Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla (66 page)

Aviation Week
also described the use of “young geniuses under [the age of] 29…located at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton Ohio” who were trying to conceive of a breakthrough in the technology; and also, surprisingly, that “the President [Jimmy Carter] was screened from vital technical developments by the bureaucracy of the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency.” The source was General George Keegen, former head of Air Force Intelligence.
⁴⁵

Three intriguing points emerge: (1) the concept of intense secrecy of particle-beam weapons; (2) the mention of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base; and (3) the policy of utilizing bright young geniuses. All of these variables are evident in the FBI files on Tesla reviewed earlier. Great support is lent to the conspiracy hypothesis that Tesla’s work and papers were systematically hidden from public view in order to protect the trail of this top-secret research, which today is known as Star Wars.

Particle-beam weaponry is still more a dream than a reality, at this time in 1996. Therefore, if indeed the inner sanctum of one or both superpowers has access to Tesla’s plans, why is it that no death ray has ever been constructed? Perhaps there are prototypes, but it seems to me that they should have been tried out in the field during such wars as Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Kuwait/Iraq. This part of the story must remain a mystery.

When a man looks back over the events associated with his work…he begins to realize how minor is that part which he himself has played in shaping the events of his career, how overpowering the part played by circumstances utterly beyond his control.

EDWIN ARMSTRONG ACCEPTING THE EDISON MEDAL
¹

A
s an echo from the Tesla-Morgan affair, Edwin Armstrong had to battle the giant RCA to get FM accepted over AM radio, even though it was a superior means for transmitting music. Col. David Sarnoff, “Napoleonic” head of RCA and NBC, had simply pirated his friend’s FM invention
because he required it for use in television.
With the help of CBS, Sarnoff also manipulated the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to create a stipulation that severely restricted the power of FM transmitters “to one tenth their intended level…and shifted the FM band to a less desirable frequency range.” That is why AM became the dominant band for long-distance radio transmission.

Required to rebuild his own radio station because of the FCC ruling and forced to battle the media Goliath in the courts for patent infringement, Armstrong cashed in his remaining block of RCA stock to finance the enormous expenditure that would be required. Lawyers for NBC were able to persuade the high court in New York that it was their engineers that invented FM and not Armstrong! Although the Institute of Radio Engineers as a group filed a formal protest (an unprecedented move in such situations), which eventually caused the ruling to be reversed by the Supreme Court, it was too late for Armstrong. With his marriage in shambles, his key patents expired, and his fortune drained by litigation, he jumped out a thirteen-story window in the dead of winter of 1954, spiritually trammeled by the very people who profited from his creative
endeavors. That Tesla survived such a fate is a testament to his fortitude and transcendent nature.
²

In 1956 there was a celebration of the centenary of Tesla’s birth. To highlight the event, with Nobel laureate Niels Bohr as a speaker, a centennial congress was held in Tesla’s honor. Simultaneously, the Yugoslav Postal Service issued a commemorative Tesla stamp, and the Yugoslav government placed Tesla on the 100 dinar note (equivalent to a U.S. dollar). Statues of the inventor were placed at museums in Zagreb and Vienna, a school was named after him in Illinois, a Tesla day was proclaimed in Chicago, and in Munich the Institute Electrotechnical Committee agreed to adopt the name “tesla” as the unit of magnetic flux density. Now Tesla could take his rightful place beside such other luminaries as Ampère, Faraday, Volta, and Watt.

Twenty years later, as a gift from the Yugoslavian people, in 1976 a statue of Tesla by sculptor Franco Krsinic, was placed at Niagara Falls and an identical companion statue erected on the village square in Gospić, Croatia, where Tesla was raised as a boy. (Unfortunately, this Gospić statue was purposely blown apart during the war in 1993.) President Tito gave a speech in Tesla’s honor in Smiljan before thousands of Croats, Serbs, and Bosnians (who were separated by armed guards and demarcation fences), and the celebration also continued in America. Plaques were posted at the site of his residence at the Hotel Gerlach in New York City and at the Wardenclyffe laboratory, which still stands at Shoreham, Long Island.

In 1983 the U.S. Post Office honored Tesla, along with Charles Steinmetz, Philo Farnsworth, and, alas, Edwin Armstrong, in a block-offour commemorative stamp. In Boston a giant Tesla coil can be found at the Museum of Science, and Tesla’s picture can be found hanging in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. There are also two major organizations in his honor, the Tesla Memorial Society, in Lackawanna, New York, and the International Tesla Society, which has held conferences every two years since 1984 at the society’s headquarters in Colorado Springs.

William Whyte wrote in
The Organization Man
that as beneficial as the large corporations can be, they are also static, delusory, and self-destructive. During the inevitable conflict between the individual and society, the organization man is caught in a bind because the company provides a livelihood, but at the expense of the worker’s individuality. This is what Whyte calls a “mutual deception”: “It is obvious to fight tyranny; it is not easy to fight benevolence, and few things are more calculated to rob the individual of his defenses than the idea that his interests and those of society can be wholly compatible…One who lets the Organization be the judge ultimately sacrifices himself.”
³

The corporate view becomes the very embodiment of rationality
itself, structuring, restructuring, and thereby controlling consciousness.
⁴
As was the case with the Tesla situation, the more the corporate world rejected the Wardenclyffe idea, the more unworkable it appeared to the engineers working in the industry, because they, as products and extensions of the corporations, had their consciousness shaped by its policies. Ultimately, Tesla’s worldview became a threat, and it was easier to dismiss him as an eccentric than consider that his plans may have been viable.

A modern example of a famous innovator who became somewhat of a nonperson is Steven Jobs, cofounder of Apple Computer. Realizing, in the mid-1980s, that the Motorola microprocessor was superior for graphics capabilities to the one in the Apple II computer and the one being used by Bill Gates/Microsoft for IBM, Jobs produced the Macintosh. First-generation Macintoshes, which were admittedly unattractive for business use and constructed so that they were not expandable, were not immediate successes in the marketplace. The inferior IBM disk operating system (DOS) was, of course, the standard. Undeterred, Jobs wanted to scrap the obsolete but highly profitable Apple II to go solely into production of Macs. Even though he was the wunderkind cocreator of the billion-dollar enterprise, Jobs became a threat to its financial stability. In a stunning move, Jobs was not only deposed; he was literally barred from working at Apple, even though he was still the largest shareholder! A decade later, the Bill Gates/IBM-compatible (Intel/Pentium) chip, although endowed with graphics (Windows) capabilities, is still based on an inferior design as compared to the Power-Mac. Nevertheless, the Gates/Intel chip is by far the leading system in the country, even though the Power-Mac by necessity is the standard in such fields as graphic design. Coyly, Gates said it this way: “People were coming out with completely new operating systems, but we had already captured the volume, so we could price it low and keep selling…[And] believe me, it would have been a lot easier to write Windows so it didn’t run DOS applications. But we knew we couldn’t make the transition without that compatibility.”
⁵

Being aware of the criticisms of the Freudian paradigm and the problem of oversimplification, I argued in my doctoral dissertation that in order to explain Tesla’s unusual personality, self-proclaimed celibacy, and alleged homosexuality, it is possible that he may have suffered repressed guilt feelings associated with the untimely death of his older brother Dane when Tesla was five years old. In the throes of the Oedipal complex and admittedly overattached to his mother, young Niko experienced great trauma not only because Dane was Djouka’s favorite son but also because Niko was at that age of gaining his sexual identity and learning to transfer
love bestowed upon himself to others. Possibly the mother rejected Tesla after Dane’s death, and thus Tesla bestowed the love back upon himself and became narcissistic. Wishing to gain back the perceived loss of love from his mother and lost brother, later in life Tesla would unconsciously seek out figures that would combine the dynamics of “older brother/mother surrogates,” for example, strong, nurturing authority figures, such as Westinghouse and Pierpont Morgan. This combination of brother and mother might also explain the confusion associated with Tesla’s sexual identity.

To recapture their lost love and, in the symbolic sense, to bring the brother back from the dead (for that would be the only way to repair the damage), Tesla would have to form a sacrifice as penance. In Westinghouse’s case, he ripped up the royalty clause, and it cost him millions of dollars (he could have set up a deferred payment schedule);
⁶
and in Morgan’s case, the inventor insisted that the financier take the larger share of the partnership, that is, 51 percent, even when Morgan suggested fifty-fifty.

Due, however, to a multitude of personality factors, including egomania, overambition, and his impatient wish to crush the competition, Tesla breached his contract with Morgan by deciding to build a larger tower than was agreed upon. This was a self-destructive move (although it might have succeeded and was also, on another level, simply a calculated risk). From the psychoanalytic standpoint, unconsciously he was hoping that the financier would forgive his sins (show his surrogate son that he still loved him) by providing him with the additional funds to complete the tower. When Morgan said no, the unconscious could not face such a harsh rejection, so Tesla tried obdurately to turn the man around; and even when it was clear that Morgan would never come through, the self-perceived surrogate son continued to try.

Turning to Tesla’s persistent wish to contact extraterrestrials, from a psychoanalytic perspective these outer space entities may have symbolized beings existing in the afterworld. Certainly the need to believe in extraterrestrials is a powerful and popular one. It explains why so many people accepted Percival Lowell’s “Canals of Mars” hypothesis and, in today’s world, the extreme popularity of such movies as
Star Wars, Star Trek,
and
ET.
In Tesla’s case the extraterrestrials may have prelogically stood for his dead brother and mother. The insistence that he had probably been contacted by Martians became an unconscious safety valve which allowed him to hypercathect (release) much of the anxiety associated with the death of his older brother, as the brother would still be, in a sense, alive. Thus, if Dane still existed, the trauma of his death would be diminished, and Niko’s mother would love
him
again.

This form of regressive behavior could also explain Tesla’s obsession with caring for pigeons. After Dane died, the family was wrested from their
idyllic farm in Smiljan to the bustling city of Gospić. The pigeons were not only substitute mistresses for Tesla; they also symbolized a return to the utopia of his early and untroubled childhood in Smiljan.

As a counterhypothesis to the psychoanalytic paradigm (and as no solid evidence of homosexuality has been discovered by this researcher), one must place Tesla within his time period. Like William James and other intellects of that day, the idea of dedicating oneself to science at the expense of marriage was not a unique occurrence. Tesla was keenly aware that the responsibilities of marriage would have interfered too greatly with his inventive élan. Purposely, and admittedly through self-denial, he transformed his instincts in the alchemical sense to raise them to a higher level. This view, however, does not completely explain the natural proclivity to partake of the passions, especially when one considers that at his height, in the Gay Nineties, the rising star could probably have had his pick of any number of willing females, for example, Marguerite Merrington. Nor does it explain his overattachment to the city pigeons.

Nevertheless, the Freudian paradigm falls short in its attempts to explain the nature of Tesla’s wizardry in that it tends to see this ability as a sublimation rather than an end in itself. Tesla’s emphasis on ritual and such obsessions as cleanliness and self-denial were just as much linked to his childhood bouts with cholera, caused by impure drinking water, as to his wish to change his state of consciousness through a set routine so that he could prepare his mind to do its work. Unlike most inventors, Tesla’s creativity did not just lie in one plane. He adapted his mental faculties to a number of separate fields, designing fundamental inventions in lighting, electrical power distribution, mechanical contrivances, particle-beam weaponry, aerodynamics, and artificial intelligence. This great versatility of achievement places the inventor in a category all his own. Ultimately, Tesla was a journeyman searching for the Holy Grail. His goal was nothing short of altering the very direction of the human species through extensions of
his
effort.

It was the coil that I noticed first—because I had seen drawings like it years ago…“Hank, do you understand? Those men, long ago tried to invent a motor that would draw static electricity from the atmosphere, convert it and create its own power as it went along. They couldn’t do it. They gave it up.” She pointed at the broken shape. “But there is it.”

Atlas Shrugged
by Ayn Rand
⁷

At 8:00 P.M. on June 20, 1957, in the ballroom of the Hotel Diplomat in New York City, the
Interplanetary Sessions Newsletter
announced a meeting
to coordinate an expected visit by the “Space People” to the planet Earth. The event was planned by three individuals: George Van Tassel, author of
I Rode a Flying Saucer;
George King, purported telepathic contactee with extraterrestrials, and Margaret Storm, author of the occult Tesla biography
Return of the Dove,
a book whose “transcripts were received on the Tesla set, a radio-type machine invented by Tesla in 1938 for interplanetary communication.” By July 1 it was assured that the “Martians” would have “full scale operations” in Washington, D.C., New York, and “general North American areas.” It was also revealed that “Tesla was a Venusian, brought to this planet as a baby in 1856, and left in a remote mountain province in what is now Yogoslavia [
sic
].”

In attendance at this meeting was a man who preferred to remain unnoticed. He was an FBI agent assigned to continue the expanding file on the enigmatic Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla. It is quite likely that a copy of this newsletter, which is in the FBI file, was also read by J. Edgar Hoover, a man concerned about the growing interest in the flying-saucer phenomena and the secrecy surrounding various adherents.