Wizard

by Marc Seifer

  When…Dr. d’Arsenoval declared that he had made the same discovery [concerning the physical effects caused by sending extremely high frequency through the body], a heated controversy relative to priority was started. The French, eager to honor their countryman, made him a member of the Academy, ignoring entirely my earlier publication. Resolved to take steps for vindicating my claim, I…met [with] Dr. d’Arsenoval. His personal charm disarmed me completely and I abandoned my intention, content to rest on the record. It shows that my disclosure antedated his and also that he used my apparatus in his demonstrations. The final judgement is left to posterity.

  Since the beginning, the growth of the new art [of electrotherapy]…and industry has been phenomenal, some manufacturers turning out daily hundreds of sets. Many millions are now in use throughout the world. The currents furnished by them have proved an ideal tonic for the human nerve system. They promote heart action and digestion, induce healthful sleep, rid the skin of destructive exudations and cure colds and fever by the warmth they create. They vivify atrophied or paralyzed parts of the body, allay all kinds off suffering and save annually thousands of lives. Leaders in the profession have assured me that I have done more for humanity by this medical treatment than all my other discoveries and inventions.41

  (More recently, a number of researchers, particularly Dr. Robert O. Becker of Syracuse University, have utilized electrical currents to help heal bones that have difficulty knitting. Having studied regeneration capabilities of such reptiles as salamanders whose tails he amputated, Becker has discovered that these animals generate a particular electrical frequency which serves somehow as a field for promoting the total regrowth of the missing appendage. By “artificially duplicating” the signal, Becker reports, “we have been able to produce partial limb regeneration in [mammals such as] rats by a similar technique, and some clinical applications are under study in human beings at this time.”42)

  The Paris lecture ignited “the French papers…[with Tesla’s] brilliant experiments. No man in our age has achieved such a universal scientific reputation in a single stride as this gifted young electrical engineer,” the Electrical Review reported.43

  Tesla met with a number of dignitaries while in Paris, including Prince Albert of Belgium, who was interested in supplying his country with a more economical means of distributing electric power; Monsieur Luka, of the Helios Company of Cologne, with whom Tesla sold his AC motor patents for use in Germany;44 and André Blondel, an important theoretician in advanced theories with alternating currents.

  Forty years later, Blondel recalled “with immense interest and admiration” the Paris conference and congratulated Tesla on the elegant simplicity with which he advanced his concepts in alternating current well beyond the work of his French colleague Deprez and his Italian neighbor Ferraris.45

  Shortly after the lecture and in a state of “oblivion” associated by “my peculiar sleeping spells, which had been caused by prolonged exertion of the brain,” Tesla received a dispatch at the hotel informing him that his mother was dying. “I remembered how I made the long journey home without an hour of rest.”46 Greeted in Gospić by his three sisters, all of whom were married to Serbian priests, and by his Uncle Petar, the regional bishop, Tesla was in a terrible state. Entering the bedroom, he found his mother in “agony.”

  During this time, Tesla suffered from a peculiar malady similar to amnesia; where he claimed to have lost all memory of his earlier life. He also said that he slowly regained this information before his return to the States. One aspect of this episode which is noteworthy is that it occurred over a long period of time, beginning at the close of 1891, and culminating with his mother’s death in April 1892. Tesla said that although he could not remember historical occurrences, he had no trouble thinking about the details of his research including “passages of text” from his writings “and complex mathematical formulae.”47 Simultaneously, Tesla also experienced a psychic event which “momentarily impressed me as supernatural. I had become completely exhausted by pain and long vigilance, and one night was carried to a building about two blocks from our home. As I lay helpless there, I thought that if my mother died while I was away from her bedside she would surely give me a sign.”48

  Having been influenced by “my…friend Sir William Crookes, when spiritualism was discussed,” Tesla lay in anticipation. “During the whole night every fiber in my brain was strained in expectancy, but nothing happened until early in the morning. [Awakening in] a swoon, [I] saw a cloud carrying angelic figures of marvelous beauty, one of whom gazed upon me lovingly and gradually assumed the features of my mother. The appearance slowly floated across the room and vanished, and I was awakened by an indescribably sweet song of many voices. In that instant [or] certitude, [I knew] that my mother had just died. And that was true.”49

  Surprised and perhaps even frightened by the clairvoyant vision, Tesla wrote to Crookes for advice. For months, and maybe even for years after, the inventor “sought…the external cause of this strange manifestation.” Note how Tesla assumes a priori that the cause came from “outside” as opposed to “inside,” that is, from the unconscious. Although he readily accepted the concept of wireless communication, in no way was Tesla capable of allowing for the possibility that the human brain could also act as a receiver of mental vibrations. The idea of telepathy, or spiritualism, for that matter, was a true threat to the paradigm he was operating from, and so Tesla manufactured a physical mechanism as the cause of his noetic experience:

  “To my great relief,” Tesla wrote, “I succeeded after many months of fruitless effort” in solving the conundrum. The vision of the angels rising up, Tesla attributed to the memory of an ethereal painting of the same subject which he had gazed on prior to the experience, and the sound of the serenading voices, he linked to a nearby church choir that was singing for an Easter mass.50 Whether or not Tesla’s mother died on a Sunday morning is not known. But what is clear is that this analysis greatly relieved the tension Tesla was under, for it supported, once again, a materialistic viewpoint.

  A question which remains, however, is whether or not Tesla’s excesses in work-related endeavors is enough to explain his onset of amnesia? One theoretician speculated that the enormous voltages that Tesla passed through his body may have contributed to the problem.51 From a psychoanalytic point of view, one could speculate that Tesla was repressing, that is, unconsciously, but purposefully forgetting events that he did not want to remember. Possible unwanted memories included the way he felt as a child after his exalted brother died and the recent eradication of the royalty clause with the Westinghouse Corporation.

  After the death of his mother, Tesla stayed on in Gospić for six weeks to recuperate. On the positive side, it enabled the lone son to reconfirm emotional ties to his family; it also provided Tesla with probably the only extended vacation he would ever take.

  He traveled to Plaski to visit his sister Marica, to Varazdin to see his uncle Pajo, and to Zagreb to lecture at the university. He sojourned to Budapest to confer with Ganz & Company, as they were in the midst of constructing a substantial 1,000-horsepower alternator. He also met with a delegation of Serbian scientists who accompanied him down to Belgrade, where an audience was arranged with the king. Young Alexander I conferred upon Tesla a special title of Grand Officer of the Order of St. Sava, and the official plaque was shipped to him a few months later after his return to the States.52 Tesla also visited the great Serbian poet Jovan Zmaj Jovanovich,53 and he attended an assembly where he was honored by the mayor.

  In front of a welcoming committee, Zmaj read his poem “Pozdrav Nikoli Tesli,” and then Tesla took the podium. “There is something in me which is only perhaps illusory,” Tesla began, “[It is] like that which often comes to young, enthusiastic persons; but if I were to be sufficiently fortunate to bring about at least some of my ideas it would be for the benefit of all humanity.” Referring back to Zmaj’s poem, Tesla concluded with a message that would deeply touch the h
earts of his people. “If these hopes become one day a reality, my greatest joy would spring from the fact that this work would be the work of a Serb.”54

  On his return leg, Tesla made a special trip through Prussia to see the eminent patriarch Hermann Ludwig von Helmholtz, in Berlin, and his most famous student, Heinrich Hertz, in Bonn. A bearded, youthful man with soft features, a high forehead, and elongated face, Hertz had gained the world’s attention by performing the first significant experiments in wireless, many of which Tesla replicated or expanded upon.

  In attempts to clarify the findings of James Clerk Maxwell on the nature of electromagnetic phenomena and its relationship to light and the structure of the ether, in 1886, Hertz constructed “flat double-wound spiral coils” which he used in induction experiments in attempts to measure the propagation of electromagnetic waves. Hertz, like Tesla shortly after him, displayed resonance effects between primary and secondary circuits and “established the existence of standing waves with their characteristic nodes and troughs in a long straight wire.” He was also able to measure the wavelength of the waves in the wire.55 Hertz, however, differed markedly with Tesla in terms of his interpretation of the meaning of Maxwell’s equations and his subsequent conceptualization of the structure of the ether.

  Deriving his clarifications more from theory than from actual experimentation, Hertz had created an elegant mathematical interpretation of Maxwell’s equations, but at the expense of some aspects of Maxwell’s theory, most notably vector (a quantity that has magnitude and direction) and scalar (a quantity that has magnitude, but no direction, such as a point or field) potentials. In duplicating Hertz’s work, Tesla postulated that these components should not have been eliminated.56 What he tried to tell Hertz, and what he wrote a few months later, was that electromagnetic waves might “more appropriately [be] called electric sound-waves or sound-waves of electrified air.”57

  “When Dr. Heinrich Hertz undertook his experiments from 1887 to 1889,” Tesla told an interviewer, “his object was to demonstrate a theory postulating a medium filling all space called the ether, which was structureless, of inconceivable tenuity…and yet possessed of [great] rigidity. He obtained certain results and the whole world acclaimed them as an experimental verification of that cherished theory, but in reality what he observed tended to prove just its fallacy.

  “I had maintained for many years before that such a medium as supposed could not exist, and that we must rather accept the view that all space is filled with a gaseous substance. On repeating the Hertz experiments with much improved and very powerful apparatus, I satisfied myself that what he had observed was nothing else but effects of longitudinal waves in a gaseous medium, that is to say, waves propagated by alternating compression and expansion [emphasis added]. He had observed waves in much of the nature of sound waves in the air,” not transverse electromagnetic waves, as generally supposed.58

  Tesla tried to open a dialogue by noting that his experiments tended to contradict the polished mathematical results Hertz had achieved, but Hertz rebuked him. “He seemed disappointed to such a degree,” Tesla recalled, “that I regretted my trip and parted from him sorrowfully.”59

  Having replicated Hertz’s experiments, Tesla tried to show the German professor that his own oscillator could produce a much more efficient frequency for transmitting wireless impulses. Tesla already had his eye on the idea of transmitting power through the ambient medium, and the Hertzian paradigm virtually disallowed this possibility. But egos clashed, as one Weltanschauung threatened the other, and Hertz would never come to realize that his device was obsolete. Perhaps this was to Hertz’s advantage, for even to this day wireless frequencies are referred to as Hertzian waves, when, in fact, they are really Tesla’s, as they are produced by high-frequency continuous-wave oscillators, not by the primitive Hertzian interrupted spark-gap apparatus.60

  During the voyage home, Tesla walked the deck of the ship and pondered an incident that occurred to him during a hike he had taken in the mountains during the trip. Having witnessed an oncoming thunderstorm, he had noted that the rain was delayed until a flash of lightning was perceived. This “observation” confirmed Tesla’s speculations, with Martin and Crookes, that weather control was possible because it was the production of large amounts of electricity, in Tesla’s eyes, that caused the downpour.

  Revealing a megalomaniacal streak, Tesla recalled his thoughts that day in the Alps:

  Here was a stupendous possibility of achievement. If we could produce electric effects of the required quality, this whole planet and the conditions of existence on it could be transformed. The sun raises the water of the oceans and the winds drive it to distant regions where it remains in a state of most delicate balance. If it were in our power to upset it when and wherever desired, this mighty life-sustaining stream could be at will controlled. We could irrigate arid deserts, create lakes and rivers and provide motive power in unlimited amounts…It seemed a hopeless undertaking, but I made up my mind to try it, and immediately upon my return to the United States in the summer of 1892, work was begun…for the successful transmission of energy without wires.61

  11

  FATHER OF THE WIRELESS (1893)

  The day when we shall know exactly what “electricity” is, will chronicle an event probably greater, more important than any other recorded in the history of the human race. The time will come when the comfort, the very existence, perhaps, of man will depend upon that wonderful agent.

  NIKOLA TESLA1

  Tesla disembarked from the August Victoria in the last week of August 1892.2 The trauma associated with the death of his mother was alleged to have caused a shock of hair on his right temporal lobe to temporarily turn white.3 Whether this occurred cannot be determined; however, what is clear from studying photographs taken before and after the excursion is that a qualitative alteration in his appearance took place, the virginal look of adolescence supplanted by the cocksure demeanor of manhood.

  After three years at the Astor House, Tesla moved on to the Hotel Gerlach. Set up on the “European plan” by Charles A. Gerlach, its manager, the Gerlach was equipped with “elevators, electric lights and sumptuous dining rooms.” The establishment was family oriented and fireproof.4

  Located on Twenty-seventh Street, between Broadway and Sixth Avenue, the Gerlach was just a few blocks from the new, magnificent Madison Square Garden, a modern galleria with shops, theaters, restaurants, a thirty-story tower, and a coliseum with a seating capacity of seventeen thousand. The Garden, which was still under construction, was financed by banker J. Pierpont Morgan, who was funding Edison at the time; and it was designed and managed by Stanford White, the flamboyant architect of the prestigious firm of McKim, Mead & White, who would later become an important associate of Tesla’s.

  Having unpacked his bags and cache of missives at the new hotel, on he went to South Fifth Avenue to his lab, which he had been away from for so long. In long strides, the inventor weaved his way through “Washington Square, [to] the heart of that picturesque neighborhood known as the French quarter. [The streets were] teeming with cheap restaurants, wine shops and weather-beaten tenements,” establishments Tesla would never frequent himself. To his surprise, he noticed shop owners waving, whispering among themselves; some even displayed awe. Having been elected to the Royal Society of Great Britain, now he had become a célébrite internationale and the neighborhood had been awaiting his return. He came upon what one reporter described as the “uninviting…huge yellowish brick building of some half-dozen stories”5 which housed his lab. Eagerly, the “murky interior” was entered as Tesla traversed the stairs, taking two at a time. He climbed past the oily, smelly lower floors, which were devoted to a pipe-cutting factory, even managed a smile for the owners of the dry-cleaning service on the third floor, and then entered his secluded haven on the fourth.

  The inventor had brought a number of books which he had purchased abroad, and he placed them in his library before proceeding into the machi
ne room, where he spent some time removing dust and cobwebs. Tesla’s prime concern was to exploit his advances in fluorescent lighting and wireless transmission of power. Over the next few weeks he hired several workers and a secretary and began by dictating an article on experiments he had conducted with Hertzian frequencies and their relationship to the surrounding medium.6 He refined his oscillators and designed an experiment whereby one of the terminals of a sizable transmitter was attached to one of the city’s water mains, and he recorded electrical vibrations at different positions around town. “By varying the frequency,” he said, “I was able to watch for evidence of resonance effects at various distances…I think that beyond doubt it is possible to operate electrical devices in a city through the ground or pipe system by resonance from an electrical oscillator located at a central point.”7 Using vacuum tubes and other tuned circuits as detectors, Tesla began to study the principles of harmonics and standing waves, noting that his instruments would respond at certain points along the pipes but not at other positions.

  There was also mail to answer and equipment to order. In September correspondence was begun with Mr. Fodor, a German scientist who, with Tesla’s help, translated his world-famous discourses into German.8 Shortly thereafter, Thomas Edison sent an inscribed photograph “To Tesla from Edison.”9 Tesla also conferred with Professor R. H. Thurston, a physics teacher from Cornell who had expertise in thermodynamics.10

  At the end of the month George Westinghouse stopped by with Albert Schmid to welcome the inventor home and discuss the fate of the Tesla AC system.11 In May of that year, Westinghouse had won the bid to furnish the power for the upcoming Columbian Exposition, which was going to be held in Chicago, and he reportedly had taken a million dollar loss in order to secure the contract. But even at this juncture he was still not convinced that the Tesla system would prove to be more useful than compressed air and hydraulic power for long-distance transmissions.12 Although Tesla had great respect for the descendent of Russian noblemen, he still had difficulty hiding his dissatisfaction. Schmid was relieved that the burden of convincing Westinghouse had shifted.