Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla (59 page)

With Katharine’s death came a new level of intimacy between Tesla and Luka. Often they would meet for dinner or at the cinema, and when Spanish-American War hero Richmond P. Hobson returned with his wife to live in the city, he would join them. According to Mrs. Hobson, “these two dear friends [Tesla and Hobson], about once a month or sometimes oftener, would meet and go to a movie and then sit in the Park, and talk till after midnight! Richmond always came home with enthusiasm over some
new invention of Tesla’s and well I recall the night he told Richmond, ‘I can shake the world of its orbit, but I won’t do it, Hobson!’”
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Certainly Tesla’s relationship with Katharine had been, at least at one time, provocative, and no doubt he reviewed details with Hobson, but apparently, according to his own words, he had “never touched a woman.”
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One could make a case for a germ phobia, although his relationship with the pigeons would seem to dispel that myth, magnified greatly by the O’Neill biography;
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or Tesla’s aversion to sexual intimacy with women could be evaluated from a psychoanalytic perspective. In 1924, Tesla wrote in a condolence note to Jack Morgan, “The mother’s loss grips one’s head more powerfully than any other sad experience in life.”
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June, 1931
Potsdam, Germany

Dear Mr. Tesla!

I’m happy to hear that you are celebrating your 75th birthday, and that, as a successful pioneer in the field of high frequency currents, you have been able to witness the wonderful development of this field of technology.

I congratulate you on the magnificent success of your life’s work.

Albert Einstein
¹

F
or the balance of the wizard’s life, he would continue to speak cryptically about a number of entirely new and revolutionary inventions. These included (a) a machine for harnessing cosmic rays; (b) a means for transmitting mechanical energy; (c) a particle-beam weapon; and (d) a mechanism for communicating with other planets. In addition, Tesla also continued to refer to (e) his Wardenclyffe idea. The identification of each separate invention became a somewhat confusing task for journalists and researchers because each of these ideas involves the transmission of energy to distant places; and the third invention, the so-called death ray apparently, in its final form, comprised features from some, if not all, of the other inventions.

Throughout Tesla’s seventies, that is, from the mid-1920s until about 1934, Tesla continued his practice of traveling to industrial centers throughout the Northeast and Midwest in his quest to market his wares. While commuting to Philadelphia during the years 1924-25 to work on his gasoline turbine (he had worked on the steam turbine in Chicago and
Milwaukee), Tesla met with John B. Flowers, inspector of airplanes and engines at the local naval aircraft factory. He had known the inspector since 1917.
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As it became more apparent that the bladeless turbine was stuck in the endless cycle of research and development, Tesla returned to his first love, wireless transmission of power, and began a publicity campaign to espouse its merits. By implementing a series of central stations to pump energy into the ground and surrounding medium, the ultimate conservationist-pragmatist theorized that airplanes and automobiles, equipped with specially designed receiving devices, could operate without fuel onboard; they would simply derive their power from his towers.

On October 10, 1925, Flowers traveled to New York City to confer with the wizard in his suite at the Hotel Pennsylvania. There they drafted out the entire scheme so that it could be presented to physicist J. H. Dillinger, head of the Radio Laboratory, Bureau of Standards, in Washington, D.C.

In a carefully worded ten-page document, complete with schematic drawings of the earth imbued with Tesla-created standing waves, Flowers unveiled a plan for operating cars and planes powered by electromagnetism. “Dr. Tesla said that the Wireless Power System would supply power to airplanes at any point around the earth,” Flowers told Dillinger. “In addition,” Flowers continued, “Dr. Tesla has already developed the oscillator to provide the power and is willing to furnish the U.S. Government his plans if they agree to build the plant.” Flowers also set up a meeting in Washington to go over the proposal.

In the interim, Dillinger referred the proposal to H. L. Curtis, a fellow expert. After canny consideration, Curtis rejected the plan, his main objection being that “as he understood it, Tesla’s scheme was to create standing electrical waves around the earth as a sphere. There would then be considerable concentration of energy at the nodes and it was at the nodal points Tesla expected to develop his energy. The system proposed by Mr. Flowers does not have this feature. He proposes to collect energy at any point…[Thus] some means would have to be devised for concentrating this energy and making it available. No such method is proposed, and I do not think of any that appears feasible…[Furthermore] I do not know of any wireless apparatus…of sufficient magnitude to warrant the expectation that power can be economically transmitted by radio methods.”
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The basic criticism that the energy would not be available at any point of the globe, but only at the nodal points, was countered on numerous occasions by Tesla (although, apparently, the towers, which were not near power sources, would have to be placed at nodal points). One of Tesla’s favorite analogies was to view electricity as a kind of fluid and his magnifying transmitters as a series of pumps. Just as with a hydraulic system the fluid would be present at all points in equal pressures, so, too,
would Tesla’s electrical oscillations. And just as electrical energy is present at every connected electrical outlet in the world but is not used until an appliance is plugged in, so, too, was Tesla’s electricity available, but not used until the receiver was turned on.

In a comprehensive article published in
Telegraph & Telephone Age
in October 1927, which was probably written as a rebuttal to Curtis and Dillinger, Tesla also explains that the oscillations would spread from the magnifying transmitter

with a theoretically infinite speed, slowing down first very quickly and afterward at a lesser rate until the distance is about six thousand miles, when it proceeds with the speed of light. From there on it again increases in speed, slowly at first, and then more rapidly, reaching the antipode with approximately infinite velocity. The law of motion can be expressed by stating that the waves on the terrestrial surface sweep in equal intervals of time over equal areas, but it must be understood that the current penetrates deep into the earth and the effects produced on the receivers are the same as if the whole flow was confined to the earth’s axis joining the transmitter with the antipode. The mean surface speed is thus about 471,200 kilometers per second—57% greater than that of the so-called Hertz waves.
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Tesla likened the effect to the moon’s shadow spreading over the earth during an eclipse. Here was the first of a number of instances in which Tesla disagreed with the findings of Einstein’s theory of relativity, as the so-called Tesla wave supposedly traveled faster than light.
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In 1928, Tesla traveled to Philadelphia to attempt construction of his helicopter-airplane, probably with John Flowers, and to Detroit to try to market it as a “flying automobile” to GM. On a more practical level, he also peddled his speedometer to the Ford Motor Company.

One of the problems in the speedometer was cost, the Tesla invention having become a premium item only found in the more expensive vehicles. He also visited with his nephew Nicholas Trbojevich, who was helping fund the helicopter, and who was on the verge of becoming very wealthy from his various automobile inventions associated with economizing the transmission and steering. Trbojevich, like his uncle, was somewhat of a workaholic, and Tesla cautioned his wife to give her husband “unceasing care [and love],” as in the long run “your husband is sure to acquire great wealth and when his battle is won, you will have everything to your heart’s desire.”
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Shortly after, Tesla returned to Detroit and met Trbojevich for a late snack at the Book-Cadillac Hotel, the city’s “finest.” According to William Terbo, “the maitre d’ suggested they wait five minutes, when the five dollar cover charge would be lifted. Tesla would hear none of it and marched in.”
As this was during the Great Depression, when a quarter could buy three hot dogs and two cokes, this wasted expense was enormous, and it became a great point for laughter among the Trbojevich family, which tended to view Tesla as simply their old eccentric uncle rather than one of the most important inventors in the world. When the nephew tried tactfully to bring up the matter of the cover charge, Tesla evaded by responding, “I’ll never die rich unless the money comes in the door faster than I can shovel it out the window.”
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During this period (1925-38) Tesla also negotiated with Myron Taylor, CEO of U.S. Steel. Interested in the steel company for a variety of reasons, the ever-prodigious inventor had developed special equipment for purifying ores, “degasification of steel,” and also conservation of sulphur during iron processing. In the late 1920s he asked Taylor if he could install equipment to see if the procedure worked. Taylor agreed, and so Tesla traveled up to their Worcester plant in September 1931 to install it. Although he hoped for a successful demonstration, this apparently did not occur, since the archives of U.S. Steel have only one short paragraph referring to Tesla’s dealings with the company.
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Tesla’s ultimate plan, which apparently was not tested, was to install his bladeless turbine in the heat exhaust system, with the idea of converting the enormous amount of wasted heat into useful electricity. Ever the conservationist, this was one of Tesla’s most elegant ideas.

From Worcester, Tesla moved on to Buffalo for a top-secret experiment, according to Peter Savo, a cousin living in New York. There the inventor reportedly refitted an automobile that, according to the story, ran on electrical power from an outside source.

The car [was] a standard Pierce Arrow, with the engine removed and certain other components installed instead. The standard clutch, gear box, and drive train remained…Under the hood, there was a brushless electric motor, connected to [or in place of] the engine…Tesla would not divulge who made the motor.

Set into the dash was a “power receiver” consisting of a box…containing 12 radio tubes…A vertical antenna, consisting of a 6 ft. rod, was installed and connected to the power receiver [which was] in turn, connected to the motor by two heavy, conspicuous cables…Tesla pushed these in before starting and said: “We now have power.”
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If this tale is to be believed, it would mean that Tesla had also installed one of his powerful oscillators somewhere near Niagara Falls to provide the wireless energy needed to power the vehicle. An alternative possibility was that Tesla was testing one of his gasoline or steam turbines in the automobile, and Savo mistook it for the wireless device. “The aging
inventor, a tall, thin, almost spiritual figure in the sort of brown cutaway suit that older men wore before the World War, received interviewers in one of the public rooms in the Hotel New Yorker, where he lives. Before he would speak of his present work, he reviewed his past achievements, which entitle him more than Edison, Steinmetz or any other, to be called the father of the power age…”
¹⁰

There was a new king of the hill. Ever since the 1919 confirmation of his theory of relativity, that space was curved and that light traveled at a constant speed irrespective of the movement of its source, Einstein began to occupy the spot formerly held by such technical wizards as Bell, Edison, the Wright brothers, or Tesla. First postulated in 1905, Einstein’s theories not only shifted the prevailing space-time paradigm, that self-assuring Newtonian world that the old guard grew up in; his theories also threatened Tesla’s position as premier mastermind. Although the measurement of the starlight bending around the sun during the 1919 eclipse was experimental proof of Einstein’s new postulate,” for the most part the theoretical physicist was exactly that, a theorist, whereas Tesla, as hands-on creator of new technologies, was able to prove out his assumptions in the everyday world. This was the inventor’s advantage, and he used it to attack the new Nobel Prize-winning upstart.

As Einstein’s theory abandoned the old nineteenth-century ether, it explained the bending of light rays around large bodies as being caused by the non-Euclidean curving of space-time. This, in essence, became the new and more abstract ether. Mathematical equations accurately predicted the precise amount of bending that occurred. “In general relativity, the gravitational field and the structure or geometry of space are identical…The gravitational field
is
the curved space.”
¹²

Tesla completely disagreed with the concept of space being curved, saying that it was “self-contradictory.” Since “every action is accompanied by an equivalent reaction,” it appeared to Tesla’s “simple mind…[that] the curved spaces must react on the bodies and, producing the opposite effect, straighten out the curves.” To Tesla, the light bent because the large body (e.g., the sun) had a force field which influenced it.
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Ironically, Einstein’s contemporaries at the Carnegie Institution of Washington were using the Tesla coil in their new 1929 experiments in attempting to split the atom,
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while Tesla was discussing a more esoteric source of energy, cosmic rays:

A principle by which power for driving the machinery of the world may be derived from the cosmic energy which operates the universe, has been discovered by Nikola Tesla, noted physicist and inventor…

This principle, which taps a source of power described as “everywhere present in unlimited quantities” and which may be transmitted by wire or wireless from central plants to any part of the globe, will eliminate the need of coal, oil, gas or any other of the common fuels…“The central source of cosmic energy for the earth is the sun,” Dr. Tesla said, but “night will not interrupt the flow of the new power supply.”
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On July 10, 1931, Tesla turned seventy-five.
Time
honored the senior inventor by placing his portrait on the cover. Tesla’s life was briefly reviewed, and his most recent mysterious research on harnessing “an entirely new and unsuspected source [of energy]” was discussed. Unwilling to reveal more about the adjuvant, the venerated iconoclast startled the interviewer by referring obliquely to his most esoteric invention, the “Teslascope,” a device for signaling the nearby stars: “I think that nothing can be more important than interplanetary communication. It will certainly come some day, and the certitude that there are other human beings in the universe, working, suffering, struggling like ourselves, will produce a magic effect on mankind, and will form the foundation of a universal brotherhood that will last as long as humanity itself.”
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Hugo Gernsback couldn’t have said it better.