Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla (29 page)

Marconi was also being aided by H. M. Hozier, director of Lloyds, who, according to one account, “succeeded in sending reasonably clear messages…[through Hozier’s apparatus]…in one place, at least where Marconi himself had failed.”
¹⁶
Lloyds also contacted Tesla “to rig up a wireless set, ship-shore in 1896 to report the international yacht race, [but] Tesla refused the offer, claiming that any public demonstration of his system on less than a world-wide basis would be confused with the amateurish effort being made by other experimenters.”
¹⁷

Instead, Tesla performed a long-distance clandestine experiment which he told no one about, not even his workers. Sometime in 1896 or early 1897, the inventor turned on his generator to “produce continuous trains of oscillations” and took a cab to the Hudson River. There he caught a boat and ferried up to West Point with a battery-operated machine “suitable for transportation.” “I did this two or three times,” he told the courts in 1915. “[But] there were no signals actually given. I simply got the note, but that was for me just the same.” In other words, having brought a receiving instrument with him, the inventor simply tuned it to the point where it began to respond to the oscillations emanating from his laboratory back at East Houston Street. “That is, I think, a distance of about thirty miles,” Tesla said.
¹⁸

Tesla also considered harnessing wind power, the tides, solar and geothermal energy, and also energy released during the process of electrolysis. If water was separated into oxygen and hydrogen, these explosive substances could theoretically be used to generate the heat to create steam. Working along varying lines of research, Tesla also patented ozone-production machines and devised a scheme whereby nitrogen from
the air would be electrically separated out and blended with conveyor belts of soil to create a fertilizer machine.

“All the agriculturist needs,” Tesla suggested, “is…[to] shovel…a quantity of loose earth, treated by a secret chemical preparation in liquid form…into the cylinder. An electric current is passed through the confined atmosphere, the oxygen and hydrogen are…expelled, and the nitrogen which remains is thus absorbed into the loose earth. There is thus produced as strong fertiliser for a nominal price [right] at [the farmer’s] home.”
¹⁹

On April 6, 1897, Tesla spoke again to the public at the New York Academy of Sciences. Over four thousand people attended.
²⁰
With large photographs of dozens of radio tubes Tesla had designed gracing the walls, Tesla set out to explain his advances in Roentgen rays. Certainly the audience was interested in seeing a remarkable device that revealed the human skeleton of a living person, but unquestionably most of them came to behold the sorcerer hurl his thunderbolts.
²¹

Tesla’s world telegraphy system had finally come into clear focus. His plan was to disturb the electrical capacity of the earth with gigantic Tesla oscillators and thereby use these earth currents themselves as carrier waves for his transmitter. In 1897 he explained precisely how his world telegraphy system would operate:

Suppose the whole earth to be like a hollow rubber ball filled with water, and at one place I have a tube attached…with a plunger…If I press upon the plunger the water in the tube will be driven into the rubber ball, and as the water is practically incompressible, every part of the surface of the ball will be expanded. If I withdraw the plunger, the water follows it and every part of the ball will contract. Now, if I pierce the surface of the ball several times and set tubes and plungers at each place, the plungers in these will vibrate up and down in answer to every movement which I may produce in the plunger of the first tube.

There is a peculiar addition to this paragraph: “If I were to produce an explosion in the centre of the body of water in the ball, this would set up a series of vibrations in the whole body. If I could then set the plunger in one of the tubes to vibrating in consonance with the vibrations of the water, in a little while and with the use of a very little energy, I could burst the whole thing asunder.”

The water corresponds to “terrestrial currents” (which are today known as telluric currents), and the plungers refer to his transmitters and receivers. “The inventor thinks it possible that his machine when perfected may be set up, one in each great centre of civilization, to flash the news of
the day’s or hour’s history immediately to all other cities of the world; and stepping for a sentence out of the realms of the workaday world, he offers a prophecy that any communication we may have with other stars will certainly be by such a method.”
²²

This article, which appeared in
Scribners,
also discussed Marconi’s successful wireless transmission of eight miles in Europe. We see in these passages stemming from 1896 and 1897, that Tesla had already conceived of a total plan for his world telegraphy system and that it utilized a variety of wireless modes, one being through the upper air strata, another by means of mechanical resonance, which he called telegeodynamics, and a third, and his most important, by riding terrestrial currents. His next plan was to measure precisely the frequency of the planet and construct transmitters in harmonic relations to it. Nodal points could then be mapped out from, say, a wireless transmitter placed at Niagara Falls to precise positions for receiving towers on different continents.

For all intents and purposes, no one, except for Marconi, had demonstrated that wireless messages could be transmitted more than a few hundred feet. And success only involved the modest goal of sending Morse coded messages. Marconi’s next plan, which would capture the world’s attention, was to radiate the impulses across the English Channel. Certainly Tesla had demonstrated all of the principles found in the modern radio years earlier, but his public demonstrations were held within lecture halls. He had established that he could illuminate lamps from a transmitter placed on the roof of his laboratory on Houston Street to his hotel twenty-six blocks away, but these experiments were held in secret and were never publicized.
²³
The 1895 fire also thwarted his efforts to display long-distance effects.

And when Lloyds of London contacted him, to the dismay of his secretary, George Scherff, Tesla rejected the offer to demonstrate his system’s capabilities.

Tesla, however, was not content with merely setting up a world broadcasting system that, from a conceptual perspective, is superior to our prevailing technology in that it would transmit
power
as well as information; he also suggested that he could contact the stars, create rain in the deserts, or cause wide-scale havoc. Tesla became the quintessential mad scientist. Through his inventions, the world could be dominated according to whim.

The contradictions within the inventor began to pull him in opposite directions. In letters to the Johnsons he calls himself Tesla Great Inventor and implies that, like Paderewski and other luminaries, he was not a mere mortal, but during his Niagara Falls speech he denigrated himself. Tesla was somewhat wealthy during this period, but the requirements of his operations were beyond his means. And yet Tesla shunned billing engineers
when they sought his aid and voided a royalty contract with Westinghouse, though it was now worth a fortune.

In June 1897 it was reported that Westinghouse had paid $216,000 for his patents.
²⁴
As Tesla and his partners, Brown and Peck, were receiving yearly checks of $15,000, with an initial down payment of probably $70,000,
²⁵
this works out to about a quarter of a million dollars for a ten-year period. In a letter to Astor, Tesla places the figure at $500,000,
²⁶
but in either case, it was still millions of dollars less than its actual value.

By this time, Westinghouse and GE had formalized their “entente cordiale.” This meant that a second gigantic corporation with numerous subsiaries would be benefiting from Tesla’s invention but the inventor would not receive a dime for it. The electric subway trains would also be implementing the Tesla motors and system, and again the inventor would get no compensation.

Tesla’s new plans would require enormous expenditures. Westinghouse was making it clear that his company would not be a source of funds beyond their former signed agreement (although it is possible that Tesla did receive additional revenues for other inventions, such as for his oscillators). At the end of the year, the inventor wrote his friend Earnest Heinreich, an engineer at the Westinghouse Corporation who also was a novelist. “My dear Heinreich,” Tesla wrote, “It is true that I have not been quite well of late, but can assure you that I am physically and mentally all right at present. I have however, still a little ailment which may be best designated as financial anemia, from which you are yourself suffering, if I am not mistaken. I wish you would remember me to all the boys at about Xmas time for it is just possible that some of them might feel disposed to send me a token.”
²⁷

There were other pressures as well. Tesla was having difficulties with his financial backer Edward Dean Adams, who was opposing his efforts to promote his wireless enterprise; there was this continuing competition with Marconi; and there were the painful echoes of his Serbian past, from Kosovo and his lost youth. His parents and brother were dead, and he was away from his family not just in distance but also in spirit. In yet another of so many letters sent, sisters Marica and Angelina pleaded for a response. Tesla had sent funds on many occasions and a copy of his Martin text, but they wanted more. “Remember what your name is and where you come from,” Marica wrote, ending her letter with the customary “I am kissing you in spirit.”
²⁸
Part of him ached from the pain, and just as he was coasting high and ahead of the pack on the crest of the wave.

Maybe it was the influence of the Boer War or the unrest brewing in Cuba, but Tesla’s destructive streak began to emerge. His previous inventions were already reshaping human events; his newest creation could
interlink every remote hamlet or tear the world apart. He decided to experiment.

With George Scherff present, Tesla placed one of his mechanical oscillators on the center support beam in the basement of the Houston Street building where his laboratory was located and adjusted the frequency to the point where the beam began to hum. “While he was attending to something else for a few moments, it attained such a crescendo of rhythm that it started to shake the building, then it began shaking the earth nearabout [and other buildings with support beams in resonant

frequencies]…The Fire Department responded to an alarm frantically

turned in; four tons of machinery flew across the basement and the only thing which saved the building from utter collapse was the quick action of Dr. Tesla in seizing a hammer and destroying his machine.”

“The device could be a Frankenstein’s monster,” Tesla confided many years later. “If not watched, no substance can withstand the steadily applied rhythm when its resonance point is reached. Skyscrapers could easily be destroyed with the steady building up of resonance from the timed strokes of a five-pound hammer.
²⁹

In another rendition of the story, told at another time, Tesla claimed that he had taken his alarm clock-sized oscillator to a building site “in the Wall Street district.” Finding one under construction, about “ten stories high of steel framework…” he clamped the vibrator to one of the beams and fussed with the adjustment until he got it.

“In a few minutes I could feel the beam trembling,” Tesla told a reporter. “Gradually, the trembling increased in intensity and extended throughout the whole great mass of steel. Finally, the structure began to creak and weave, and the steel-workers came to the ground panic-stricken, believing there had been an earthquake. Rumors spread that the building was about to fall, and the police reserves were called out. Before anything serious happened, I took off the vibrator, put it in my pocket and went away. But if I had kept on ten minutes more, I could have laid that building flat in the street. And, with the same vibrator, I could drop the Brooklyn Bridge into the East River in less than an hour.”

Tesla told the reporter that he could split the earth in the same way, putting an end to mankind.

“The vibrations of the earth,” he said, “have a periodicity of approximately one hour and forty-nine minutes. That is to say, if I strike the earth this instant, a wave of contraction goes through it that will come back in one hour and forty-nine minutes in the form of expansion. As a matter of fact, the earth, like everything else, is in a constant state of vibration. It is constantly contracting and expanding.

“Now suppose that at the precise moment when it begins to contract,
I explode a ton of dynamite. That accelerates the contraction, and in one hour and forty-nine minutes, there comes an equally accelerated wave of expansion. When the wave of expansion ebbs, suppose I explode another ton…and suppose this performance be repeated time after time. Is there any doubt as to what would happen? There is no doubt in my mind. The earth would be split in two. For the first time in man’s history, he has the knowledge with which he may interfere with cosmic processes.”

Tesla calculated that this procedure might take more than a year to succeed, “but in a few weeks,” Tesla said, “I could set the earth’s crust into such a state of vibration that it would rise and fall hundreds of feet, throwing rivers out of their beds, wrecking buildings, and practically destroying civilization. The principle cannot fail.”
³⁰

We entered an immense hall, lighted by…[a] lustre…but diffusing a fragrant odor. The floor was in large tesselated blocks of precious metals, and partly covered with a sort of matlike carpeting. A strain of low music, above and around, undulated as if from invisible instruments…

In a simpler garb than that of my guide, [a figure] was standing motionless near the threshold. My guide touched it twice with his staff, and it put itself into a rapid and gliding movement, skimming noiselessly over the floor. Gazing on it, I then saw that it was no living form, but a mechanical automaton…Several [other] automata…stood dumb and motionless by the walls.

T
HE
C
OMING
R
ACE
,
E
DWARD
B
ULWER
-L
YTTON
¹

O
ne of Tesla’s major inventions in terms of ingenuity, originality, and complexity of design was a remote-controlled robotic boat which he called the telautomaton. This device was unveiled at the Electrical Exposition held at Madison Square Garden during the height of the Spanish-American War in May 1898, but earlier precursors could be traced to wireless motors which he displayed before the Institute of Electrical Engineers in 1892.

This single invention not only established all of the essential principles of what came to be known a few years later as the radio; it also lay as the basis of such other creations as the wireless telephone, garage-door opener, the car radio, the facsimile machine, television, the cable-TV scrambler, and remote-controlled robotics. The precise nature of the invention, virtually its patent application, was published in most of the technical journals at the time of its inauguration.
²

The telautomaton paralleled precisely a model developed by British novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1871, although Tesla insisted in a missive
to Johnson, written two years after the invention’s inauguration, that he had not been inspired by this science-fiction tale.
³

As Bulwer-Lytton was perhaps the most popular author next to Charles Dickens at that time, it is unlikely that Tesla was unaware of this story when he conceived of the invention. In
The Coming Race,
Bulwer-Lytton describes a concept which he called “vril power.” This was an energy transmitted from the eye and body of the fictional advanced species which was used to animate automatons.
⁴
In essence, Tesla built a working model that substituted electricity for the novelist’s “vril.” The story begins when the protagonist falls into a hole in the earth and comes upon an advanced civilization: “In all service, whether in or out of doors, they [the people of Vril-ya] make great use of automaton figures, which are so ingenious, and so pliant to the operations of vril, that they actually seem gifted with reason. It was scarcely possible to distinguish the figures I beheld, apparently guiding…the rapid movements of vast engines, from human forms endowed with thought.”
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As we shall see, key aspects of Bulwer-Lytton’s story correlate quite closely with positions espoused by Tesla.

The electrical exhibition was organized by Stanford White, who worked with Tesla to fashion a rainbow room of neon lights at the entrance, and it was presided over by Chauncey Depew, another Tesla friend, who was also one of the principals of the New York Central Railroad and a U.S. senator from New York. It had been hoped that President McKinley would illuminate the exposition by means of telegraph lines from Washington, but something went awry, so Vice President Garret Hobart opened the proceedings instead. Representing the Marconi company was Tom Edison’s son, Tom Junior, who obtained the position through T. C. Martin. This liaison marked the beginning of a partnership between Marconi and Edison, as the Menlo Park wizard had wireless patents which the Italian wanted to own in order to boost his legal position on priority of discovery. The event also portended the upcoming break in the friendship between Tesla and Martin.

Animosities between Spain and the United States had run high for a number of years. Ever since 1895, when the Spaniards took repressive measures against rebelling Cubans, many Americans began to champion the cause of Cuban annexation.

The sinking of the battleship
Maine
in Havana harbor in February of 1898 eliminated any doubts, and war was officially declared two months later. Tesla had been meeting with John Jacob Astor throughout this period in his continuing attempts to woo the financier as Astor spelled out more clearly his position on relevant issues.
⁶
While his wife played mah-jongg at home, the colonel jaunted along the deck of his mighty ship, the
Nourmahal,
which he had armed with four machine guns in order to protect against potential pirates. Labeled as insipid and henpecked by gossip
columnists, Astor sought his freedom on the high seas.

Perhaps it was during an outing on Astor’s yacht that the inventor conceived of the idea of fashioning the teleautomaton in the form of a torpedo. “Come to Cuba with me where you can demonstrate your work upon the insufferable scoundrels,” Astor suggested.

Tesla may have been tempted, but in the midst of a whirlwind of invention, he graciously declined as he had been called “for a higher duty.”
⁷

Tesla finalized construction of his remote-controlled boat and considered how to make amends as Astor conferred with President McKinley in Washington and then hastened to the front lines. The colonel had donated $75,000 to the U.S. Army to equip an artillery division for use in the Philippines and lent the
Nourmahal
to the navy for use in battle. The tall ship, nearly a hundred yards in length, was equipped with a corps of military seamen. Able to feed sixty-five at one sitting, the steam-driven three-masted schooner made a formidable warship. With his honorary rank stepped up to inspector general, Colonel Astor sailed his battalion down to Cuba, where he could “watch Teddy Roosevelt in the Battle of San Juan Hill through a pair of field glasses.”
⁸

Beating the Spanish with modern instruments of destruction became the overriding theme of the exposition. Tesla would have far and away the most sophisticated construction, but he chose to portray it by deceptively emphasizing mysterious features: “In demonstrating my invention before audiences, the visitors were requested to ask any question, however involved, and the automaton would answer them by signs. This was considered magic at the time, but was extremely simple, for it was myself who gave the replies by means of the device.”
⁹

The boat, approximately four feet in length and three feet high, was placed in a large tank in the center of a private auditorium, set up for special viewing for key investors like J. O. Ashton, George Westinghouse, J. Pierpont Morgan, and Cornelius Vanderbilt.
¹⁰
By means of a variety of transmitters and frequencies, the inventor could start, stop, propel, steer, and operate other features, such as putting lights on or off. Tesla was also planning on constructing a prototype submersible, perhaps to compete in the mock battles that were staged between models of the American ships and the Spanish fleet, but it was never built.

Due to the lack of access the press had to this exclusive invention the newspapers featured Marconi’s wireless detonation system instead. By means of a bomb planted onboard the enemy frigate and a simple button placed in the hands of Tom Junior, “Spanish” ships were blown to smithereens. Marconi, however, had not solved the problem of tuning a frequency, and so, on one occasion, Edison’s son accidentally blew up a desk in a back room that had housed other bombs. Fortunately, no one was injured.
¹¹

It appears that the public appreciated the dramatic Marconi contraption, which appealed to baser instincts, as compared to Tesla’s masterwork, which was sixteen years ahead of its time operationally and at least a century ahead of its time conceptually, that is, as envisioned in final form. Only the scientific journals explained with any clarity the complexity of the device.
¹²

Tesla’s coy portrayal kindled a blitzkrieg of epithets from the press. The following fantastic prognostication particularly upset them:

Torpedo Boat Without a Crew

My submarine boat, loaded with its torpedoes, can start out from a protected bay or be dropped over a ship side, make its devious way along the surface, through dangerous channels of mine beds…watching for its prey, then dart upon it at a favorite moment…discharge its deadly weapon and return to the hand that sent it…I am aware that this sounds almost incredible and I have refrained from making this invention public until I had worked out practically every detail.
¹³

By allowing the following editorial to appear in his journal
Electrical Engineer,
T. C. Martin was, in a backhanded way, another to lead the assault.

Mr. Tesla and the Czar

Mr. Tesla fools himself, if he fools anybody, when he launches into the dazzling theories and speculations associated with his name…Just of late Mr. Tesla has been given publicity to some of his newest work…We should be glad personally to see him finish up some of the many other things that have occupied his energies these ten years past.

The editorial then went on to criticize Tesla’s oscillator and his method of “delivering large quantities of current…without wires, say from Niagara Falls to Paris [which has also yet to happen]…Mr. Marconi has already telegraphed from balloon to balloon without wires…over twenty miles, thus proving in advance the tenability of Mr. Tesla’s proposition.
¹⁴

Discredit of the wireless torpedo followed. This was in reaction to Tesla’s suggestion that the ultimate weapons could be “devil automata.” Caught up in war fever, Tesla emphasized nefarious implications of his work: Automatons would fight while humans would live. He wrote, “The continuous development in this direction must ultimately make war a mere context of machines without men and without loss of life—a condition [which will lead]…in my opinion…to permanent peace.”
¹⁵

This position was refuted by a number of individuals, the most eloquent by Frenchman M. Huart:

The Genius of Destruction

Like all inventors of destructive machines, [Tesla] claims that his [devil automata] will make the governments which are inclined to create international conflagrations hesitate. On this account Nikola Tesla claims a right to be called a benefactor of humanity. The genius of destruction would seem to have, then, two aims. It creates evil but mostly good. Through its help the abolition of wars may no longer be a utopia of generous dreamers. A blessed era will open up to the people, whose quarrels will be settled in view of the terror of the cataclysms promised by science. What contradictions of conception is the human mind subject to?
¹⁶

Coincidentally, this view was espoused by Mark Twain, who wrote to Tesla from Europe wanting to sell the patents to cabinet ministers in Austria, Germany, and England, by Bulwer-Lytton, and by Czar Nicholas of Russia, whom Tesla himself was negotiating with.
¹⁷
(And that was how “Nicholas” Tesla became associated with the czar.) In the modern era, Edward Teller, one of the inventors of the hydrogen bomb, and, more recently, President Ronald Reagan in his 1980s Star Wars speeches, have also expounded on this position. But Tesla (much like Einstein) came to regret his initial view of how the agents of Armageddon could lead humans to peace.

The brazen essay, which had appeared in Martin’s journal, continued as an introduction to Tesla’s “thoughtful” paper on electrotherapeutics and then concluded with the following convoluted backhand compliment:

It is not our desire to pose as apologists or publicists for Mr. Tesla. He needs no assistance of that kind; and so long as he commands freely whole pages of the Sunday papers, for which Mr. Wanamaker pays gladly his thousands of dollars, the scientific journals have little to do with the matter. All we wish to say is that it is not fair to condemn, as many do, Mr. Tesla as a visionary and impractical. No man has finished his work till he is dead, and even then there are long, long centuries in which his ideas can prove themselves true. The visionaries are thus often in the end the most sordid of realists—something Mr. Tesla will never be.
¹⁸

As Martin had been, in a sense, Tesla’s advance man, his decision to allow this critique in his journal became a tacit sanction for other writers to unfurl their condemnation. For instance, another scathing review appeared in both
The Scientific American
and the more popular
Public Opinion.
The article appeared on the same page as the obituary of mountebank inventor John Worrell Keely.

Was Keely a Charlatan?

In the death of J. W. Keely of Keely Motor fame…the world has been robbed of one of its most unique and fascinating characters…[Keely] was always going to startle the world but never did. It is sincerely to be hoped that Keely’s alleged secrets have died with him.

Science and Sensationalism

…That the author of the multiphase system of transmission should, at this late date, be flooding the press with rhetorical bombast that recalls the wildest days of the Keely Motor mania is inconsistent and inexplicable to the last degree…The facts of Mr. Tesla’s invention are few and simple as the fancies which have been woven around it are many and extravagant. The principles of the invention are not new, nor was Tesla the original discoverer.
¹⁹

This implication that Tesla was not the author of his system of wireless communication echoed previous charges that he was not the genuine inventor of the AC polyphase system. This was what particularly angered him, as it was essential that his work be original. “I wish I could lay upon the fellow all the forked lightning in my laboratory,” Tesla told the Johnsons at dinner at their home.
²⁰