Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla (58 page)

The election of 1920 was the first to be broadcast by radio to a national audience; Lee De Forest announced the wrong winner four years earlier to a much smaller crowd. With his running mate Calvin Coolidge, Warren Harding trounced Democratic contender James Cox and vice presidential hopeful Franklin Roosevelt.

By this time, RCA was a megacorporation, writing million-dollar checks to John Hays Hammond Jr. and Edwin Armstrong. Having uncovered a great new market, RCA had increased its radio audience in 1924 to 5 million listeners. Profits were made not only in selling air space to advertisers but also in selling the radios themselves. By 1928 national broadcasts would link all forty-eight states, and soon after, regular shows featuring Buck and Will Rogers, Amos ‘n’ Andy, Burns and Allen, the Shadow, Stoopnagle and Budd, and Jack Benny would become daily fare. Such advertisers as Lucky Strike, Maxwell House, Canada Dry, Chesterfield, and Pontiac would soon insinuate themselves into the mass psyche. Tesla would say that he cared not to listen to the radio because he found it “too distracting.”

Other milestones during this period included the anointment of the “Manassa Mauler,” Jack Dempsey, as world heavyweight champion, a soaring stock market, and a number of key trials, most notably, Sacco and Vanzetti’s, alleged anarchists accused of murder, the Scopes monkey trial, and the $500 fine and ten-day incarceration of Mae West for lewd improvisations during her hit Broadway play
Sex.
Newest crazes included speakeasies, Al Capone, flapper dresses, and such dances as the Charleston, waltzing till you dropped, and the Shimmy. Although the radio was czar at home, for a night on the town, silent movies were king. Deaths during the Roaring Twenties included T. C. Martin, Jacob Schiff, Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie, Enrico Caruso, William Roentgen, Alexander Graham Bell, Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding, and the thirty-one-year-old heartthrob Rudolf Valentino, who, along with Harry Houdini, died of a ruptured appendix, Vladimir Lenin, Sarah Bernhardt, Princess Lwoff-Parlaghy, and Katharine Johnson, who passed on during autumn 1925.
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October 15, 1925

Dear Tesla,

It was Mrs. Johnson’s injunction that last night of her life that I should keep in touch with Tesla. This is a pretty hard thing to do, but it will not be my fault if it is not done.

Yours faithfully,
Luka
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Throughout the world, wireless inventors were becoming a precious commodity. In Italy, Mussolini “adroitly” redirected the Italian senate’s Fascist salute to Guglielmo Marconi for having established a national broadcasting system.
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A few years later,
Il Duce
approached Jack Hammond to institute a “foolproof secret radio system,” which, to Jack’s later revulsion, became a tool for killing anti-Fascists.
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In the Soviet Union, Lenin contacted Tesla to ask him to come over to his country to institute his AC polyphase and “regional power-distribution stations.”
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Sending emissaries to lure the Serbian nobleman. Tesla became enmeshed in a shady organization known as the Friends of Soviet Russia. With over 5 million people dying there of famine in 1922, the celebrated inventor had been approached by Ivan Mashevkief, of the Russian Workers Club of Manhattan, and by Elsie Blanc, a Communist leader from Massachusetts, to speak at “monster mass-meeting” at the Grange Hall in Springfield in June 1922. The purpose of the conclave, which was coorganized by a group of “Italian radicals,” was ostensibly to raise money for clothing and food for the starving and dying people of Russia. Since a
Russian “bomb factory” was discovered in a warehouse in Manhattan at that time, no doubt some of the funds were also siphoned off for more nefarious activities.

Traveling to Springfield with Mashevkief, who described “with considerable imagination the manufacturing industries of Russia,” Tesla heard the first speaker announce “that the only solution to the economic problem [in Europe] was in the hands of the working class…[which] will have charge of all means of production. ‘They will do this for humanity’s sake and not for profit.’ The speaker prophesied that an economic collapse of the entire industrial structure of Europe will come and when it does, the working class will then secure full control of affairs. The speaker emphatically stated that the famine in Russia to-day is caused by counterrevolutionary forces backed by world capitalists and not because of the alleged poor rule of the bolshevists.”

According to Adrian Potter, the FBI agent who monitored the event, “‘Nicolo Tesla’ was addressed by several Italians as ‘Bettini’…Tesla or Bettini prophesied that Italy was soon to adopt a communist form of Government.”
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Clearly, Tesla was, in some sense, a revolutionary and on the side of the worker, but more for the purpose of transforming and uplifting their station. Tesla’s inventions were purposely constructed so as to reduce consumer cost, preserve natural resources, and relieve humanity of unnecessary manual labor. The Serb believed in the profit motive and strove all his life to become what Lenin loathed, so the reader should read this FBI report with caution, as Tesla’s supposed statement and motive for attending the meeting are not totally clear. Most likely he was concerned with the plight of the starving people in Russia (the U.S. government would send a reported $60 million in aid to feed the Soviets over the next decade),
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and he was also looking to sell his inventions to this new regime, with an accompanying vast potential market.

Where the Soviet leadership sought Tesla out, the aging gnomewizard and odd-combination capitalist-socialist Charles Steinmetz initiated his own contact, writing the Soviet premier a letter in February 1922. “Wishing Lenin success,” Steinmetz “express[ed] confidence that he would complete the astonishing work of social and industrial construction which Russia had undertaken under difficult circumstances.”

Joining a variety of Soviet organizations, Steinmetz also publicized his correspondence with Lenin and “published two papers in the
Electrical World
that described Russia’s electrification plans.” Scratching his gnarled arthritic fingernails on GE’s capitalist blackboard, the self-righteous $100,000-per-year supposed academic implacably “called for American capital to support the project.”
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Although Lenin’s correspondence with Tesla has not been located, his
response to Steinmetz is well known. “Lenin replied…that ‘to my shame’ he had heard the name of Steinmetz only several months ago…thanked Steinmetz for his help, but suggested that the absence of diplomatic relations between the United States and Soviet Russia would impede its implementation.” Lenin, however, would publish the note from the prominent engineer and send Steinmetz an autographed photograph of himself, which he received a few months later.
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Just one year later, Charles Proteus Steinmetz, the four-foot giant of electrical engineering, bon vivant, and family man, was dead. He was fifty-eight.
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Tesla was living on Fifth Avenue, two blocks from Central Park, in the Hotel St. Regis, room 1607, for the years 1920-1923.
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Commuting to Milwaukee and paying an exorbitant fifteen dollars a day in rent, the inventor neglected to compensate the hotel for a seven-month period and was promptly sued for the balance, over $3,000.
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Forced to find other premises, he moved into the Hotel Marguery on Park Avenue and Fortyeighth Street, just a few blocks from his favorite stomping grounds: Bryant Park, behind the New York Public Library, and the great commuter’s hall at Grand Central Station. After hours, in the dead of night, the inventor would grab his coat, cane, white gloves, and derby and prance out for a tour of the park by the library, where he cogitated and fed his precious pigeons. Rumors began spreading about the gaunt eccentric who fed the pigeons, as Tesla purposely kept his identity concealed. “Midnight is the hour he chooses for his visits…Tall, well dressed, of dignified bearing [the man] whistles several times, a signal for the pigeons on the ledges of the building to flutter down about his feet. With a generous hand, the man scatters peanuts on the lawn from a bag. A proud man, yet humble in his charities—Nikola Tesla.”
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According to several researchers, Tesla was a homosexual, and it was supposedly there, in the Hotel Marguery, that he liked to meet “his special friends.” More likely a celibate, the inventor did have one homosexual admirer, the young journalist Kenneth Swezey.
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Born in 1905 and raised in a Brooklyn apartment, where he stayed his whole life, Swezey had constructed his first radio at the age of thirteen, during the height of World War I. Shortly thereafter, forsaking secondary school, he began to write science articles for a number of the local newspapers and magazines and eventually a textbook on chemistry. Able to reduce complex ideas to a level understandable by the masses, Swezey was later congratulated by Albert Einstein for explaining Archimedes’ principle.
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Having sifted through the data on the wireless, Swezey came to realize that Tesla was the unsung author of the invention and sought the hermit out for an interview.

With a round, boyish face, glasses, and a quick and perceptive mind, Swezey quickly endeared himself to Tesla, who expressed surprise at the writer’s youth. Only nineteen at the time, Swezey and Tesla began a special friendship that would last until the end of the inventor’s life. Often they would meet in Tesla’s apartment to go over some articles Swezey was writing or to discuss aspects of Tesla’s work. Afterward, the youngster might join the inventor for dinner, or Tesla would walk the boy back to the gate of the subway.
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As the friendship grew, the aging sage also came to rely on Swezey when he needed assistance, and by the time he was in his late seventies, their friendship became so familiar that, according to Swezey, Tesla sometimes greeted him at the door stark naked. As the years progressed, Tesla’s new publicist became virtually one of the family, befriending Agnes Holden, Robert Johnson’s daughter, and also Sava Kosanovic, Tesla’s nephew, who often traveled to New York from the newly formed Yugoslavia as its first ambassador.

Swezey, who himself described Tesla as “an absolute celibate,” began to compile a large holding of articles, letters, and original manuscripts as he raced, unwittingly, Jack O’Neill, Tesla’s other journalist-compadre, to write the quintessential biography. Concerning Tesla’s habits, Swezey confirmed that the inventor rarely slept. Tesla claimed he slept less than two hours per night. The inventor, however, did admit to “dozing” from time to time “to recharge his batteries.” For exercise, the inventor would walk “8-10 miles per day” and also loosen up in the bathtub (although he also touted a waterless bath which involved charging his body with electricity in such a way as to repel all foreign particles). Later, Tesla would add to his repertoire the squishing and unsquishing of his toes one hundred times for each foot every night. He claimed the practice stimulated his brain cells. “And how this man worked! I will tell you about a little episode…I was sleeping in my room like one dead. It was three after midnight. Suddenly the telephone ring awakened me. Through my sleep I heard his voice, “Swezey, how are you, what are you doing?” This was one of many conversations in which I did not succeed in participating. He spoke animatedly, with pauses, [as he]…work[ed] out a problem, comparing one theory to another, commenting; and when he felt he had arrived at the solution, he suddenly closed the telephone.”
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In 1926, shortly after moving to the Hotel Pennsylvania, the inventor agreed to an interview for
Colliers
magazine. The sixty-eight-year-old philosopher chose as his topic of the evening the female of the species. Viewing the woman’s movement as “one of the most profound portents of the future,” the “tall, thin, ascetic man” told the interviewer, “This struggle of the human female toward sex equality will end in a new sex order, with the female as superior.”
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Happy with the article, Tesla forwarded a copy to Anne Morgan, with whom he still kept in touch and Anne wrote back to
review her own twenty-year odyssey as an advocate in the women’s movement.
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During this same time period Tesla divulged in the
World
his unbridled attachment to the city’s pigeons. “Sometimes I feel that by not marrying I made too great a sacrifice to my work,” he told the reporter, “so I have decided to lavish all the affection of a man no longer young on the feathery tribe. I am satisfied if anything I do will live for posterity. But to care for those homeless, hungry or sick birds is the delight of my life. It is my only means of playing.”

In the same article, Tesla poignantly reveals a fondness for one particular pigeon that had a broken wing and leg. “Using all my mechanical knowledge, I invented a device by which I supported its body in comfort in order to let the bones heal.” Carrying the bird up to his suite, Tesla calculated that “it cost me more than $2,000 to cure [her].” It took over a year and one-half of daily care, and afterward Tesla hand-carried the bird to one of his favorite farms, where “it is now one of the finest and prettiest birds I have ever seen.”
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Concerning his potential affinity for males, Tesla certainly displayed an affection for muscle men, often, in the later years, inviting boxers such as Henry Doherty, Jimmy Adamick, and the Yugoslav welterweight champion Fritzie Zivic out to dinner or to his apartment.
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Having “made a study” of the 1892 championship match between Gentleman Jim Corbett and John L. Sullivan (which had been held in New Orleans), Tesla made the sports headlines in 1927 by predicting the outcome of the rematch between Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey, the “Manassa Mauler” having been deposed the year before in a ten-round decision.

Dr. Tesla Picks Tunney on Basis of Mechanics

Sitting in this suite at the Hotel Pennsylvania, the 71-year-old inventor…did not hedge or pussyfoot, but declared that Tunney was “at least a ten to one favorite…Tunney will hit Dempsey continuously and at will…[In addition], he is single, and other things being equal, the single man can always excel the married man.”

Dr. Tesla smiled significantly. He is a lifelong bachelor.
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