Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla (62 page)

Tauscher, a German American, was closely linked with the Fatherland through his daughter, who still lived there. Through this and other channels, Tesla could be introduced to potential weapons buyers. Simultaneously, he could also be supplied with small amounts of dynamite, which he used to test telegeodynamic equipment that he was trying to sell to such companies as Texaco Oil Company for geophysical exploration.
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Titus deBobula was now making his living selling rifle grenades, fragmentation and gas bombs, and other armaments to both domestic police departments and foreign governments in Europe and South America. Unfortunately for the Hungarian, unwished-for newspaper publicity concerning a lawsuit with Tauscher drew the attention of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Having hid his relationship with the munitions factory, deBobula not only attracted the tax collectors but also the seemingly omniscient J. Edgar Hoover, who monitored his activities for the next ten years. He was accused of being a German agent and illegal alien
involved in subversive activities, and Hoover “recommended that [deBobula] be considered for custodial detention in the event of a national emergency.”

Although they maintained their relationship during this stormy period, Tesla’s antennae were raised, especially when deBobula requested loans from him “in amounts you would not miss” just at the time he declared bankruptcy: DeBobula was $750,000 in debt. Hoping to make Tesla a partner in the company, deBobula raised Tesla’s ire when he used his name as a reference when working an arms deal with the minister of Paraguay. Tesla called deBobula and stated emphatically that he was not to use the inventor’s name.
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Unable to maintain his Manhattan apartment, deBobula moved to the Bronx, where he was eventually arrested. A search of his apartment revealed an arsenal of hand grenades, dynamite, and tear-gas bombs. The architect claimed that they were simply part of the inventory from his company, and he was interrogated and released. Presumably an anti-Semite who apparently had ties to Henry Ford, deBobula disavowed any relationship to either the Communist party or the German-American Bund. Although he was monitored throughout the World War II years, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was unable to prove that he had violated any federal statute, and deBobula was allowed to move to Washington, D.C., where he set up another munitions arsenal right in the heart of the city! In 1949 he wrote directly to J. Edgar Hoover to “get them off his back,” and apparently Hoover complied, as articles and references to him faded away at that time.
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As the Great Depression wore on, Tesla’s expenses continued to mount. He was now $400 in debt to the hotel, which, during those dreary days, was a considerable sum. Cornered by the management, the sly conceptualist fell back on a strategem that had worked so well when he was at the Waldorf-Astoria: he would live on credit. He thereupon offered as collateral “a working model” of his death ray, which he told the establishment was worth $10,000. They asked for a receipt in writing, and he agreed. The treacherous device and his note were carefully placed in locker no. 103 in the hotel’s back-room vault.
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Although he had solved the problem of meeting the rent, Tesla’s finances were still in a precarious state. He was even having trouble coming up with the fifteen dollars per month storage costs at the Manhattan Storage Warehouse. In 1934, with a bitter taste in his mouth, he drafted a long letter to J. P. Morgan Jr. In it the inventor revealed that he has made overtures to sell his “Chinese wall of defense” to war departments in America and England. “The Russians are very anxious to render their border safe against Japanese invasion, and I have made them a proposal which is [also] being seriously considered.” The inventor went on to
acknowledge his outstanding debt to Morgan from the turbine affair and his willingness to pay back the sum, about $40,000, and then made an appeal. “If I had now $25,000 to secure my property and make convincing demonstrations, I could acquire in a short time colossal wealth.” Tesla ended the letter by lambasting FDR’s “New Deal,” which “poured out billions in public money [just so] it can remain in power indefinitely.” This “perpetual motion scheme,” in Tesla’s view, was antidemocratic, “destructive to established industries, and decidedly socialistic.”
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Needless to say, Morgan did not lend Tesla any money. However, what is interesting in this passage is Tesla’s reference to property he needed to secure in order to make convincing demonstrations. This suggestion that he had, in fact, erected a working death ray would become important later, when the question was raised whether a functioning model had actually been constructed.

According to Hugo Gernsback, through to his prompting, the Westinghouse Corporation agreed to help their former champion out. Gernsback stated that he had called up the Westinghouse officials “in the late 30’s…to discuss what could be done. I apprised [them] of the fact that Tesla was a very proud man who, under no circumstances, would consider charity. I suggested that perhaps he could be put on the staff in an honorary capacity as a consultant. This was agreed upon and from that time until his death…Tesla received a modest pension.”
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Gernsback may certainly have called the company. However, his interpretation of what occurred conflicts with the timing of the contract and the reasons for the deal. Tesla had settled with Westinghouse about four years before the science-fiction publisher’s gracious call. On legal footing, the inventor continued to press his case. Finally, on January 2, 1934, the president, F. A. Merrick, acquiesced and agreed to pay Tesla “to act as a consulting engineer for $125/month for such a period as may be mutually agreeable.”
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To solve the aging patriarch’s psychological problem of refusing to pay his rent, Merrick also agreed to cover Tesla’s rent. The debt owed to the Hotel Governor was never settled; rather, Tesla moved, after signing of the agreement to the Hotel New Yorker; and there he would live, so far as he was concerned, rent free to the end of his days.
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Then there appeared the vision of a man from a strange, new world. A tall, thin man, whose eyes blazed with an unearthly light, entered the room so quietly that one was hardly aware of his presence. He bowed himself to his seat…He beamed upon [Viereck and his wife] paternally. He greeted the guests with a kindly nod. Before he could be introduced, Tewson blurted out, “Nikola Tesla!”

ELMER GERTZ
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T
he first-time ambassador Stanko Stoilkovic saw the celebrated Serb he was standing in front of the library with “two white pigeons on his arm…pecking seeds from his palm.” That was in 1918, and they met only briefly. A decade later, Stoilkovic returned to America as an emissary of the Yugoslavian consulate, and they became close friends for the next ten years. At the age of ninety, Stoilkovic would recall their visits.

As with many other Serbs, Stoilkovic was unhappy about the split between Tesla and Pupin, and like others before him, he tried to bring the two men together. Perceiving Pupin as ungrateful and deeply hurt by his association with “that donkey” Marconi, Tesla wanted nothing to do with his fellow Serb. The feeling, of course, was mutual.

May 29, 1931

My dear Mr. Swezey:

I have not seen Mr. Tesla for nearly 20 years. In the beginning of the World War a difference of opinion created a split between Mr. Tesla and myself. Neither he nor I have ever had, since that time, an opportunity to cure that split. In 1915 I offered through a mutual friend, to forgive and forget, but somehow the offer was not accepted. I regret, therefore,
that…I could not transmit to Mr. Tesla a letter of greeting or congratulation on his seventy fifth birthday.

Yours very sincerely,
M. J. Pupin
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In Dunlap’s classic text
Radio’s 100 Men of Science,
the author writes, “Pupin was a man of complete intellectual honesty; if he made an error in an equation on the blackboard, he would quickly admit the mistake, rub out the blunder and begin again.”
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We have discussed in the past Pupin’s insistence that many of Tesla’s inventions were his own and how Pupin removed Tesla’s name from the discussion of the history of the AC polyphase system and of the wireless in his four-hundred-page Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography, which he had dedicated to “the rise of idealism as a qualified witness whose testimony had competence and weight.”
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This tack also carried over to his legendary courses at Columbia University in which he camouflaged Tesla’s role in the etiology of a variety of inventions. “When Marconi came to New York, in 1927 to lecture…Dr. Pupin presided at the Institute of Radio Engineers…‘Marconi, we love you,’ said Dr. Pupin; ‘we have come not so much to hear what you have to say, but to see your boyish smile.’”
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When Pupin became ill in 1935, he asked his secretary to go see Stoilkovic and “plead with him to get Tesla to visit Pupin in the hospital. He wanted to make peace before he passed on.”

Greeting Stoilkovic at the door in his favorite lounging outfit, a red robe with blue slippers, Tesla was taken aback by the request. He said he needed to sleep on the matter. The following day, he called his friend and said he would go if Stoilkovic would accompany him.

In Pupin’s room there were a few doctors alongside his bed. The meeting was most touching. Tesla approached the sick man and held his hand out and said, “How are you, my old friend?”

Pupin was speechless from emotion. He cried and tears were coming down his face. We all went out of the room and left the two men alone. Tesla was able to talk with Pupin eye to eye…In parting Tesla had mentioned that they would meet again in the Science Clubrooms and converse as before…Immediately after Tesla’s visit, Pupin passed away. Tesla attended the funeral.
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Four years Tesla’s senior, Robert Underwood Johnson left for a tour of England as a widower in 1927 and went again to France and Italy in 1928. Tesla lent his friend $500 for the trip and $800 for the mortgage on his home. Upon his return in 1929, Johnson joined Tesla and Richmond P. Hobson for a movie and an evening out on the town. Hobson, who was living with his wife, Grizelda, at the Hotel Weylin on Fifty-fourth Street,
also had a residence in the nation’s capital. Tesla was seeing his friends on a daily basis at this time; Johnson was particularly lonely, even though he had children and grandchildren who frequently came to visit. The following year, now an octogenarian, the old poet set off again for Europe. On this trip he was hoping to interview Madame Marie Curie.

Although Tesla was able to spend much of the 1930s with Johnson, Hobson left the city after only a short stay to purchase a cattle ranch with his son in Vancouver. In April 1937, Tesla forwarded a new biography of his life that had been translated from Serbo-Croatian into English to Johnson, who passed it on to the editor in chief of the
New York Times.
At eighty-five years of age, Johnson was too weak to write a thank-you letter in his own hand, but he was able to sign it “R. U. Johnson—Luka Filipov.” Both Johnson and Hobson died shortly thereafter; the famous lieutenant, barely sixty years old, was buried in Arlington Cemetery. With the help of Agnes Holden, Robert’s daughter, Tesla sent a “gorgeous flowering azalea” to Grizelda, who appreciated greatly the kind thoughts of this dear friend.
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Another character who stayed friendly with Tesla in the later years was George Sylvester Viereck, wunderkind poet. Viereck was a sensualist, cynic, and German propagandist during World War I and Nazi spokesman during the 1930s and World War II. Tesla’s link to Viereck extended back thirty years, to when Gilder and Johnson introduced such provocative Viereck poems as “The Haunted House” in the
Century
in 1906, which was a poem about an enchanting partner whose body was, alas, “a haunted place…When I did yield to passion’s swift demand,” Viereck penned, “one of your lovers touched me with his hand. And in the pang of amorous delight, I hear strange voices calling through the night.”
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Viereck, who was probably an illegitimate grandson of Wilhelm II, abdicated kaiser of Germany, was a multifaceted character and self-proclaimed genius. Having interviewed many of the greatest minds of the epoch, the German-American intellectual had rattled the souls of such individuals as Theodore Roosevelt, George Bernard Shaw, occultist Aleister Crowley, H. G. Wells, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Kaiser Wilhelm, and Adolf Hitler. A man in intimate contact with his irrational side, Viereck had passed many a day with Sigmund Freud, explicating the great theoretician’s libido theory, influencing Freud’s writings, and applying the master’s psychology to modern life. Freud, Viereck wrote, was “motivated not only by a desire to complete his own world view, but by a belief that each individual represented a special expression of the world spirit.”
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Not an anti-Semite, having, for instance, cowritten a series of books with a Jewish professor, Viereck, a lifelong German apologist, was nevertheless somehow able to rationalize the Nazi spiel, and he became an American spokesman for Adolf Hitler. Although Freud saw in this journalistic “lion hunter” a great mind, he said that Viereck suffered from
“narcissism, had delusions of persecution and a fixation on the Fatherland.” Once Viereck began to rationalize Hitler’s rhetoric, Freud saw the journalist as “debasing himself” and would not correspond with him anymore.
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During one of a series of interviews Viereck conducted with Tesla, he revealed that Tesla “was not a believer [in God] in the orthodox sense…To me, the universe is simply a great machine which never came into being and never will end. The human being is no exception to the natural order…What we call the ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ is nothing more than the sum of the functionings of the body. When this function ceases, the ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ ceases likewise.” According to John O’Neill, this “meat machine” theory was really a ruse used to hide the numerous mystical experiences that Tesla had.

On his vision of the twenty-first century, Tesla foresaw a world in which eugenics would be “universally established.” Perhaps spurred by Viereck’s discussion of the Aryan vision or the iniquitous American practice of sterilizing criminals and some mentally retarded individuals, Tesla supported the idea of “sterilizing the unfit and deliberately guiding the mating instinct. A century from now,” the celibate concluded, “it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal.”

On diet, the slim epicurean revealed that he had given up meat altogether. Tesla believed that in the future inexpensive and healthy food would be derived from milk, honey, and wheat. As the 1930s progressed, the inventor would continue to live on an ever-receding subsistence diet, moving from meat to fish to vegetables and finally to warm milk, bread, and something he called “factor actus.” Eliminating solid food altogether, the thinning wizard had concocted a health potion made up of a dozen vegetables, including white leeks, cabbage hearts, flower of cauliflower, white turnips, and lettuce hearts.
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Although he still maintained that he might live to 140, a psychoanalytic view of this regimen of meager victuals could only construe it as an anorexic, unconscious plan for selfextinguishment.

“Long before the next century dawns,” the oracle predicted, “systematic reforestation and the scientific management of natural resources will have made an end of all devastating droughts, forest fires and floods. Long distance transmission of electrical power by harnessing waterfalls will dispense with the necessity of burning fuel; robots and thinking machines will replace humans, and the trend of spending more on war and less on education will be reversed.” A major reason for this would be Tesla’s latest discovery of his defensive shield between nations.

“If no country can be attacked successfully, there can be no purpose in war. My discovery ends the menace of [war]. I do not say that there may
not be several destructive wars before the world accepts my gift. I may not live to see its acceptance.”
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In the habit of meeting with Viereck and his family at their home on Riverside Drive on a somewhat regular basis, Tesla accepted an invitation to attend a dinner party. Present was Viereck’s son Peter. Today, as a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and English professor, Peter remembers Tesla as almost an uncle.
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Also present was the youthful Elmer Gertz, who, at the time, was preparing a biography of Viereck. A friend of Carl Sandburg and also biographer of voluptuary Frank Harris, Gertz would later come to defend such illustrious individuals as Nathan Leopold (and Loeb), pornographic writer Henry Miller, and assassin Jack Ruby (in an appeal of the death sentence). At a spry eighty-five years of age, Gertz remembered the meeting, which took place fifty-seven years before, when he was twenty-nine.

“In a communicative mood, [at the dinner party] Tesla told his life story unostentatiously, simply, with quiet eloquence. He told of his platonic affairs of the heart…explained the inventions that have made the world his debtor…[and] told of his plans, of his credo, of his foibles. It was a tale of wonders, told with guileless simplicity.”

Struck by the fact that they were in “the same house that had seen Einstein, Sinclair Lewis, and countless others,” Gertz noted that “Viereck was comparatively silent much of the night, but he was subtly responsible for the intellectual thrills of the evening.”
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Pressed for other details, Gertz revealed that “Tesla knew all of Viereck’s poems by heart.” Tesla also discussed his platonic affair with Sarah Bernhardt, whom he had met while in Paris at the 1889 exposition. Differing with O’Neill’s oft-quoted suggestion that Tesla avoided her eyes when he picked up her handkerchief, Gertz said that Tesla had met with her on several occasions, perhaps also in New York. So taken with her was he that “Tesla had saved and preserved her scarf without ever washing it” and still had it to that day.
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Viereck provides a fascinating link between Tesla and Sigmund Freud: self-denial and eros. Stoilkovic told a story of how he was invited to Tesla’s New Yorker apartment and a valet “brought in a bottle of wine in a dish of ice,” but Tesla never allowed it to be opened. When this event was replayed another evening, Tesla revealed that he kept the bottle there to prove that he could prevent himself from drinking it. A man of rigid habits, Tesla denied himself certain pleasures as a way to supposedly establish total control over himself. And yet Tesla was a complete slave to his idiosyncrasies and to a cauldron of phobias.

Going out of his way to avoid handshakes, displacing his amorous affections onto birds, keeping hotel servants at a distance of at least three feet, throwing out collars and gloves after one use, Tesla had other rigid
requirements as well. The hotel was requested to keep one table permanently reserved for himself. No one else was allowed to eat there. If a fly landed on the table, it had to be reset and a new plate of food brought forth. When it came to money matters, Tesla also showed little ability to restrain himself, and as we have seen, he habitually refused to honor rent payments. From the Freudian point of view, Tesla was an anal-compulsive personality, fixated in the latent stage of sexual repression, with a displacement of his energies into scientific endeavors. By denying his libido, his censor had converted his primal sexual energy into an odd mixture of prelogical behavior patterns that tended to diffuse, redirect, and sublimate the highly cathected complexes the inventor wished to deny. It appears quite possible that Viereck strove to psychoanalyze Tesla, to have the inventor dig deep into his childhood in an effort to release submerged events that may have blocked or redirected his life in neurotic fashion. Viereck, who was known to partake of “opium tincture,” probably entered an altered state when conversing with the ethereal prophet.
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Nearly eighty years old at the time, exceedingly frail and thin, Tesla wrote Viereck a long letter reviewing the traumas of his childhood.