Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla (31 page)

Thus, even though Ava was on his side, the inventor was uncertain of his standing. “My dear Astor,” Tesla began, “I would like to explain why I could not go down to Cuba with you.”

“I understand,” Astor replied. “During the gunfire, perhaps that is when it dawned on me, I realized that your life was too precious to risk on such a trip. I see, however, from recent reports that you have been attacked after all, but it has been by reporters instead.”

“I’m glad,” Tesla quipped, “that I am living in a place in which, though they can roast me in the papers, they cannot burn me at the stake.”
²⁹

Tesla thereupon called a meeting with Astor and two of his cronies, Mr. Clarence McKay and Mr. Darius Ogden Mills, so that he could display his continuing progress with his oscillators and fluorescent lights as well as show them patent applications, articles which had appeared in the technical journals, and reports on tests performed by the Royal Society in London and the Roentgen Society in Germany. “Let me read you the following dispatch from Sir William Crookes,” Tesla said. “Congratulations. The performance of your machine is marvelous.” And Tesla presented another
report, which hailed his oscillator as “one of the most significant of the age.”

“You will see how many enterprises can be built up on that novel principle, Colonel. It is for a reason that I am often and violently attacked, because my inventions threaten a number of established industries. My telautomaton, for instance, opens up a new art which will sooner or later render large guns entirely useless, and will make impossible the building of large battleships, and will, as I have stated in my patent long before the Czar’s manifesto, compel the nations to come to an understanding for the maintenance of peace.”
³⁰

“You are taking too many leaps for me,” Astor said, causing the others to reconsider as well. “Let us stick to oscillators and cold lights. Let me see some success in the marketplace with these two enterprises, before you go off saving the world with an invention of an entirely different order, and then I will commit more than my good wishes. Stop in again when you have a sound proposal or call me on the telephone.”

Tesla waited until the new year and then hit the colonel with a direct assault. “My dear Astor,” Tesla said, “It has always been my firm belief that you take a genuine, friendly interest in myself personally as well as in my labors…Now I ask you frankly, when I have a friend like J.J.A., a prince among wealthy men, a patriot ready to risk his life for his country, a man who means every word he says—who puts such a value on my labors and who offers repeatedly to back me up—have I not a foundation for believing that he would stand by me when, after several years of hard work I have finally brought to commercial perfection some important inventions which, even at the most conservative estimate, must be valued at several million dollars.”

Informing Astor that George Westinghouse had given him $500,000 for the AC polyphase system and that Edward Dean Adams had invested $100,000 to become a partner in his later endeavors when he had “14 [new] U.S. and as many foreign patents,” Tesla remarked that there was a “powerful clique” which still now opposed him. “And it is chiefly for this reason that I want a few friends, like yourself, to give me at this moment their valuable financial and moral support.”

Having “placed faith” in Astor’s words, Tesla reveals that he had sold off securities to buy back control of his company, although “Mr. Adams still has a minority interest.” Having stated that his laboratory in the past has “paid $1500 for every $100 invested, on the average,” the inventor proclaims, “I am fully confident that the property which I have now in my hands will pay much better than this.”

“I now produce a light superior by far to that of the incandescent lamp with one third of the expenditure of energy, and as my lamps will last forever, the cost of maintenance will be minute. The cost of copper, which
in the old system, is a most important item, is in mine reduced to a mere trifle, for I can run on a wire sufficient for one incandescent lamp more than 1000 of my own lamps, giving fully 5000 times as much light. Let me ask you, Colonel, how much is this alone worth when you consider that there are hundreds of millions of dollars invested to-day in electric light in the various chief countries in which I have patented my inventions in this field?

“Sooner or later,” Tesla continues, “my system will be purchased either by the Whitney Syndicate, G.E. or Westinghouse, for otherwise they will be driven out of the market.”

The inventor closed: “Then consider my oscillators and my system of transmitting power without wires, my method of directing the movement of bodies at a distance by wireless telegraphy, the manufactures of fertilizers and nitric acid from the air, the production of ozone…and many other important lines of manufacture as, for instance, cheap refrigeration and cheap manufacture of liquid air, etc.—and you will see that, putting a fair estimate on all, I cannot offer to sell any considerable amount of my property for less than $1000 a share. I am perfectly sure that I will be able to command that price as soon as some of my inventions are on the market.”

Telling Astor that he had contracts pending with “the Creusot Works in France, the Helios Company in Germany, Ganz and Company in Austria and other firms,” Tesla requested an investment of $100,000. “If you do not take that much interest you will put me at a great disadvantage.” Should Astor come in, other Astor associates, such as Mr. McKay and Darius Ogden Mills, “would do the same.” If, Tesla wrote, “after six months you should have any reason to be dissatisfied, it will be my first duty to satisfy you.”
³¹

Astor stressed interest in seeing Tesla exploit his fluorescent lights, and the inventor agreed. On January 10, 1899, papers were signed whereby Astor gave Tesla $100,000 for five hundred shares of the Tesla Electric Company; in return, Astor was elected director of the board.
³²
At the same time, Tesla moved into the Waldorf-Astoria. Tesla also received $10,000 from the dry-goods manufacturer Simpson and Crawford,
³³
and he may also have received funds from Mr. Mills or Mr. McKay. The old Tesla Company, with William Rankine and Edward D. Adams, was, for all intents and purposes, dissolved, along with his relationship with Alfred Brown and Charles Peck, although all of these individuals may have in one way or another been involved in the new enterprise.

The first letter on Waldorf stationery written to the Johnsons is dated November 3, 1898. It is one of the rare letters in which Tesla refers to Mrs. Johnson as “My dear Kate.” Tesla was about to hook a big fish, perhaps the wealthiest fish on the planet, and his sense of self-importance escalated
accordingly. In haughty fanfare, the Serbian aristocrat separated his exalted ilk from “other social tribolites…plebians, drummers, grocerymen, [and] Jews.”
³⁴
Anti-Semitic references are rare in the Tesla correspondence, but no doubt he was anti-Semitic, at least in the social sense, that is, as a common reflection of the times. Anti-Semitism against ethnic ghetto dwellers, such as those newly arrived in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and New York’s Lower East Side, was common among the upper classes, even though the Rothschilds, August Belmont, Jacob Schiff, and Bernard Baruch were well respected and known to be Jewish. It is, however, clear evidence of one of Tesla’s prejudices. The letter also refers to Tesla’s wish to meet Lieutenant Hobson, whose Cuban exploits had been featured in the
Century.
“The interest in [Hobson] was at a fever heat [at our offices],” Johnson recalled, “[and] the estimates of the sale of his [proposed] book ran into the hundred thousands.” Unfortunately, shortly after his account appeared, a scandalous event occurred which was egged on by the “sensational press,” and the idea for the book “fell flat.”
³⁵
The incident had to do with Hobson’s handsome appearance and the inability of women to refrain from kissing him when he came into their midst.

“I would have cut off my right arm rather than to offend one of [those ladies],” Hobson declared, concluding, “The kissing episodes, what little there was to them, were entirely beyond my control, and my conscience is clear.”
³⁶

The dashing lieutenant was well liked by Tesla and the Johnsons, and his entrée into their circle added a wonderful spark to their lives. He would join a group that included at this time the Gilders, Miss Kussner, Miss Merrington, Mrs. Winslow, Mrs. Robinson, Mrs. Dodge, Rudyard Kipling, and John Muir. Playful jealousies became evident as Tesla and the Johnsons vied for the war hero’s attention, Tesla daring even to tender to Hobson one lady with whom the inventor may have had intimate relations.

“Remember, Luka,” Tesla teased, “Hobson does not belong to the Johnsons exclusively. I shall avenge myself on Mme. Filipov by introducing him to Mme. Kussner and somebody will be forgotten.”
³⁷

Tesla spent many “delightful” hours with Hobson, inviting him to the laboratory, to dinner, and out on the town. “He is a fine fellow,” the inventor concluded.
³⁸
Their friendship would last.

Hobson, twenty-eight, a southerner, was a striking presence in his uniform, with deep-set, penetrating eyes, hair swept back, a firm, prominent chin, and a handlebar mustache. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy in 1889, he had spent three years in Paris studying at a maritime college and had worked for the Office of Naval Intelligence.

Gifted with a keen mind, Hobson had worked for the secretary of the navy during the China-Japan war. His family, on both sides, included
lawyers, judges, a governor, and a general.
³⁹
He was a ready-made hero, and he was a social catch of the first order.

All the pieces of Tesla’s puzzle were now in place. He had obtained fundamental patents on wireless communication and remote control, he had calculated the type of energy he needed in order to disturb the electical conditions of the planet, he had obtained a sizable sum of working capital from one of the wealthiest men in the world, he had begun serious negotiations with the U.S. Navy, and, as a social triumph, he had moved into the Waldorf-Astoria. The budding entrepreneur settled upon a plan for marketing his oscillators and cold lamps—well, they could wait for now—and then Tesla took the next bold step. He would test his wireless theories on a grand scale.

The laboratory at Houston Street was simply too small and vulnerable to fires and potential spies. With few people aware, Tesla had scouted the country to seek out potential sites for his new “Experimental Station.” George Scherff, his capable secretary, tried to get Tesla to reconsider, to stay in New York and do something tangible, something that would pay an immediate return, but he was talking to a deaf ear. Destiny was urging Tesla westward.

Nikola Tesla, the Servian scientist, whose electrical discoveries are not of one nation, but the pride of the world, has taken up his abode in Colorado Springs
…
On East Pike’s Peak avenue, with limitless plains stretching to the eastward, and a panorama of mighty mountains sweeping away north and south, to the west—Tesla has caused to be constructed a [wireless] station for scientific research.

D
ESIRE
S
TANTON
, C
OLORADO
S
PRINGS
, 1899
¹

H
aving been invited to Colorado Springs to build his laboratory by Westinghouse patent attorney Leonard E. Curtis, a longtime adviser and friend through the difficult years of the “battle of the currents,” Tesla shipped his equipment in early spring, 1899. Before he left New York and as the coup de grâce to his relationship with T. C. Martin, Tesla met with competing editor Charles W. Price of
Electrical Review
and professional photographer Dickenson Alley to choreograph a spectacular piece on the wizard’s laboratory. Complete with a rich description of his experiments and a sensational series of photographs, the article ran in the March 29, 1899, issue. Starting with a full-length portrait of the inventor grasping a basketball-sized wireless vacuum lamp glowing resplendently, the essay went on to describe the evolution of other inventions, such as his high-tension transformer, which resulted in Tesla’s flat, spiral transmitting coil. This eight-foot transmitter, “easily recognizable by its spider web appearance” was the first which efficiently enabled the inventor to generate two individualized vibrations, or tuned circuits, simultaneously and also produce many millions of volts.
²
Other prints depicted the flamboyant engineer transmitting high currents through his body to illuminate a variety of vacuum tubes, such as one which he whipped around his head in a multiple exposure. With one hand seeming to pluck a refulgent rod out of the midst of a spiral galaxy of blurred light and the
other grasping a sparking, circular high-tension coil, “the operator’s body…[was] charged to a [great] potential.”
³

Tesla arrived in Colorado Springs on May 18, 1899, after stopping in Chicago to display his telautomaton to the Commercial Club, a local electrical society. Situated at the very gateway to the Rocky Mountains, at the edge of a plain that stretched for hundreds of miles, the Colorado site would prove an excellent choice not only for monitoring wireless energy generated from his transmitter but also for studying a common phenomenon in the region, the electrical storms.

Stepping from the station after his weeklong journey, the inventor was met by Curtis and a few dignitaries. A horse and carriage took him to his hotel, the Alta Vista, where he stayed, in room 207.
⁴
Much like his childhood home in Smiljan, the town was situated at the foothills of a mighty chain of mountains. The Rockies arose so suddenly that they looked almost as if they were still being formed. A view on a clear day stretched virtually to Wyoming to the north and New Mexico to the south, and it was a common sight to witness lightning storms in the distance while standing in sunshine.

Hoping to be the “Little London” of the West, the people of “the Springs” welcomed the great inventor by honoring him with a banquet, sponsored by Curtis, at the El Paso Club. Well known throughout the region because his AC power transmission system had been adopted at lead, silver, and gold mines in such camps as Telluride and Cripple Creek, Tesla was happily met by society people, town officials, and the governor.
⁵
A few days later, another notable also came to town, Admiral Schley, recently back from his victory in Santiago Bay. The entire town celebrated the hero’s visit.
⁶
No doubt Tesla had easy access to the admiral, and they probably discussed the potential use of his telautomaton as a weapon to help abolish war.

As part of Tesla’s arrangement, with Curtis’s guarantee, the El Paso Electric Company provided Tesla with free electrical power to support the great quest. Local contractor Joseph Dozier was introduced to discuss construction of the lab. Off they drove down Pike’s Peak Avenue to what is now the corner of Coyote Street, near Prospect Lake, to look the site over. Dozier, it appears, had a mystical bent, so discussions drifted to talk of life on other planets and unusual ways to search for gold in the nearby hills.
⁷

The inventor had traveled west for a variety of reasons, particularly his wish to experimentally verify that he could transmit light, information, and power to vast distances by means of wireless. “I wanted to be free of the disturbing influences in the city which make it very difficult to tune circuits,” the inventor added.
⁸
Tesla had embarked on a massive plan that presupposed an understanding of a technology which even challenges today’s comprehension of power-distribution systems. Details of the work
would remain secret, Tesla not even revealing his intent to erect the station until almost the day he departed.
⁹

From the very first day of his arrival, he announced rather optimistic plans, telling town columnist Mrs. Gilbert McClurg, wife of the secretary of the chamber of commerce, who wrote under the nom de plume Desire Stanton,
¹⁰
“With [my] wireless telegraph oscillator, [I]…could talk to the inhabitants of the planet Mars…if they know enough to take a message…and will talk to the people of the earth, at any distance away, without the assistance of wires.”
¹¹

There was a popular notion and even astronomical speculation that other planets were inhabited and that Mars could be contacted. Growing large fields with flora planted in different-colored symbols or creating giant reflecting surfaces to flicker signals were two other proposals espoused by writers in the technical journals that received serious consideration. With Percival Lowell’s magnificent telescope only a few hundred miles away, in Flagstaff, Arizona, reports of Martian activities were a commonplace topic of conversation.

With Tesla’s arrival, in Desire’s words, “the day of ‘vril power’ is not far distant.”

“I would light whole cities and give to mere machines all the motions of intelligence,” said Tesla. “But my first plan is to simply collect experimental data, mount instruments and record experiments at different atmospheric levels.”

“Tesla’s plan for cabling across the Atlantic is to erect two terminal stations, one in London and one in New York, with the oscillators placed at the top of high towers, communicating thence with great disks suspended in captive balloons floating 5,000 feet above the earth to catch the strata of rarefied air through which electrical waves travel most easily. A message could be flashed instantly by these lightning rays from the oscillator to the disk in the balloon, and across the thousands of miles of intervening space to the second disk…Mr. Tesla says he is ready to put his wireless system into operation as soon as the practical details can be arranged.”
¹²

His scheme was multifaceted. He could utilize the ionosphere to act as a conduit or a reflector of the electrical waves;
¹³
he could use the intrinsic electrical impulses of the earth itself, that is, its geomagnetic pulse as a carrier wave, or he could transmit energy in the more conventional wireless way “with one single tuned circuit on the transmitting and receiving end,”
¹⁴
such as he had demonstrated in his public lectures in London, Paris, New York, Philadelphia, and St. Louis, that is, by using a resonant tuned circuit, comprising a transmitter and a receiver, an aerial and ground connection, or he could use conventional copper lines.
¹⁵

With Colorado Springs six thousand feet above sea level, one of his first experiments involved the transmission of very high frequencies up
long wires to terminals situated two miles in the sky.
¹⁶
Helium-filled balloons more than ten feet long were ordered from a “balloon farm” in Germany run by Professor Meyers, and thousands of feet of wire and cable were shipped from the Houston Street lab.
¹⁷

Other equipment included batteries, receiving and measuring instruments, switches, transformers, vacuum pumps, and dozens of types of electronic tubes specially prepared by a Manhattan glassblower. Also, his huge oscillators and gargantuan Tesla coils were shipped, although his novel, flat, spiral transmitter, which appears so prominently in the 1898 photographs of his New York laboratory, was not sent. Louis Uhlman, one of his key engineers, was placed in charge of equipment at Houston Street, with George Scherff business manager and liaison.

Tesla’s wireless experimental station was a large barnlike structure approximately sixty feet wide and eighteen feet high, with a 200-foot-tall bulbous-topped aerial whose height could be adjusted to differing lengths. Situated on East Pike’s Peak Avenue, within walking distance of the center of town, the building was connected by transmission lines to the El Paso Electrical Station only “a few miles away,” From their circuit, Tesla was able “to draw, according to necessity, 100 horse-power and more.”
¹⁸
Guarded by a sign which read Great Danger, Keep Out, the lab housed a high-frequency transformer and a Tesla coil with a diameter of forty-five feet.
¹⁹
All of his experiments would be carefully recorded in his private Colorado notebook (which was discovered in the 1950s among his papers at the Belgrade Museum). Theories, experiments, occasional personal observations, and highly technical mathematical equations filled the pages.
²⁰

Tesla stated that his main reason for coming to Colorado “was to produce a [resonant transformer] which would be capable of disturbing the electrical condition [of part], if not the entire globe…thus enabling me to transmit intelligence to great distances without wire.”
²¹
The plan was actually quite simple; Tesla assumed that the earth had a resonant frequency and therefore could be measured and utilized as a gigantic carrier wave to distribute electrical power. Since the entire earth was in a harmonic relationship with his equipment, Tesla claimed that there would be “no diminution in the intensity of the transmitted impulses. It is even possible to make the actions increase with distance from the plant according to an exact mathematical law.”
²²

By regulating the height of the aerial, different wavelengths could be created which could be measured in terms of their harmonic relationship to the natural electrical properties of the earth.

A few weeks later, Tesla summoned Fritz Lowenstein. Just twenty-five years old and a recent German immigrant, Lowenstein had only been working for Tesla for a month. Thus, there was a question about his ability to be reticent about the work. Nevertheless, he was, as Tesla said, “a man
possessed of the highest technical training”
²³
and probably the most formally educated of his crew.

In June, Tesla experimented with a wireless telephone, although it is not known whether he actually transmitted spoken words.
²⁴
To Astor, he wrote, the following year, “There is nothing novel in telephoning without wires to a distance of five or six miles, since this has been done often before…In this connection, I have obtained two patents.”
²⁵

Whether or not Astor was completely aware of Tesla’s plan to leave New York to set up an experimental station in Colorado Springs is unknown. Astor had been in Europe during much of the planning stages of the venture, returning to New York on June 14. Certainly Tesla notified Astor of his plans, but this author suspects that the financier did not find out until after their business arrangement was solidified. As Astor was expecting progress on the oscillators and cold light, he probably had mixed feelings when he contacted Scherff to check on Tesla’s progress.
²⁶

Professor Meyers’s balloons had finally arrived. “They should only be about two-thirds inflated,” Meyers warned, “as otherwise they may burst when they attain some height.”
²⁷
“He has also included some kites,” Scherff wrote with the shipment. The balloons were launched in July, “but they [are] too heavy and do not work well.”
²⁸
The scheme, although plausible, was cumbersome, as energy would have had to be transmitted up a long wire, which weighed down the balloon (or kite) in a somewhat haphazard fashion, and then another balloon placed at some distance would be needed to receive the transmission and then send it down long wires to instruments on the ground. For numerous reasons this line of investigation was abandoned.

Next on the agenda was the measurement of the electrical properties of the earth, monitoring electrical storms, and creating electromagnetic oscillations that would be in a harmonic relationship to terrestrial currents.

Uppermost in Tesla’s mind was the problem of individualization of messages and protected privacy. Therefore, most of his experiments involved the combination of two or more frequencies and the construction of receiving instruments tuned to these specific arrangements. “The chief feature of a practical wireless telegraph system,” Tesla told Lowenstein, “is the secrecy, immunity and selectivity of the oscillating and receiving apparatus.” The inventor thereby set about to create a variety of mechanisms to produce multiple wavelengths. Whereas Marconi and the others were using inefficient Hertzian “pulsed oscillations at very high frequencies,” Tesla worked with “continuous [undamped] oscillations in the low HF [high-frequency] range.”
²⁹

“Do you understand what we are now trying to achieve?”

“Yes, Mr. Tesla,” Lowenstein replied, “I understand that in this invention the elements of the receiving apparatus respond to the elements
of the transmitter, and that only the co-action of the responding of all these elements of the receiver apparatus make the registering apparatus register.”

“Excellent.”
³⁰

On June 16, Tesla set out to create an efficient ground connection. His workers were instructed to dig a hole twelve feet deep near a water main, and a copper plate twenty feet square was buried there. “Water was kept constantly flowing upon the ground to moisten it and improve the connection,” but the dry earth and the problem of rock formations interfered with the creation of a completely efficient setup. Nevertheless, “purposely unsensitive receiving instruments placed 200 feet from the shop responded when connected to the ground. The action of the device was strong even though it was concluded that the earth resistance was still too great.”
³¹