Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla (2 page)

I
n 1976, while involved in research at the New York Public Library, I stumbled upon a strange text entitled
Return of the Dove
which claimed that there was a man not born of this planet who landed as a baby in the mountains of Croatia in 1856. Raised by “earth parents,” an
avatar
had arrived for the sole purpose of inaugurating the New Age. By providing humans with a veritable cornucopia of inventions, he had created, in essence, the technological backbone of the modern era.
¹

His name was Nikola Tesla, and his inventions included the induction motor, the electrical-power distribution system, fluorescent and neon lights, wireless communication, remote control, and robotics.

Tesla—who’s he?
I said to myself. Because my father had been a TV repairman for several years in the early 1950s and I had spent part of my childhood accompanying him on house calls, helping put up antennas, test and buy radio tubes, play with oscilloscopes, and watch him build TVs, I was amazed that I had never heard of this man.

I remember vividly an event from my grade-school years on Long Island that prepared me for my latter-day interest. It was a Saturday, circa 1959, and I was working on a Boy Scout assignment when I came upon a design for a crystal radio set. My father and I gathered a glass jar and a set of headphones, a crystal detector for changing the ambient AC radio waves into audio DC pulses, some thin copper wire to be wrapped around the jar, a metal switch that was scraped across this coil for the “dial,” a small plank to hold the contraption together, and a hundred feet of normal rubbercoated wire for the antenna, which we strung out a second-story window. There was no plug;
all energy was derived from the broadcast signals from the nearby radio stations.
However, after hooking it all together, the reception was faint; I became discouraged.

My father paced the room, considering the problem, muttering, “Something’s wrong.” After a few moments of deep thought, he made a motion which said, “I’ve got it.” Walking over to our radiator and dragging another wire, which he had hooked up to the jar, Dad attached a ground connection. Suddenly, all the stations began to come in loud and clear, and I marked each of them on the jar along the coil. It was apparent to me then that electrical power was being transmitted from these stations by wireless means and that the earth somehow was intrinsically linked to this system.

And now, here I was, nearly twenty years later, two years out of graduate school with a master’s degree, well-read and somewhat knowledgeable about electronics, yet I had never heard of the principal inventor of the very device I had spent endless hours with as a kid. This astonished me in a way difficult to describe. Moreover, when I asked my father about Tesla, he barely knew of him.

Because I believe in seeking original sources, I began to research Tesla’s life, starting with the two existing biographies, John O’Neill’s classic
Prodigal Genius
and Inez Hunt and Wanetta Draper’s
Lightning in His Hand.
Soon after, I began tracking down numerous turn-of-the-century references and also the weighty
Nikola Tesla: Lectures, Patents, Articles,
produced by the Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Thus, I was able to ascertain, by following his actual patents, that indeed Tesla existed and that his work was fundamental to all these creations.

That Tesla’s name was so little known puzzled me, so in 1980, three years after writing my first article on him, I began a doctoral dissertation on his life. My major purpose was to address the question of name obscurity.

During the writing of my dissertation, several notable Tesla works were compiled. These included the comprehensive and encyclopedic
Dr. Nikola Tesla Bibliography,
by Leland Anderson and John Ratzlaff; Tesla’s 1919 autobiography, republished by Hart Brothers; Margaret Cheney’s biography
Tesla: Man Out of Time
; two compendiums of Tesla’s writings by John Ratzlaff;
Colorado Springs Notes,
produced by the Tesla Museum; and most recently, Leland Anderson’s edition of Tesla’s private testimony to his lawyers on the history of wireless communication.

Even with all this new material, however, no comprehensive, all-embracing treatise had been achieved. In fact, after studying all these texts,
a number of contradictions and glaring mysteries remained.
These included not only Tesla’s obscure early years, tenure at college, and relationship to such key people as Thomas Edison, Guglielmo Marconi, George Westinghouse, and J. P. Morgan but also the worth of Tesla’s accomplishments and his exact place in the development of these inventions.

This book attempts to solve the mysteries. Because there have been significant gaps in the record, a clear chronology of Tesla’s life is presented. Also addressed are such issues as why his name dropped into obscurity after being a page 1 subject in newspapers around the world at the turn of the century, why he never received the Nobel Prize, even though he was nominated for one, what Tesla did during the world wars, and whether his plan for transmitting electrical power by wireless was feasible.

Using a psychohistorical perspective, the text discusses not only those factors that led to Tesla’s genius, but also quirks that led to his undoing. In this vein, it delineates Tesla’s relationship to many of his well-known associates, such as John Jacob Astor, T. C. Martin, J. P. Morgan Sr. and Jr., John Hays Hammond Sr. and Jr., Michael Pupin, Stanford White, Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, George Sylvester Viereck, Titus deBobula, and J. Edgar Hoover. Many of these people are barely touched upon or are not discussed at all in other treatises.

Because Tesla’s life is so controversial and complex, I also examine such questions as whether Tesla received impulses from outer space, why he ultimately failed in his partnership with J. P. Morgan in constructing a multifunctional global wireless system for distributing power and information, what his exact relationship to Robert and Katharine Johnson was, and what exactly happened to his particle-beam weaponry system and secret papers. Since I’ve based the text largely on firsthand documents rather than on the existing biographies, this book offers an essentially new view of Tesla’s life. The most recent biography,
Tesla,
by Tad Wise, an admittedly fictionalized version of the inventor’s life, was not referred to herein, as the goal of the enclosed is to separate out the myth and uncover who Tesla really was. However, one of Wise’s most prominent stories, that Tesla was responsible for the peculiar explosion that devastated Tunguska, Siberia in June of 1908, is addressed in a new appendix for this second edition.

I have visited all major Tesla archival centers such as at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.; Columbia University, in New York City; and the Tesla Museum, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. And because I have also utilized the Freedom of Information Act and accessed the arcane network of Tesla researchers,
I have been able to compile hundreds of documents that have never been discussed before by any Tesla biographies.
In addition, because I am a handwriting analyst, I have also utilized that expertise to analyze a number of the key personalities involved. Through this means, and as a total surprise, I have also been able to discover a heretofore unreported emotional collapse that the inventor suffered in 1906, at the time of the failing of his great wireless enterprise.

Since Tesla lived until the age of eighty-six, the story spans nearly a century. Revered as a demigod by some in the New Age community, Tesla has, at the same time, been relegated to virtual nonperson status by influential segments of the corporate and academic communities. Often billed as a wizard from another world who drew thunderbolts from the skies, Tesla himself helped support the supernatural persona by comparing himself to the Almighty and by frequently grabbing headlines with his sensational talk of interplanetary communication. Because his accomplishments are prodigious, fundamental, and documented, the elimination of his name from many history books is not forgivable. Only by understanding why this occurred can we, as a modern people, hope to rectify the historical record for future generations.

Curiously, the further away we have moved from Tesla’s death, the more material on his life has come to the fore. In particular, we must thank John O’Neill, the Tesla Memorial Society, the Tesla Museum in Belgrade, and the International Tesla Society (ITS) for this occurrence and the many Tesla researchers who have written so much about him of late and have participated in the various ITS conferences held every other year, since 1984, at the site of some of his most spectacular experiments, in Colorado Springs.

Because Tesla’s eye was always on the future, it seems appropriate to conclude this introduction with the opening lines from his autobiography. They are as true today as we enter the twenty-first century as they were three generations ago, when they were written:

The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention. It is the most important product of his creative brain. Its ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of the forces of nature to human needs. This is the difficult task of the inventor who is often misunderstood and unrewarded. But he finds ample compensation in the pleasing exercises of his powers and in the knowledge of being one of that exceptionally privileged class without whom the race would have long ago perished in the bitter struggle against pitiless elements. Speaking for myself, I have already had more than my full measure of this exquisite enjoyment, so much that for many years my life was little short of continuous rapture.
²

Hardly is there a nation which has met with a sadder fate than the Servians. From the height of its splendor, when the empire embraced almost the entire northern part of the Balkan peninsula and a large portion of what is now Austria, the Servian nation was plunged into abject slavery, after the fateful battle of 1389 at the Kosovo Polje, against the overwhelming Asian hordes. Europe can never repay the great debt it owes to the Servians for checking, by the sacrifice of its own liberty, that barbarian influx.

N
IKOLA
T
ESLA
¹

I
t was during a crackling summer storm in Smiljan, a small hamlet at the back edge of a plateau set high in the mountains, when Nikola Tesla was born. The Serbian family resided in the province of Lika, a plateau and gentle river valley in Croatia where wild boar and deer still dwell and farmers still travel on ox-drawn wagons. Only a cart ride from the Adriatic, the land is well protected from invasion by sea, by the Velebit ridge to the west, which runs the length of the province and towers over the coastline as a steep cliff, and by the Dinaric Alps to the east, a chain of mountains that emerge from Austria, span the Balkan peninsula and culminate in the south as the isle of Crete.

Though hidden, Smiljan was centrally located, fifteen miles east of the tiny seaport of Karlobag, six miles west of the bustling town of Gospić and forty-five miles southwest of the cascading wonder known as Plitvice Lakes, an interlinking chasm of caves and streams and magnificent waterfalls that lie at the base of the Dinaric chain.
²

In the early 1800s, having been briefly part of Napoleon’s Illyrian provinces, Croatia was now a domain of Austria-Hungary. With its neighboring Slavic countries of Bosnia, Hercegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia, Croatia was sandwiched between the ruling Hapsburg
dynasty to the north and the Ottoman Empire to the south.

In ancient times, and for many centuries, much of the coastline along the Adriatic was ruled by the Illyrians, a piratical tribe believed to have descended from regions around Austria. Successfully protecting their borders from such rulers as Alexander the Great, many Illyrians rose into social prominence; some, at the time of Christ, became emperors.

Slavs, traveling in close-knit clans known as
zadrugas,
were first recognized by the Byzantines in the second century A.D. in the areas around what is now Belgrade. Tesla’s appearance resembled the characteristic features of the Ghegs, a tribe described as being tall and having convex-shaped noses and flat skulls. Like other Slavs, these people were originally pagans and worshiped nature spirits and a god of thunder and lightning. Tesla’s early ancestors were probably born in the Ukraine. They most likely traveled down through Romania into Serbia and lived near Belgrade, along the Danube. After the Battle of Kosovo in the latter part of the fourteenth century, they crossed the Kosovo plains into Montenegro and continued their migration northward into Croatia in the latter part of the eighteenth century.
³

All Slavs speak the same language. The major distinction between Croats and Serbs stems from the differences in the histories of their respective countries. The Croats adopted the pope as their spiritual leader and followed the Roman form of Catholicism; the Serbs adopted a Byzantine patriarch and the Greek Orthodox view. Whereas Roman priests remain celibate, Greek Orthodox priests may marry.

In the east and central regions Slavs were more successful in maintaining their own control over what came to be called the kingdom of Serbia; whereas in the west, in Croatia, outside rulers, such as Charlemagne in A.D. 800, occupied the region. While Croatia maintained the Christianization policies of the Franks, the Serbs and Bulgarians drove out the papacy and revived their own pagan faith, which included animal sacrifice and pantheism. Many of the ancient pagan gods were made saints and were celebrated in higher esteem than Jesus. Tesla’s patron saint Nicholas was a fourth-century god who protected sailors.
⁴

To further alienate the two groups, although speaking the same verbal language, Croats adopted the Latin alphabet, whereas Serbs and Bulgarians took on the Cyrillic alphabet used by the Greek Orthodox church.
⁵

Before Turkish rule, from the ninth century until the 1300s, Serbia had maintained autonomy. For Serbia, this period was its golden age, as the Byzantines accepted its autonomous status. Due to the philanthropic nature of its kings, a dynamic medieval art flourished, and great monasteries were erected.
⁶

Croatia, on the other hand, was in much more turmoil. Influenced by
western Europe, the ruling class attempted unsuccessfully to institute a feudal system of lords and serfs. This policy directly opposed the inherent structure of the democratic
zadrugas,
and so Croatia was never able to establish a unified identity. Nevertheless, one independent offshoot of Croatia, Ragusa (Dubrovnik), which had established itself as a port of commerce and a rival of Venice as a major sea power, became a melting pot for south Slavic culture and a symbol for the Illyrian ideal of a unified Yugoslavia.

The identity of Serbia as a nation, however, changed for all time on June 15, 1389, the day 30,000 Turks obliterated the Serbian nation in the Battle of Kosovo. Cruel conquerors, the Turks destroyed Serbian churches or converted them to mosques. Drafting the healthiest male children into their armies, they skewered and tortured the men and forced the women to convert and marry Turks. Many Serbs fled, taking up residence in the craggy mountains of Montenegro or the hidden valleys of Croatia. Some of those that remained became wealthy as Turkish vassals; others, mostly of mixed blood, became pariahs.

The Battle of Kosovo is as important to the Serbs as the Exodus to the Jews or the Crucifixion to the Christians.
It is commemorated every year on the anniversary of the tragedy as Vidov Dan, the day “when we shall see.”
⁷
As one Serb told the author, “It follows us always.”
⁸
The massacre and ensuing defilement of the kingdom became the dominant motif of the great epic poems which served to unify the identity of the Serbian people through their centuries of hardship.

Unlike the Croats, who did not have this kind of all-embracing exigency, the Serbs had Kosovo. Combined with their adherence to the Greek Orthodox religion in a twofold way, Serbs, no matter where they lived, felt united.

The century of Tesla’s birth was marked by the rise of Napoleon. In 1809 the emperor wrested Croatia from Austro-Hungarian rule and established French occupation. Extending his domain down the Adriatic coast, Napoleon reunited the Illyrian provinces and introduced French libertarian ideals. This philosophy helped dismantle the outmoded feudal system of lords and serfs and reawaken the idea of a unified Balkan nation. At the same time, the occupation created an identity with the French culture. Tesla’s paternal grandfather and maternal great-grandfather both served under the French emperor.
⁹

With support from the Russians, Serbian bands united in 1804 under the leadership of the flamboyant hog farmer George Petrovich, known as Kara-George (in Turkish, Black George), a man of Montenegrin heritage trained in the Austrian army. However, in 1811, Napoleon invaded Russia; thus, support for Serbia evaporated.

Forty thousand Turks marched against the Serbs, leveling towns and
butchering citizens. Serbs were often executed by impalement, their writhing bodies lined up along the roads to the city. All males captured above the age of fifteen were slaughtered, and women and children were sold as slaves. Kara-George fled the country.

Milosh, the new Serbian leader, was a sly and treacherous character, able to walk a thin line between Serbs and the sultan. In 1817, when Kara-George returned, he was decapitated, his head sent by Milosh to Istanbul. A tyrant as terrible as any Turkish pasha, Milosh became the official head of Serbia in 1830.

One of the more sapient figures of the day was the scholar and Serb Vuk Karadjich (1787-1864). Schooled in Vienna and St. Petersburg, Vuk believed “all Yugoslavs were one.”
¹⁰

Pleading with Milosh to build schools and to form a constitution, Vuk created, with a student, a Serbo-Croatian dictionary that combined the two written languages. He published the epic folk ballads, which gained the attention of Goethe, and through this means the Serbian plight and also its unique literature were translated and spread to the western world.
¹¹

In Croatia, the land of Tesla’s birth, Emperor Ferdinand of Austria, in 1843, issued a proclamation forbidding any discussion about Illyrianism, thereby helping keep the Serbs and Croats a separate people. In 1867 the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy was created, and Croatia became a semiautonomous province of the new empire. Simultaneously, in Serbia, Michael Obrenovich was finally able to “secure the departure…of the Turkish garrisons from Belgrade” and convert the state into a constitutional monarchy.

Tesla’s background was thus a mixture of crossed influences, a monastic environment, a Byzantine legacy of a once great culture, and incessant battles against barbarous invaders. As a Serb growing up in Croatia, Tesla inherited a rich mix of tribal rituals, egalitarian rule, a modified form of Greek Orthodox Catholicism, pantheistic beliefs, and myriad superstitions. Women cloaked their bodies in black garb, and men packed a cross in one pocket and a weapon in another. Living at the edge of civilization, Serbs saw themselves as protectors of Europe from the Asian hordes. They bore that responsibility with their blood for many centuries.