Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla (36 page)

August 2, 1900

Dear Mr. Tesla,

I have been thinking of you all day and all evening as I do so often…I sat on a little hillside this afternoon looking over green meadows to the sea beyond…and wishing that I could loan you my eyes that you might have my visions and drink in the beauty of the day…You are as silent as only you know [how] to be…Do call us.

Yours faithfully,
Katharine Johnson
³⁰

August 12, 1900

My dear Mrs. Johnson,

Just a line to tell you that I never can and never shall forget the Filipovs—they have given me too much trouble.

Yours sincerely,
N. Tesla
³¹

Unable to relax until he settled things with Astor, Tesla tried again, having forfeited the chance for a needed respite.

August 24, 1900

My dear Colonel Astor,

I still remember when you told me, that if I could only show you great returns on your investment, you would gladly back me up in any undertaking, and I hope not in a selfish, but in a higher interest that your ideas have not changed since…[Re: oscillators, motors and lighting system] not less than $50,000,000 [can be]…made out of my invention. This may seem to you exaggeration, but I honestly believe that it is an understatement.

Is it possible that you should have something against me? Not hearing from you I cannot otherwise interpret your silence…

Finally, Astor replied, stating that he was “glad to get your letter, and will get back to you.”
³²
But this was really a decoy procedure, for Astor continued to slip away. Tesla shot off another round of letters outlining his progress with his oscillators, fluorescent light—“the commercial value…if rightly explored, is simply immense”—and wireless enterprise,
³³
but again Astor balked.

Astor never directly told Tesla his real feelings. His reluctance in advancing the partnership suggests that he was angry with Tesla for
not
exploiting the oscillators and fluorescent lights in 1899, as he had promised, but had instead run off to Colorado Springs to conduct his wireless folly.

Certainly the onslaught in the papers injured Tesla’s reputation, but it is this author’s belief that the attack by the press had little if anything to do with Astor’s turnabout. Tesla had deceived him. As wealthy as he was, Astor wanted to invest in a sure thing. The oscillators and the fluorescent lights seemed practically ready for market, but rather than perfect these inventions, Tesla took the capital to go off on another venture and returned without a dime. Astor was enraged but too much of a gentleman to even let Tesla know. With Stanford White and Mrs. Douglas Robinson behind him, Tesla explored a fresh lead.

J. P. Morgan towered above all the Wall Street people like Samson over the Philistines.

N
IKOLA
T
ESLA
¹

I
n May 1900, Gentleman Jim Corbett was KO’d by James Jeffries in a championship bout held in Coney Island. Tesla, an avid boxing fan, probably attended. Back at the hotel, a Serbian youth with a familiar name had left a message. It was Anna’s son, the one and only girl Tesla had ever fallen in love with. Through the years they had maintained contact, so Tesla had been notified of the boy’s arrival. However, he was not prepared for the career that the lad had chosen.

“I want to be a boxer,” the boy proclaimed.

Unnerved by this announcement, Tesla conferred with Stanford, who helped set up the youth at a boxing school near the Garden. Every so often Tesla would go down to the gym to follow the boy’s progress; finally, it was decided that he was ready to enter the ring. Stanford had done his best to set up a reasonable match, but the youth persisted in seeking out a tougher opponent.

One blow knocked the boy unconscious, and he died shortly thereafter in the hospital. “Tesla grieved for him as though he was his own son.”
²

In the fall of 1900, J. Pierpont Morgan announced the wedding of his daughter Louisa to Herbert Satterlee, Morgan’s latter-day biographer. It was a magnificent event with a guest list numbering twenty-four hundred. The Serbian wunderkind felt quite at home at the gala occasion, for many of his friends were there, including John Jacob and Lady Astor, Mrs. Douglas Robinson and her brother Teddy Roosevelt (whom Tesla had met at Mrs. Robinson’s Madison Avenue home in March of 1899), William Rankine, Edward Dean Adams, Darius Ogden Mills, Chauncey DePew,
and Stanford White. Other guests included Jacob Schiff, Henry Clay Frick, Grover Cleveland, August Belmont, President William McKinley, and Thomas Edison. Morgan was in an exceedingly good mood and personally greeted each guest with a warm handshake.
³
“I read your article in the
Century,
Mr. Tesla, and was very impressed.”

Coincident with Tesla’s impending liaison with the House of Morgan and recent triumphant return from Colorado Springs, his handwriting and signature began to display a frivolous abundance of ornate embellishments. Although these samples were written in moments of gaiety in letters to the Johnsons,
⁴
they nevertheless reveal a subconscious, qualitative change in his state of mind as compared to his usual lean, bare-bones handwriting. Graphologists note that “the paper [is] frequently treated as a substitute object…[Thus] the graphically expansive [writers]…usually are the same who not only dominate the paper, but also their environment, [just as] the graphically timid ones are also timid in other respects.”
⁵

One could therefore speculate that Tesla was a very visible character at the affair. And just as Tesla adorned his signature, he adorned his body, wearing the latest suits, top hat, cane, and white gloves. He took extreme pride in being the leader of his field and one of the best-dressed men to walk Fifth Avenue. Now tending toward flamboyance, the inventor began to identify more heartily with the opulence and power that surrounded him.

Twenty-eight-year-old Anne Tracy Morgan, Louisa’s younger sister, was particularly taken with the dashing inventor, and they began a friendship.

“The Thanksgiving dinner at [Morgan’s home that] year was an unusually large and gay affair with its traditional four varieties of pies,”
⁶
and Tesla was invited to the day-after event, held Friday evening.
⁷
Anne may have seen this as an opportunity to extend their friendship; they would come to exchange letters for the duration of their lives—but Tesla saw it as a business opportunity. The wizard brought along fascinating multicolored electric bulbs that emanated dancing spiderwebs of lightning, static-electricity devices that made a person’s hair stand on end, and other wireless paraphernalia. The inventor exchanged hellos with J. P. Morgan Jr., now in his early thirties, and gave photographs of his work at Colorado Springs to Anne.

After dinner, Morgan met Tesla privately in order to discuss a possible partnership. The tenor of the times is discussed by Herbert Satterlee, a man who knew Tesla personally. Having written a virtual daily log of Morgan’s life, Satterlee deliberately deleted any reference to the Morgan-Tesla liaison; but the following paragraph, which coincides precisely with this time, appears to be a justification for the financier’s decision
to back the wireless venture: “The dying year saw the completion of many combinations of the smaller companies in the steel industry…They were all getting rich. Gates was speculating in Wall Street. Judge Moore began to buy fine horses…Conversely, Reid and the others invested in large country estates…[And Morgan gambled on an oddball inventor.] Dinners at the Waldorf-Astoria and at Sherry’s and lavish entertainments were the order of the day, and everywhere there was evidence of rapidly accumulated wealth. They all seemed to think that there was no end to it.”
⁸

Known among the clique for his collection of mistresses, Morgan extended his passion to amassing an immense hoard of treasures, including ancient coins, precious stones, tapestries, carvings, rare plates, the paintings of the masters, statues, old books, and original manuscripts. Some of his most prized possessions included first drafts of Charles Dickens’s novels, a portrait of Nicolaes Ruts by Rembrandt, a number of eleventhcentury Byzantine medallions, and a Gutenberg Bible.
⁹
Hanging in the study was his latest acquisition,
Christopher Columbus
by Sebastiano del Piombo.
¹⁰
It was hung next to a painting of the Commodore’s threehundred-foot-long yacht, which Morgan often preferred as a sleeping quarters to his home when it was docked near Wall Street during the boating season. Tesla eyed the del Piombo in great admiration.

“Mrs. Robinson has talked me into donating it to the Metropolitan Museum. Naturally I hate to part with it, but you know how persuasive she can be.”

The skittish Tesla had seen Morgan at close range before, but never for long periods in so intimate a way. Plagued from his youth by a series of skin conditions, Morgan’s beet-red and deformed proboscis, retouched out of all official photographs, was often swollen and coated with warts. An art dealer, encountering Morgan in a similar circumstance, was quoted as saying:

I was unprepared for the meeting…I had heard of a disfigurement, but what I saw upset me so thoroughly that for a moment I could not utter a word. If I did not gasp I must have changed colour. Mr. Morgan noticed this, and his small, piercing eyes transfixed me with a malicious stare. I sensed that he noticed my feelings of pity, and for some time that seemed centuries, we stood opposite each other without saying a word. I could not utter a sound, and when at last I managed to open my mouth I could produce only a raucous cough. He grunted.
¹¹

“I want to know, Mr. Tesla,” Morgan began, eyeing one of the inventor’s Colorado photographs, “how you survived among all of this lightning.”

“I didn’t,” Tesla said, avoiding a direct stare. “Those are multiple exposures.”

“How clever. White tells me you want to build a wireless tower?”

“I have perfected an apparatus which permits the transmission of messages to any distance without wires, making long and expensive cables as a means of conveying intelligence commercially obsolete. This creation also enables the production and manipulation of hundreds of thousands of horsepower, bringing instruments on any point of the globe into action regardless of their distance from the transmitter.”

“Instruments?”

“Telegraph keys, phones, clocks, remote photography.”

“You have a wireless means for transmitting pictures?” Morgan rebounded, raising his eyebrows.

“There is nothing novel in telephotography. Edison has been working on it since Elisha Gray’s device was presented at the 1893 Exposition. My patents simply usurp the need for using wires.”

“Don’t push my tolerance, Mr. Tesla. Your proposal as far as I understand only deals with telegraphy. I’m a simple man who wants a way to signal incoming steamers during times of fog, to send messages to Europe, maybe get Wall Street prices when I’m in England.
¹²
Can you do this? Can you send wireless messages such long distances?”

“Indeed I can, Mr. Morgan.”

“And the problem of billing? Wouldn’t anyone with a receiver have free access to this information? I’m not about to subsidize my competitors, or the public for that matter.”

“I can guarantee absolute privacy for all messages. Broad rights have been secured which gives me a monopoly in the States and most of Europe.”

“How ‘broad’ are your costs?”

“Although this work concerns a decade of effort, I know that I am in the presence of a great philanthropist, and therefore do not hesitate to leave the apportionment of my interest and compensation entirely to your generosity.”

“Don’t flatter me, Mr. Tesla. Let’s get down to brass tacks. What will it cost?”

“My plan requires two transmitting towers, one to transmit across the Atlantic and the other across the Pacific. The former would require an expenditure of approximately one hundred thousand dollars, the latter about a quarter of a million.”

“Let’s talk about one ocean at a time. What would I get for funding the construction of a wireless plant to cross the Atlantic?”

“Its working capacity would equal at least four of the present ocean cables and it would take six to eight months to complete.”
¹³

“What about Marconi? Stetson says his costs are one seventh of your quote.”

“That is so. However, there are key elements missing for his success, elements which can only be found in my patents, in apparatus universally identified with my name and published in writings dating back to 1890 and 1893, when Marconi was still pulling his mother’s apron strings.”

“He transmitted fourteen hundred words from ship to shore, right here in New York during last year’s America’s Cup races. I know, I was there. I saw his equipment.”

“Mere child’s play. He’s using equipment designed by others, and also the wrong frequency. The slightest changes in weather will disrupt his messages, and he has no device for creating separate channels. I have tested his Hertzian frequencies at length, Mr. Morgan, and believe there is no commercial viability in them whatsoever.”

“Why exactly are they so wrong?”

“For one example, they do not make use of the natural electrical properties of the Earth. The Tesla currents on the other hand are tuned to the frequencies of our planet. These are continuous waves, not pulsed interruptions. In short, my way is best for transmitting substantive information, and insuring total privacy.”
¹⁴

“I have a handful of articles with Marconi’s pictures all over them which appear to disagree with you. The British Post Office is using the Hertzian method.—Here’s a newspaper report I picked up in England from an Admiral who has used Marconi’s transmitters for distances exceeding 80 miles: ‘Our [ship] movements have been directed with an ease and certainty and carried out with a confidence which, without this wonderful extension of the range of signalling, would have been wholly unattainable. It is a veritable triumph for Signor Marconi.”
¹⁵
And I have articles which question whether you have ever sent messages beyond the confines of your laboratory.”

“I see that I have taken up enough of your time,” the inventor said, looking at his watch. “I thank you very much for your hospitality.”

“I’m not saying we can’t do business, Mr. Tesla, but I am going to have to think this over.”

“Very good.”

Upon Tesla’s departure, Morgan took out a deck of cards and went through his nightly ritual of playing solitaire. Before him was another file on Tesla’s patents, but these were not in wireless: “Mr. Tesla’s discoveries do away with the carbon filament…[He] explained that by creating an electrostatic field, [cold vacuum] tubes could be hung anywhere in the room. [They can not burn out, because there is no filament to be destroyed]…The estimated manufacture of incandescent lamps is 50,000 a day…”
¹⁶

December 10, 1900

Dear Mr. Morgan,

Appreciating the immense value of your time…I have withdrawn more or less hastily last Friday preferring to make a few condensed statements at long distance which with a small effort on your part will put you in the possession of knowledge I have gained only after a long and exhaustive study.

This lengthy letter, one of the first of many, began with a quote from Professor Adolph Slaby of Germany, who referred to Tesla as “the father of this telegraphy,” and also included quotes from Lord Kelvin and Sir William Crookes on other developments in the field, such as in the construction of his oscillator for generating wireless frequencies. The letter also pointed out Tesla’s legal position, having patented all of the fundamentals of the process, in America, Australia, South Africa, and Europe, and noted the specific flaws of Marconi’s system (pointed out above). “Apologizing for this digression…I beg you to bear in mind that my patents in this still virgin field, should you take hold of them…will command a position which, for a number of reasons will be legally stronger than that held by those of my own discovery in power transmission by alternating currents.”

Tesla ended the letter with a rousing challenge: “Permit me to remind you that had there been only faint-hearted and close-fisted people in the world, nothing great would ever have been done. Rafael could not have created his marvels, Columbus could not have discovered America, the Atlantic cable could not have been laid. You of all should be the man to embark on this enterprise…[which will be] an act of inestimable value to mankind.”
¹⁷