Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla (53 page)

Another case which did not receive much publicity but which became vital to the Supreme Court’s 1943 ruling in Tesla’s favor, was
Marconi v. U.S. Navy,
brought July 29, 1916, two years after their first go-around. The Italian was seeking $43,000 in damages, suing for infringement of fundamental wireless patent no. 763,772, which had been allowed in June 1904.

E. F. Sweet, acting secretary of the navy, and also Assistant Secretary Franklin D. Roosevelt began a correspondence in September to review Tesla’s 1899 file to the Light House Board.
²⁰
The history of Marconi’s patent applications to the U.S. Patent Office provided additional ammunition. In 1900, John Seymour, the commissioner of patents, who had protected Tesla against the demands of Michael Pupin for an AC claim at this same time, disqualified Marconi’s first attempts at achieving a patent because of prior claims of Lodge and Braun and particularly Tesla. “Marconi’s pretended ignorance of the nature of a ‘Tesla oscillator’ [is] little short of absurd,” wrote the commissioner. “Ever since Tesla’s famous [1891-93 lectures]…widely published in all languages, the term ‘Tesla oscillator’ has become a household word on both continents.” The patent office also cited quotations from Marconi himself admitting use of a Tesla oscillator.

Two years later, in 1902, Stone was granted his patent on tuning which the government cited as anticipating Marconi, and two years after that, after Seymour retired, Marconi was granted his infamous 1904 patent.
²¹

“I have had a lot of fun at Columbia,” Armstrong said. The lecturer in physics that semester loftily disparaged the experiments of Nikola Tesla.
“He even went so far as to say that there was very little originality about Tesla.” Ever the audacious student, Armstrong used the professor’s ignorance of Tesla’s teachings to cause the man to receive a hearty shock from some electrical equipment. “He couldn’t let go, and pulled most of the apparatus off the table before the current was turned off.”
²²

Just after graduation, Armstrong invented a feedback amplifier, which was, in essence, a refinement and further development of De Forest’s audion tube. Influenced by the “Edison effect” or flow of electrons studied by Tesla in the early 1890s in his “brush” vacuum tube, Armstrong had discovered a way to take the De Forest audion and amplify its sensitivity and boost its power to another magnitude by connecting a second circuit, or wing circuit, to the grid inside the tube and feeding it back into the grid. The end result was that with this new invention the young whippersnapper could pick up wireless messages from Nova Scotia, Ireland, Germany, San Francisco, and even Honolulu.

As Armstrong was one of Professor Pupin’s star pupils, Pupin was able to set up meetings with Lee De Forest, David Sarnoff, representing Marconi Wireless, and Dr. Karl Frank, head of the Atlantic Communication Company. Since De Forest’s audion lay at the center of the new device, De Forest claimed the “ultra-audion” as his own invention, so Marconi Wireless stepped aside to wait for the dust to settle. Frank, on the other hand, had Armstrong put the equipment into the wireless plant at Sayville and paid him a royalty of $100 per month.
²³
Destined to invent AM and FM radio and a nonconformist by nature, this new wizard on the block had come upon his 1912 discovery because he had rejected the inferior Marconi spark-gap apparatus that most of his wireless buddies were still playing with and, like Stone, plunged himself into the continuous-wave technology developed by Tesla.

With Professor Pupin training many of the new breed of electrical engineers, it is no wonder that few of them would have the gumption of an Armstrong to see that Marconi’s success was based on the work of another and, furthermore, that Marconi succeeded in spite of the fact that he only partially understood what Tesla had attempted. Blinded by the Hertzian spark-gap research, Marconi spread his “myopic vision” through Pupin to the vast hordes of researchers in the field of wireless; and this policy has continued to this day. With Marconi’s highly visible early success, large-scale wireless enterprise, and Nobel Prize on his side of the balance, it became much easier to credit him with the discovery. The ongoing Great War served to further cloud the issue, as the important legal battle between Atlantic Cable Company (Telefunken) and Marconi Wireless was abandoned before it was resolved.

Due to the dangers that existed on the high seas, and the rumors that the Germans were out for Marconi’s head, the
senatore
did not sail back on
the
Lusitania;
he returned on the
St. Paul
with a disguised identity and under an assumed name.

Marconi set sail as the new head of the AIEE, John S. Stone, was honored at a dinner attended by a potpourri of leaders in the industry. Guests included Lee De Forest, who was about to receive a quarter of a million dollars for sale of his patents to AT&T, J. A. White, editor of
Wireless
magazine; David Sarnoff, on the verge of launching his radio empire; Rudolf Goldschmidt, the force behind the Tuckerton plant; A. E. Kennelly; Fritz Lowenstein, who was about to earn $150,000 from AT&T for one of his inventions; and Nikola Tesla, who stood between De Forest and Lowenstein for an official photograph.
²⁴

A fortnight later; in May 1915, a German submarine torpedoed the
Lusitania,
killing 1,134 persons. The sinking, in lieu of the alternative procedure of boarding unarmed passenger ships to check cargo, was unheard of. Quite possibly, Marconi could have been a target; however, the Germans used as their reason the cargo of armaments onboard headed for Great Britain. With only 750 survivors, this “turkey shoot” took almost as many lives as the sinking of the
Titanic.
According to Lloyd Scott of the Navy Consulting Board, “press reports stated that the Germans seemed to revel in this crime, and that various celebrations were held in Germany on account of it. Medals were being struck to commemorate the sinking, and holidays were given to school children.”
²⁵
No longer neutral, Teddy Roosevelt hailed the event as “murder on the open seas.”

The huge loss of life, however, did not stop George Sylvester Viereck from supporting the German position. Having traveled by zeppelin above Berlin during the war, Viereck stated in the
New York Times
that had the weapons made it to England, “more Germans would have been killed than died in the [boat] attack.” Viereck’s callous argument inflamed the populace against him. The former renowned poet was now hailed as “a venom-bloated toad of treason.”
²⁶

The enemy seemed within. German spies were everywhere. Reports started filtering in that the Germans were creating a secret submarine base around islands off the coast of Maine. It was also alleged that the broadcasting station out at Sayville was not merely sending neutral dispatches to Berlin but also coded messages to battleships and submarines.

As Tesla, just a few months earlier, had boasted to Morgan that he was working for the Germans and with the
Times
reporting on their front page that “Grand Admiral von Tirpitz [was] contemplat[ing] a more vigorous campaign against freight ships…[and planning] a secret base on this side of the Atlantic,”
²⁷
it is quite possible that the inventor became tainted with a smattering of “venom-bloated toad’s blood.”

On July 2, 1915, the senate chambers in Washington were rocked by a terrorist bomb. The following day, the fanatic who planted it, Frank Holt, a
teacher of German from Cornell University, walked into Jack Morgan’s Long Island home toting a six-gun in each hand. With his wife and daughter leaping at the assailant, Morgan charged forward. Shot twice in the groin, Morgan was able, with the help of his fearsome wife, to wrestle the guns from the man and get him arrested. Recuperating at the hospital, the hero received a get-well letter from Nikola Tesla.
²⁸

When questioned, Holt claimed he had not planned to kill the Wall Street monarch. He only wanted the financier to stop the flow of arms to Europe. A few days later, as Morgan recovered quickly and fired all German and Austrian workers from his office, the self-righteous pacifist committed suicide in his jail cell. His secret had been unveiled. Holt’s real name was Dr. Erich Muenter; he was a former German teacher from Harvard who had disappeared after murdering his wife with poison in 1906.
²⁹

A week later, on Tesla’s fifty-ninth birthday, the
Times
reported that not only were the Germans dropping bombs over London from zeppelins; they were also “controlling air torpedoes” by means of radiodynamics. Fired from zeppelins, the supposed “German aerial torpedo[es] can theoretically remain in the air three hours, and can be controlled from a distance of two miles…Undoubtedly, this is the secret invention of which we have heard so many whispers that the Germans have held in reserve for the British fleet.”
³⁰
Although it seemed as if Tesla’s devil automata had come into being, as the wizard had predicted a decade before, Tesla himself announced to the press that “the news of these magic bombs cannot be accepted as true, [though] they reveal just so many startling possibilities.”

“Aghast at the pernicious existing regime of the Germans,” Tesla accused Germany of being an “unfeeling automaton, a diabolic contrivance for scientific, pitiless, wholesale destruction the like of which was not dreamed of before…Such is the formidable engine Germany has perfected for the protection of her Kultur and conquest of the globe.” Predicting the ultimate defeat of the fatherland, the Serb, whose former countrymen were fighting for their own survival against the kaiser, no doubt stopped doing business with von Tirpitz, although he probably continued his relationship with Professor Slaby, who may have been morally opposed to the war.

Tesla’s solution to war was twofold, a better defense, through an electronic Star Wars type of shield he was working on, and “the eradication from our hearts of nationalism.” If blind patriotism could be replaced with “love of nature and scientific ideal…permanent peace [could] be established.”
³¹

The period from 1915 to the date of the United States entry into the war, in 1917, was marked by numerous reports of espionage. Spies had infiltrated the Brooklyn Navy Yard to use the station to send secret coded
messages to Berlin; through Richard Pfund, head of the Sayville plant, they had also installed equipment on the roof of 111 Broadway, the building that housed Telefunken’s offices.
³²
Shortly after America’s entrance into the war, Tesla informed Scherff that Lt. Emil Meyers, “who ran the Tuckerton operation…[had been placed] in a Detention Camp in Georgia,” suspected of spying.
³³
Thus, the monthly stipend from Telefunken had come to an abrupt end.
³⁴

The secretary of the navy, whose job it became to take over all wireless stations, was Josephus Daniels; his assistant was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In the summer of 1915, Daniels, who was actively monitoring Jack Hammond’s work, had read a recent interview with Thomas Alva Edison. Impressed with the contents, the secretary called Edison and set up a meeting with the idea of creating an advisory board of inventors. The hope was that should the country go to war, a civilian think tank, much like the one created in Great Britain, could be created. (Great Britain’s consulting board included J. J. Thomson, W. H. Bragg, Sir William Crookes, Sir Oliver Lodge, and Ernest Rutherford.) Edison, who himself had received death threats from the fifth column, became president of this “Naval Consultant Board.” Working with Franklin Roosevelt, Edison appointed numerous inventors to various positions, including Gano Dunne, Reginald Fessenden, Benjamine Lamme, Irving Langmuir, R. A. Millikan, Michael Pupin, Charles S. Scott, Elmer Sperry, Frank Sprague, and Elihu Thomson. The journalist Waldemar Kaempffert was also included because of his writing prowess.
³⁵

It is possible that Tesla’s link to Telefunken was the reason his name was not on the list, although many other inventors were also excluded, for example, Hammond, Stone, and De Forest. Tesla also was not one to work again for Thomas Edison. Tesla’s work, however, was obviously vital to the government. With President Wilson allowing his adviser, Col. William House, to set up a secret fund for Hammond to advance the Tesla inventions, Tesla himself slipped into a more surreptitious realm.
³⁶

Dear Tesla,

When that Nobel Prize comes, remember that I am holding on to my house by the skin of my teeth and desperately in need of cash!

No apology for mentioning the matter.

Yours faithfully,
RUJ
¹

O
n November 6, 1915, the
New York Times
published on its front page that Tesla and Edison were to share the Nobel Prize in physics that year. The source for the report was “the Copenhagen correspondent of the [London]
Daily Telegraph.
” Although Tesla himself forwarded to J. P. Morgan Jr. original copies of the announcement (which were also carried in a number of other journals),
²
neither Tesla nor Edison ever received the Nobel Prize.

In trying to ascertain what happened, Tesla biographers Inez Hunt and Wanetta Draper wrote in the early 1960s to Dr. Rudberg of the Royal Academy of Science of Sweden. Rudberg, referring to an event which took place a half century before, replied, “Any rumor that a person has not been given a Nobel Prize because he has made known his intention to refuse the reward is ridiculous.” Thus, they concluded that the affair was “a sardonic joke.”
³

Curiously, this same
Times
article listed four other people for Nobel Prizes in literature and chemistry who also did not receive the award that year, although three of them eventually obtained it. The fourth, Troeln Lund, like Tesla and Edison, never received the honor.
⁴

Although the announcement came in November 1915, the nomination
process actually was concluded nine months earlier. There were nineteen scientists on the physics committee, each allowed two bids. Out of the thirty-eight possible bids, two were made for inventors in wireless, E. Branly and A. Righi; two were for the quantum physicist Max Planck; Tom Edison received one bid; and the Braggs took four. According to the Royal Academy’s records, Nikola Tesla was
not
nominated that year. (However, two bids, nos. 33 and 34, were missing from their files.) A week after the
Times
announcement, on November 14, Stockholm announced that Prof. William H. Bragg and his son would share the award in physics.

The man who nominated Edison, Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of Columbia University (who, twenty years before, had awarded Tesla an honorary doctorate), apologized to the committee for offering up Edison’s name. “Although somewhat out of the line of previous nominations,” Osborn wrote, qualifying his decision,” I would [like to] suggest the name of Mr. Thomas A. Edison…who is through his inventions, one of the great benefactors of mankind.” Tesla would not be nominated until 1937 (by F. Ehrenhaft of Wien, who had previously nominated Albert Einstein).
⁵

Certainly, both Tesla and Edison deserved such an award, and it is nothing short of astounding that (1) neither of them ever received it and (2) no one at the time discovered the reason behind this curious quirk of history.

O’Neill, having interviewed Tesla on the subject, stated that Tesla “made a definite distinction between the inventor, who refined preexisting technology, and the discoverer who created new principles…Tesla declared himself a discoverer and Edison an inventor; and he held the view that placing the two in the same category would completely destroy all sense of the relative value of the two accomplishments.”
⁶

Support for this interpretation can be found in a letter Tesla wrote to the Light House Board in Washington from his Colorado Springs Experimental Station in 1899. The navy had written Tesla that they would “prefer” to give their impending wireless contract to an American rather than to Marconi.

“Gentleman,” Tesla responded curtly. “Much as I value your advances I am compelled to say, in justice to myself, that I would never accept a preference on any ground…as I would be competing against some of those who are following in my path…Any pecuniary advantage which I might derive by availing myself of the privilege, is a matter of the most absolute indifference to me.”
⁷
If no one else would recognize his genius, Tesla certainly did. He would not think twice about giving up mere cash when faced with the prospect of being
compared,
in this case to Marconi.

The following letter to Johnson, which the inventor took the time to rewrite in a careful hand, was penned just four days after the announcement and four days
before
Sweden’s decision to give the award to the Braggs.

My dear Luka,

Thank you for your congratulations…To a man of your consuming ambition such a distinction means much. In a thousand years there will be many thousand recipients of the Nobel Prize. But I have not less than
four dozen of my creations identified with my name
in technical literature. These are honors real and permanent which are bestowed not by a few who are apt to err, but by the whole world which seldom makes a mistake, and for any of these I would give all the Nobel Prizes which will be distributed during the next thousand years.
⁸

This passage was contained in its entirety in the Hunt and Draper text; however, they incorrectly concluded that this “sober” message was overshadowed by “jubilation” because of the announcement.
⁹
Johnson also incorrectly understood the full implication of the letter, because in March 1916 he refers to the award, fully expecting Tesla to receive it.
¹⁰

In the
New York Times
interview on the day following their announcement, Tesla stated that Edison was “worthy of a dozen Nobel Prizes.” The various Tesla biographers assumed that this was a public statement congratulating Edison when, in fact, it was a piquant snub to the Nobel committee. Tesla was stating between the lines that the Nobel committee recognized only small accomplishments rather than truly original conceptualizations.

“A man puts in here [in my Tesla coil] a kind of gap—he gets a Nobel Prize for doing it…I cannot stop it.”
¹¹
Thus, Edison’s many “better mousetraps” could all be honored, but none of them, in Tesla’s opinion, concerned the
creation of new principles.
They were simply refinements of existing apparatus.

Edison would probably have agreed with Tesla on this point, for most of his inventions were actually further developments of other people’s work. However, Edison did have a number of original discoveries and creations. In his own opinion, his most important contribution was the phonograph, which certainly was the work of genius, even by Tesla’s criteria, and deserving of a Nobel Prize. Furthermore, Edison’s unparalleled success in bringing promising creations to fruition was exactly Tesla’s failure, and that, too, was a gift placing Edison in a category all by himself.

Quite possibly a letter much like the one sent to Johnson or the Light House Board could also have been wired to the Nobel committee. If this hypothesis is correct, a prejudice would have persisted against Tesla and Edison, and this would explain the indefensible position of the Swedish Royal Academy in never honoring either of these two great scientists.

Inventor Testifies He Owes the Waldorf
Hasn’t a Cent in Bank
¹²

As 1915 was drawing to a close, Tesla began to find himself in deeper and deeper financial straits. Although an efficient water fountain which he designed that year was received favorably,
¹³
his overhead was still too high. Expenses included outlays for the turbine work at the Edison Station, his office space at the Woolworth Building, salaries to his assistants and Mrs. Skerritt, his new secretary, past debts to such people as the Johnsons and George Scherff, maintenance costs for Wardenclyffe, legal expenses on wireless litigation, and his accommodations at the Waldorf-Astoria.

Some of the costs were deferred, particularly by the hotel, but Mr. Boldt’s patience had reached its limit. Tesla’s uncanny elusiveness and noble air had worn thin. Rumors began circulating of peculiar odors and cackling sounds emanating from the inventor’s suite. The maids were complaining that there was an inordinate amount of pigeon excrement on the windowsills. Boldt sent Tesla a bill for the total rent due, nearly $19,000. Simultaneously, Tesla was hit with a suit for $935 for taxes still owed on Wardenclyffe.

Tesla signed over the Wardenclyffe property to Boldt just as he was called into the state supreme court. Before Justice Finch, the inventor revealed that “he possessed no real estate or stocks and that his belongings, all told, were negligible.” Under oath, Tesla revealed that he lived at the prestigious Waldorf “mostly on credit,” that his company “had no assets but is receiving enough royalties on patents to pay expenses,” and that most of his patents were sold or assigned to other companies. When asked if he owned an automobile or horses, the inventor responded no.

“Well, haven’t you got any jewelry?”

“No jewelry; I abhor it.”
¹¹

This embarrassing article was published for all to see in the
World.
Yet, as was his custom with any article about himself, the inventor had his secretary paste
the mea culpa
in the latest volume of press clippings. Looking much like a multivolume encyclopedia, this text, along with his other records and correspondence, would provide for posterity an accurate account of the inventor’s rich and complicated life. The inventor had chosen his words carefully when speaking under oath to the judge. As much as he loathed being in a debtor’s position, he wanted the Morgans, Marconis, Franklin Roosevelts, and Woodrow Wilsons to know of his plight, for in the final analysis this shame would be theirs as much as his. Even T. C. Martin had turned against him, writing petty letters to Elihu Thomson at this time, complaining of how Tesla chiseled money out of him for the opus he had created of the inventor’s collected works a generation ago.
¹⁵

Attempting to raise funds in a variety of ways, Tesla continued to try to market his speedometer, push to get monies from American firms for the bladeless turbines, and collect royalty payments from Lowenstein and Telefunken for the Tuckerton and Sayville plants. The elder statesman of invention also continued to write newspaper articles for the
World
and the
Sun
for ready cash, and he also moved to exploit other creations, such as his electrotherapeutic machines, with Dr. Morrell. Tesla wrote Scherff that he expected the medical market to be $3-$4 million.
¹⁶

The publication of his wretched state in the public forum and the transfer of Wardenclyffe to another party produced in Tesla a deep sense of anger and corresponding shame; for now the world had officially branded him a dud. If success is measured in a material way, it was clear that Tesla was the ultimate failure.

On the exterior, the inventor kept up appearances, but this event would mark the turning point in his life. Now he began the slow but steady turning away from society. Simultaneously, he traveled to live in other states, in part to conduct business in a fresh atmosphere and in part to remove himself from a hostile environment. He wrote a letter to Henry Ford in Detroit, hoping, finally, that the auto magnate would recognize the great advantages of his steam engine.

“I can tell, any day, that Ford is going to contact me, and take me out of all my worries,” Tesla confidently predicted to Julius Czito, Coleman’s son, who was now working for him. “Sure enough, one fine morning a body of engineers from the Ford Motor Company presented themselves with the request of discussing with me an important project,” Tesla revealed a few years later.

“Didn’t I tell you,” the prophet remarked triumphantly.

“You are amazing, Mr. Tesla,” Julius responded. “Everything is coming out just as you predicted.”

“As soon as these hardheaded men were seated,” Tesla continued, “I, of course, immediately began to extol the wonderful features of my turbine, when the spokesmen interrupted me and said, ‘We know all about this, but we are on a special errand. We have formed a psychological society for the investigation of psychic phenomena and we want you to join us in this undertaking.’” Flabbergasted, Tesla contained his indignation long enough to escort the wayward explorers to the street.
¹⁷

Suffering from an attack of the grippe throughout the first month of 1916, Tesla made the newspapers by posing for a portrait for the provocative painter Princess Vilna Lwoff-Parlaghy. Daughter of Baroness von Zollerndorff and married and divorced from Prince Lwoff of Russia, Vilna
had painted the portraits of such greats as Field Marshall von Moltke, Bismarck, the Baroness Rothschild, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, and Teddy Roosevelt. Reluctant at first to sit because of superstitious feelings of foreboding, Tesla soon acquiesced and found a comfortable chair among Her Highness’s various pets, which included, at one time or another, “two dogs, an Angora cat, a bear, lion cub, alligator, ibis and two falcons.” Recently kicked out of the Plaza for unpaid bills totaling $12,000, perhaps the princess shared a good laugh with the Serbian nobleman, who himself was in a similar predicament. The painting was reproduced in
Electrical Experimenter
in 1919 and, once again, on the cover of
Time
for Tesla’s seventy-fifth birthday, in 1931.
¹⁸

This time period also saw the arrival of Tesla’s sister’s son, Nicholas Trbojevich, himself an inventor who wanted to work as Tesla’s assistant. Apparently, Tesla was unable to spend much time with his nephew. Feeling rebuked, Trbojevich turned to the local Serbian community, where he found a willing Prof. Michael Pupin, who took the lad “under his wing” and on a tour of the city. Trbojevich endeared himself to the great professor and they became friends. Trbojevich would come to develop, in the 1920s and 1930s the hypoid gear and several sophisticated improvements in steering for the automotive industry. Working with mathematical principles, this inventor designed an elegant way to lower the driveshaft, running from the motor to the rear axle, nearly a foot. This advance enabled running boards to be eliminated, thereby allowing the car to become more streamlined. Simultaneously, it earned Trbojevich a tidy sum. Moving to Detroit in the late 1920s, Trbojevich continued to correspond with Uncle Nikki, who also came to visit around the time of the Great Depression.
¹⁹