly epoch making achievement, this plant, for some unknown reason, received virtually no publicity.

This was a complex time in the history of the electrical industry; those electrical experts in Europe and America who took the time to study
the Tesla creation saw its benefits immediately. In Switzerland and Germany polyphase induction motors were being constructed by C. E. L. Brown and Michael von Dolivo-Dobrowolsky, and in America Elihu Thomson of Thomson-Houston and William Stanley did the same. As in any branch of science, it was customary to study and replicate the work of others, but in electrical engineering success ensured not only a place in history but also a substantial profit. Thus, there would be many, such as most of those mentioned above, who would try and claim the polyphase system as their own.

There was another motor invention, however, called the hydropneumatic pulsating vacuo engine, which was on much safer ground; nobody could replicate the intricacies of its machinery, and nobody but the inventor, John Ernst Worrell Keely, knew how it worked. Keely had gotten the idea for the motor after reading the treatise “Harmonies of Tones and Colours, Developed by Evolution,” by Charles Darwin’s niece Mrs. F. J. Hughes, which discussed the structure of the ether and various theoretical harmonic laws of the universe.
¹²
Hailed as a virtual perpetual-motion machine, the Keely motor never ceased to intoxicate the public, for Keely had the uncanny ability to keep the secret going, but continually achieve abstruse results. “In the opinion of Madame Blavatsky, [Keely] has discovered Vril, the mysterious force of the universe in which Lord Lytton drew attention in his ‘Coming Race’…Keely calls it sympathetic negative attraction.”
¹³

Rivaling snake-oil salesmen in the ability to “humbug” the public, Keely, a former “circus sleight-of-hand performer,” had formed a company in 1874, capitalized with $100,000 of stock in order to sell his motor, and had been successfully doing so for nearly fifteen years, until 1889, when his work was questioned.

Public Opinion
wrote that, “Engineers, scientific men, and capitalists made frequent pilgrimages to Keely’s Philadelphia laboratory to see the ‘Keely motor mote.’ Sometimes it moted and sometimes it didn’t, but Keely always had a great tale to tell. Keely’s chief accomplishment was a ready use of jargon of scientific and unscientific terms. He talked about ‘triune currents of polar flow of force,’ the ‘reflex action of gravity,’ ‘chords of mass,’ ‘sympathetic outreaches of distance,’ ‘depolar etheric waves’ and a lot of other things which didn’t mean anything, but [he] never told why his motor moted and [why he] never took a patent” (although he did have them drawn up).
¹⁴

T. Carpenter Smith, writing in
Engineering Magazine
described an eyewitness account with the “inventor” at work: “Mr. Keely proceeded to produce the force by striking a large tuning-fork with a fiddle-bow and then touching the generator with the fork. After two or three attempts, which he said failed by reason of not getting the ‘chord of the mass,’ he
turned a small valve on the top of the generator. When a slight hiss was heard, loud cheers greeted his announcement that he had ‘got it.’…The state of mind of the audience may be imagined when the shout of one enthusiast ‘Keely, you are next to God Almighty!’ seemed only a natural expression.”
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This mountebank inventor headlined the New York dailies with his newest creations and also the accompanying cry of fraud. Factions of the public demanded he be jailed, the court giving Keely sixty days to “divulge his secret,”
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but Keely held fast. Threatening to stop work on his inventions unless the court dropped its suit,
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Keely was held in contempt of court and in November of 1888, he was placed in jail.
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Shortly thereafter, through his counsel, Keely revealed that the “missing link” was a “copper tube in the form of a hoop,” and he was released on bail a few days later. He argued that he had indeed “obeyed all orders of the court” in explaining his invention in detail and the suit against him was overturned!
¹⁹

Like Edison, who promised and gave the world the “Lamp of Aladdin,” and Tesla, who discovered and harnessed a purported alternating current perpetual-motion machine, Keely billed his own invention as the “greatest scientific discovery of the century.”

Apparently vindicated, Keely proceeded with his deception. In 1890 the world celebrity and palmist Count Louis Hamon, better known as Cheiro, visited the Keely lab; and by 1895, John Jacob Astor became an investor.

Unfortunately for Tesla, however, like Keely, he, too, was gaining a reputation for making outlandish claims. For instance, Tesla said that his system could “place 100,000 horse-power on a wire” and send it hundreds of miles with almost no loss of power when the prevailing technology could only send a few hundred volts one mile, and in that case, with power dropping off markedly with distance.
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Never mind that this prognostication came true just a few years later; Tesla’s style was that of a visionary, and the claim seemed ridiculous. To the unimaginative, the uninformed, or people who listened only to the opposition, he was little different from Keely, and so he suffered through guilt by association.
²¹

As far back as 1884,
Scientific American
had published an exposé on the Keely motor, speculating that its source of power was a secret chamber of compressed air. This was confirmed in 1898, after Keely’s death, in an investigation of his laboratory conducted by Mrs. Bloomfield-Moore’s son Clarence. Having waited for his mother, an ardent Keely admirer, to pass on before he tore the place apart, Moore discovered in the cellar a large tank and a series of pipes leading up through the floor above where the demonstrations took place. Keely’s “‘etheric force’ was nothing more than
compressed air [released by]…the pressure of his foot tapping on a concealed spring valve.”
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Other bogus inventors of the day included Gaston Bulmar, who tried to sell General Electric (GE) special pills that turned water into gasoline; Walter Honenau, who derived
free energy
from an H
₂
O “hydro-atomizer” and “King Con,” Victor “the Count” Lustig, who was eventually arrested for devising and selling a special money machine that cranked out crisp twenty-dollar bills from inserted white paper.
²³

In an age of new marvels that almost daily transformed society in irreversible ways, the public was “ripe for picking”; naive investors were often bilked by promises of impossible schemes. Thus, the inventor was perceived in contradictory ways, as executioner or light bearer, con man or wizard.

When Tesla returned from Europe, he wanted nothing better than to have his AC invention placed in the hands of its new rightful owner so that he could proceed with other burgeoning interests. Naturally, he would continue to aid Westinghouse in any way that he could, by continually offering advice to Scott, Schmid, or Lamme or stopping by at Pittsburgh to provide hands-on expertise. Throughout the 1890s, whenever the opportunity presented itself, Tesla would also introduce eminent prospective clients to the Westinghouse concern. As was his custom and style, Tesla never considered a commission for this service, although he did obtain vital equipment for his laboratory, which at first was provided without cost.

And as with Keely, Bulwer-Lytton’s electrical-like energy called “vril power” had also been attached to Tesla by this time as well, via a letter from a lady in 1890, who “dreamed that if I [Tesla] would read the ‘Coming Race’ of Bulwer, I would discover great things which would advance [my work considerably].” But Tesla would not pursue the mystical treatise for a decade, and therefore it appears that although the inventions discussed in the story bore great similarities to some of Tesla’s later creations, the reader must not say afterward that “the beautiful things which I shall invent were suggested by Bulwer.”
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Nevertheless, the similarities remain, and one wonders whether or not Tesla actually read the book at the time or knew of its contents.