Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla (39 page)

In pondering these letters, it becomes apparent that Tesla was not too perturbed by the assassination of the president. Self-engulfed, he was utterly amblyopic when it came to negotiating with Morgan, a man enmeshed in two potentially epic crises and one history-altering tragedy. Theodore Roosevelt, who now became president, was not a man who was going to be particularly kind to big business.

To say that Tesla blundered here would be an understatement. His
decision to alter his contract without telling Morgan and his resolution to proceed with the grand vision when he knew that his funds would be inadequate were addlebrained. One suspects that once Tesla had signed a contract with the greatest financial force on the planet, a deep-seated, subconscious complex was triggered involving an impatient egomaniacal streak that forced the inventor to place everything on the line when he should have proceeded in a more discerning way. Incapable of compromising and at the risk of self-obliteration, Tesla began construction of the tower
after
his falling out with Morgan. On the positive side, the inventor knew that he was in a race against pirates and for what he perceived as the “Holy Grail,” his peerless notch in history. Undaunted, the courageous inventor moved ahead with the conviction that his path was right and that he could not fail.

Tesla’s seemingly foolhardy decision must be understood in light of the fact that fortunes had already been reaped on his former inventions by Morgan and others. By 1901, for instance, Morgan’s General Electric Company was actually producing
more
induction motors than the Westinghouse Corporation; Morgan was involved, along with Westinghouse, in instituting an electric subway system in the bowels of Manhattan based on Tesla’s polyphase system; and then, of course, there was Niagara Falls. Every home in the world was going to be illuminated by Tesla’s system. The revenues pouring into the electric power companies for this new technology were staggering, but Tesla received not a cent. One way or another, he felt that Morgan should give him carte blanche.

It was a bleak autumn for the inventor when the ground was broken for the eighteen-story edifice, Tesla now naming it his “magnifying transmitter.” Although mostly constructed of wood, “50 tons of iron and steel” were also used, along with “50,000 bolts.”
²⁶
Taking into account the amount of lumber it took to line the well and build the staircase down, and the difficulty in digging it, one begins to visualize the enormous expenditures that were going to be involved. W. D. Crow stayed in charge of construction. Hoping for the best, Tesla wrote to Katharine on October 13:

My dear Mrs. Johnson,

13 is my lucky number and so I know you will comply with my wish…[to] come to the Waldorf. And if you do—when I transmit my wireless messages across seas and continents you will get the finest bonnet ever made if it breaks me…

I have already ordered a simple lunch and you must come en masse. We must exhibit Hobson…I know he likes me better than you.

Nikola Tesla
Electrical Engineer & Inventor
²⁷

In November, the inventor tried once again to approach Morgan, setting up a meeting at 23 Wall Street and bringing a succinct list of his latest patent assignments and his report on how the construction was going.

Dear Mr. Morgan,

Pardon me for trespassing on your valuable time…The practical significance of my system resides in the fact that the effects transmitted diminishes only in a simple ratio with the distance whereas in all other systems it is reduced in preportion to the square. To illustrate, if the distance be increased 100-fold, I get 1/100th of the effect, while under the same conditions others can obtain at the very best, 1/10,000th of the effect. This feature alone bars all competition.

In regard to [other advantages], there are only two ways possible of economically utilizing the energy transmitted…: either storing it in dynamic form as, for instance, the energy of well timed thrusts is stored in a pendulum, or by accumulating it in potential form, as for example compressed air is stored in a reservoir…My rights [through patents] on both are fundamental.

Referring particularly to telegraphy and telephone, I have still in the patent office two applications [pending]…In one I describe and claim discoveries relating to the transmission of signals through the earth to any distance no matter how great, and in the other a new principle which secures absolute privacy of messages and also enables the simultaneous transmission of any desired number of messages up to many thousands, through the same channel, be it the earth, or a wire or a cable. On this latter principle I have applied for patents in the chief foreign countries. I consider these inventions of extreme commercial importance.

Hoping that I shall be able to satisfy you that your generosity and confidence in me have not been misplaced,

I remain,
Yours very respectfully, N. Tesla
²⁸

Morgan’s continuing mistreatment of the inventor and lack of acknowledgment of the significance of the plans revealed were almost too much to bear. Tesla could not face the Johnsons or anybody for Thanksgiving and so declined their invitation. “Dear Luka,” Tesla wrote, “Kindly excuse and remember me with kind regards,” signing the letter, “Nikola Faraway.”
²⁹

Signor Marconi had been commuting regularly between England and the States throughout this period, looking for sites to place his wireless stations. Prime locations included the eastern tip of Long Island, Martha’s Vineyard, and Cape Cod. “In September 1901, the new equipment, including the immensely powerful transmitter, was installed at Poldhu [England] and a great 200-foot diameter ring of masts 200-feet high had risen like [a huge] skeleton…on the edge of the cliff. Test transmissions to other Marconi stations, in particular that at Crookhaven, Ireland, over two hundred miles away, had shown that the waves did—at least to this extent—follow the curvature of the Earth and not fly off into space. Across the Atlantic, at Cape Cod, the twin station was similarly nearing completion, and plans were made with quiet optimism for the experiment to take place in a few weeks’ time.”
³⁰

In September, gale-force winds leveled the aerial in Poldu, and in November the same thing occurred on the Cape. Tenaciously, Marconi pressed on, gambling with a less powerful but sturdier transmitter in England and abandoning the idea of constructing a twin in the States. Instead, the Italian would try simply to intercept the signals of the English transmitter by fashioning an aerial with kites, high-altitude weather balloons, and a sensitive coherer as a receiver.

On December 6, he landed, with a small crew, in Newfoundland, Canada, and floated up his receiving antenna on a spot designated appropriately as Signal Hill. December 12 was chosen as the day for the experiment, the beacon selected dot dot dot, the Morse code for the letter
S.

On Friday the thirteenth, during a lull in a miserable storm of hail and rain, three faint taps were heard on his equipment. The world was rocked; Guglielmo Marconi’s name was irrefutably carved into the history books; the age of mass communication had begun.

December 1901: Signor Marconi has scored a shrewd coup. Whether or not the 3 dots he heard came from England or, like those Tesla heard, from Mars, if I am aught a prophet, we will hear no more of trans-Atlantic messages for some time.

L
EE
D
E
F
OREST
¹

E
mbittered, Tesla knew that Marconi’s achievement was predicated on the use of his coil, oscillators, and general design which he had spelled out in lectures years earlier. Preece assumed partial culpability, as he had requested from Tesla the use of this equipment for the work, but Marconi had announced that the Tesla apparatus was unnecessary and ineffectual,
²
and this had caused a rift in the Italian’s relationship with Preece. Fleming, on the other hand, having studied Tesla’s work in earnest ever since he had received the inventor at his home in London in 1892, saw no such conflict; for it was he who “arranged for Marconi the transmitting plant at Poldhu.”
³
Tesla revealed many years later: “[Marconi had] declared that wireless communication across the Atlantic was impossible because there was a wall of water several miles high between the two continents which the rays could not traverse. But subsequent developments showed that he had used my system in secret all the time, received the plaudits of the world and accepted stolidly even my own congratulations, and it was only a long time after that he admitted it.”
⁴

Thomas Commerford Martin arrived at his office on Monday, December 16 to review the astonishing report from Newfoundland. With only Marconi and one aide as a witness and the plans having been kept secret until the deed was accomplished, many doubted the Italian’s
proclamation. Prof. Silvanus Thomson, of Great Britain, suggested that Marconi had probably received static caused by severe weather conditions. One of Martin’s colleagues concurred: “It’s a fake. Such a thing cannot be done.”

“I think I should seek another opinion,” the editor said as he put in a call to Tom Edison.

“Very doubtful. How’s it going to get around that blasted curve?” came Edison’s hedging response. Martin dialed up Michael Pupin.

“Professor, do you believe Marconi’s transmission is genuine?”

“I most certainly do.”

“Then I think we ought to celebrate it.”
⁵

It was the dead of winter when Tesla ducked out of the Waldorf-Astoria as the new crowning electrical savant checked in. Tesla probably went to Wardenclyffe to stare at the first tier of the tower, which was finally under construction. With the temperature so cold, it was just one more annoyance to slow down progress.

With only a few days to prepare, Martin was able to book the Astor Gallery at the Waldorf for the banquet, on Monday, January 13, 1902. With three hundred guests arriving, the task of arranging all the particulars put him in a frenzied state. He brushed by fantastic pictures of a wizard’s laboratory as he hurried out the door.

The hall was decorated with a large map of the Atlantic placed on the wall and a festoon of wires “with clusters of three lights” blinking
dot-dot-dot
strung between large tablets reading Signal Hill in Newfoundland and Poldhu in England. Around the room, each table had its own model transmission tower, nameplates, and “Italian olive green menus” on card stock with pen and ink drawings of the transatlantic accomplishment. At the upper dais “in the middle was a medallion with Mr. Marconi’s portrait, draped with the Italian flag.” American and British flags and pendants for the AIEE and the Italian coat of arms were also placed there.

“At fitting times, [the lights] were flashed” to the applause of the audience; and to cap off the dinner, for dessert, a “procession of waiters” came marching in with ice cream imbedded in ice carvings of incandescent lamps, ships at sea, electric vehicles, and wireless telegraph towers.
⁶

The four-foot gnome trimmed his goatee and checked his gold pocket watch before smiling at himself once more in the mirror as he departed for the affair. Although he rocked from side to side when he walked, Charles Proteus Steinmetz developed a new swagger, for he had just been elected to the presidency of the AIEE. He was about to receive an honorary doctorate from Harvard and a professorship in engineering from Union College, located near GE headquarters in Schenectady, New York. The college appointment enabled Steinmetz to divide his time between academia and the corporate world.

During the six-hour train ride down to the city, the abstract mathematican carefully read through galleys of his opus on AC which was about to be republished in a larger format by McGraw-Hill. It was a small matter to the preeminent scholar that he had removed the name of his coauthor and had continued the practice of eliminating reference to the source of his work,
The Inventions, Researches and Writings of Nikola Tesla.
Electricians, he rationalized, would be more interested in his advanced concepts than “in knowing who first investigated the phenomena.”
⁷
By 1907, Steinmetz would lead in establishing the AIEE Code of Ethics.
⁸
Who was Tesla, anyway? Marconi was the man of the hour.

At the upper dais sat a gaggle of Tesla adversaries. Aside from the new president, there was Professor Pupin, now financially tied to Marconi; Elihu Thomson, who claimed priority on the invention of the AC motor and Tesla coil; Carl Hering, who had backed Dobrowolski in priority discussions of the inventor of long-distance AC transmission; William Stanley, who had pirated the Tesla/Westinghouse induction motor and was now producing them legally for GE; Frank Sprague, who gained his reputation in part as the inventor of the electric railroad when, in fact, it was all part of Tesla’s AC polyphase system; T. C. Martin, who was still angry about past moneys owed for sale of the inventor’s collected works; and, of course, Guglielmo Marconi, the chap who had beaten him to the punch. Tesla’s decision not to attend created an excellent atmosphere for gaiety—and for perpetuating Steinmetz’s published position of relegating the pioneer to the category of nonperson.

Others present at the infamous upper dais included Alexander Graham Bell and general counsels from Great Britain and Italy, and around the hall were Josh Wetzler, D. McFarlan Moore, many of the men’s wives, and Mrs. Thomas Alva Edison, who was representing her husband.

Martin presided over the occasion, opening up the period for lectures with readings of telegrams from those not in attendance. He began with a letter from the mayor and then read a communiqué from the Wizard of Menlo Park.

To T. C. Martin:

I am sorry that I am prevented from attending your annual dinner to-night, expecially as I would like to pay my respects to Marconi, the young man who had the monumental audacity to attempt, and succeed in, jumping an electric wave clear across the Atlantic. Thomas A. Edison
⁹

Martin did not announce that at Christmas Marconi had sent Edison a “cheerful telegram” reiterating his success and offering to display personally to the master his transatlantic equipment or that Marconi was already tendering Edison offers for his early wireless patents.
¹⁰

The
New York Times
reported “cheers when the toastmaster came to a letter from Nikola Tesla who said that he ‘could not rise to the occasion.’”
¹¹
No doubt, they masked the jeers. Grinning through his oversized mustache, Martin waited for the clamor to subside before continuing with the rest of the letter:

I regret not being able to contribute to the pleasure of the evening, but I wish to join the members in heartily congratulating Mr. Marconi on his brilliant results. He is a splendid worker, full of rare and subtle energies. May he prove to be one of those whose powers increase and whose mind feelers reach out farther with advancing years for the good of the world and honor of his country.

Prof. Elihu Thomson followed. “I had received the news of Marconi’s great feat from over the telephone from a reporter, who wished to know whether I believed that signals had actually been received across the Atlantic.” Riding on the accolades of the audience, Thomson related his response: “As I told the reporter, if Marconi says that he received the signals, I believe they were received.” And then the hero took the pulpit. Waiting gratiously for the applause to subside, he began.

Signor Marconi explained his syntonic wireless system and pointed out that “he had built very largely on the work of others and mentioned Clerk Maxwell, Lord Kelvin, Professor Henry and Professor Hertz.” At this time, its most important use was for communication between ships. The Italian was pleased to announce that “over 70 ships now carried his wireless system, 37 for the British navy, 12 for the Italian navy, and the remainder on large liners, such as the Cunard Line, the North German Lloyd and the Beaver Line. There were also over 20 stations in operation…with more on construction.” Marconi addressed the problem of selective tuning and suggested that he had such a system created so that “messages transmitted [from one ship] can in no way be received by any other, except that attuned to receive the message.”
¹²
Stated as bravado, Marconi was bluffing, as he had no system for creating separate channels.

“It is my hope,” Signor Marconi concluded, “that at no great distant date, I shall bring my system to the point of perfection of allowing friends and relatives to communicate with each other across the ocean at a small expense.”

Professor Pupin concluded. “Referring to claims made that previous to Marconi wireless signals had been transmitted over short distances,” Pupin said, glancing back to the upper dais, “any schoolboy by means of an Hertzian oscillator could transmit such signals over a short distance…but it required the engineer to make [such] work of avail to the world.” In attempting to allay fears that Marconi’s system would make obsolete
Atlantic cables, Dr. Pupin shrewdly “pointed out, as an illustration, how the completion of electric lighting has aided the gas industry and enhanced rather than decreased the value of [their] investments.”
¹³

On January 9, Tesla dispatched a letter to Morgan explaining that the patents of the “Marconi-Fleming syndicate” do not accurately reflect their actual apparatus but are covered “by my patents of 1896 [and] 1897.” The balance of the letter describes the precursor to what became, a half century later, the major television networks:

I need not tell you that I have worked as hard as I have dared without collapsing…Hav[ing] examined and rejected hundreds of experiments…with the capital at command, I am glad to say that by slow and steady advances, I have managed to continue a machine…[which shall produce] an electrical disturbance of sufficient intensity to be perceptible over the whole of the earth…[When] I throw the switch, I shall send a greeting to the whole world and for this great triumph I shall ever be grateful to you…

[This system] will do away not only with the cables but with the newspapers also, for how can journals as the present [stay in business] when every [customer] can have a cheap machine printing its own world news?

[The] beautiful invention which I am now developing, will enable me to spread our name into [every] home, and it will be [able] everywhere to [hear] the tune of my voice.
¹⁴

This would be the inventor’s last communiqué to the financier for fully nine months. He set himself the difficult task of completing construction of the eighteen-story transmission tower, knowing full well that he did not have sufficient funds. From bank records dating back to 1896, it is apparent that Tesla had nearly $50,000, some of which had been converted into land assets.
¹⁵
The last of Morgan’s money had probably been received, so it was at this time, in the midst of 1902, that the trailblazer began to tap his personal reserves to keep the project going. Work would continue at a steady pace throughout the year.

Having received his doctorate in electrical engineering in 1899, Lee De Forest had tried once again to gain entrée into his idol’s laboratory, but for a third time Tesla refused him. De Forest decided, therefore, to set out on his own. In 1901 he succeeded in sending wireless messages across the Hudson River over a distance of one or two miles and shortly thereafter sent impulses from State Street, in downtown New York, to Staten Island,
seven miles away. By using “self-restoring detectors with telephone receivers instead of Morse inkers or sounders,” De Forest succeeded in increasing substantially the speed of transmission. Now his apparatus threatened Western Union’s local telegraph lines. Working with D. McFarlan Moore, who had “studied Tesla’s monumental early volume,” De Forest was able to decrease the problems of static interference. By 1903 he was reporting yacht races at a speed of twenty-five to thirty words per minute, or about as fast as a Morse-code operator could send them. By 1904 he could transmit messages “180 miles over land, between Buffalo and Cleveland,” and by 1908 his signaling device was jumping continents.
¹⁶

Perhaps it was because of Tesla’s regard for the Yale graduate or because of the canniness of his patents that Tesla did not try to prevent De Forest from using his oscillators and general scheme. The same, however, could not be said for Reginald Fessenden, whom he sued for patent infringement in April 1902.

Fessenden, who had worked for both Edison and Westinghouse as far back as the early 1880s, is generally credited with having invented the means of sending voice over the airwaves. Although Marconi was using the electromagnetic frequencies to mimic the impulse patterns of the Morse code, “it occurred to Fessenden to send out a continuous signal with the amplitude of the waves varied (or ‘modulated’) to make the variation follow the irregularities of sound waves. At the receiving station, these variations could be sorted out and reconverted into sound. In 1906 the first such message was sent out from the Massachusetts coast, and wireless receivers could actually pick up the music. In this way radio, as we know it, was born.”
¹⁷
A year later, using his patented audion, which was, in essence, a modification of Tesla’s ‘brush tube,’ De Forest succeeded in transmitting the voice of Enrico Caruso, who was singing at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York.
¹⁸