by Marc Seifer
Tesla arrived in Colorado Springs on May 18, 1899, after stopping in Chicago to display his telautomaton to the Commercial Club, a local electrical society. Situated at the very gateway to the Rocky Mountains, at the edge of a plain that stretched for hundreds of miles, the Colorado site would prove an excellent choice not only for monitoring wireless energy generated from his transmitter but also for studying a common phenomenon in the region, the electrical storms.
Stepping from the station after his weeklong journey, the inventor was met by Curtis and a few dignitaries. A horse and carriage took him to his hotel, the Alta Vista, where he stayed, in room 207.4 Much like his childhood home in Smiljan, the town was situated at the foothills of a mighty chain of mountains. The Rockies arose so suddenly that they looked almost as if they were still being formed. A view on a clear day stretched virtually to Wyoming to the north and New Mexico to the south, and it was a common sight to witness lightning storms in the distance while standing in sunshine.
Hoping to be the “Little London” of the West, the people of “the Springs” welcomed the great inventor by honoring him with a banquet, sponsored by Curtis, at the El Paso Club. Well known throughout the region because his AC power transmission system had been adopted at lead, silver, and gold mines in such camps as Telluride and Cripple Creek, Tesla was happily met by society people, town officials, and the governor.5 A few days later, another notable also came to town, Admiral Schley, recently back from his victory in Santiago Bay. The entire town celebrated the hero’s visit.6 No doubt Tesla had easy access to the admiral, and they probably discussed the potential use of his telautomaton as a weapon to help abolish war.
As part of Tesla’s arrangement, with Curtis’s guarantee, the El Paso Electric Company provided Tesla with free electrical power to support the great quest. Local contractor Joseph Dozier was introduced to discuss construction of the lab. Off they drove down Pike’s Peak Avenue to what is now the corner of Coyote Street, near Prospect Lake, to look the site over. Dozier, it appears, had a mystical bent, so discussions drifted to talk of life on other planets and unusual ways to search for gold in the nearby hills.7
The inventor had traveled west for a variety of reasons, particularly his wish to experimentally verify that he could transmit light, information, and power to vast distances by means of wireless. “I wanted to be free of the disturbing influences in the city which make it very difficult to tune circuits,” the inventor added.8 Tesla had embarked on a massive plan that presupposed an understanding of a technology which even challenges today’s comprehension of power-distribution systems. Details of the work would remain secret, Tesla not even revealing his intent to erect the station until almost the day he departed.9
From the very first day of his arrival, he announced rather optimistic plans, telling town columnist Mrs. Gilbert McClurg, wife of the secretary of the chamber of commerce, who wrote under the nom de plume Desire Stanton,10 “With [my] wireless telegraph oscillator, [I]…could talk to the inhabitants of the planet Mars…if they know enough to take a message…and will talk to the people of the earth, at any distance away, without the assistance of wires.”11
There was a popular notion and even astronomical speculation that other planets were inhabited and that Mars could be contacted. Growing large fields with flora planted in different-colored symbols or creating giant reflecting surfaces to flicker signals were two other proposals espoused by writers in the technical journals that received serious consideration. With Percival Lowell’s magnificent telescope only a few hundred miles away, in Flagstaff, Arizona, reports of Martian activities were a commonplace topic of conversation.
With Tesla’s arrival, in Desire’s words, “the day of ‘vril power’ is not far distant.”
“I would light whole cities and give to mere machines all the motions of intelligence,” said Tesla. “But my first plan is to simply collect experimental data, mount instruments and record experiments at different atmospheric levels.”
“Tesla’s plan for cabling across the Atlantic is to erect two terminal stations, one in London and one in New York, with the oscillators placed at the top of high towers, communicating thence with great disks suspended in captive balloons floating 5,000 feet above the earth to catch the strata of rarefied air through which electrical waves travel most easily. A message could be flashed instantly by these lightning rays from the oscillator to the disk in the balloon, and across the thousands of miles of intervening space to the second disk…Mr. Tesla says he is ready to put his wireless system into operation as soon as the practical details can be arranged.”12
His scheme was multifaceted. He could utilize the ionosphere to act as a conduit or a reflector of the electrical waves;13 he could use the intrinsic electrical impulses of the earth itself, that is, its geomagnetic pulse as a carrier wave, or he could transmit energy in the more conventional wireless way “with one single tuned circuit on the transmitting and receiving end,”14 such as he had demonstrated in his public lectures in London, Paris, New York, Philadelphia, and St. Louis, that is, by using a resonant tuned circuit, comprising a transmitter and a receiver, an aerial and ground connection, or he could use conventional copper lines.15
With Colorado Springs six thousand feet above sea level, one of his first experiments involved the transmission of very high frequencies up long wires to terminals situated two miles in the sky.16 Helium-filled balloons more than ten feet long were ordered from a “balloon farm” in Germany run by Professor Meyers, and thousands of feet of wire and cable were shipped from the Houston Street lab.17
Other equipment included batteries, receiving and measuring instruments, switches, transformers, vacuum pumps, and dozens of types of electronic tubes specially prepared by a Manhattan glassblower. Also, his huge oscillators and gargantuan Tesla coils were shipped, although his novel, flat, spiral transmitter, which appears so prominently in the 1898 photographs of his New York laboratory, was not sent. Louis Uhlman, one of his key engineers, was placed in charge of equipment at Houston Street, with George Scherff business manager and liaison.
Tesla’s wireless experimental station was a large barnlike structure approximately sixty feet wide and eighteen feet high, with a 200-foot-tall bulbous-topped aerial whose height could be adjusted to differing lengths. Situated on East Pike’s Peak Avenue, within walking distance of the center of town, the building was connected by transmission lines to the El Paso Electrical Station only “a few miles away,” From their circuit, Tesla was able “to draw, according to necessity, 100 horse-power and more.”18 Guarded by a sign which read Great Danger, Keep Out, the lab housed a high-frequency transformer and a Tesla coil with a diameter of forty-five feet.19 All of his experiments would be carefully recorded in his private Colorado notebook (which was discovered in the 1950s among his papers at the Belgrade Museum). Theories, experiments, occasional personal observations, and highly technical mathematical equations filled the pages.20
Tesla stated that his main reason for coming to Colorado “was to produce a [resonant transformer] which would be capable of disturbing the electrical condition [of part], if not the entire globe…thus enabling me to transmit intelligence to great distances without wire.”21 The plan was actually quite simple; Tesla assumed that the earth had a resonant frequency and therefore could be measured and utilized as a gigantic carrier wave to distribute electrical power. Since the entire earth was in a harmonic relationship with his equipment, Tesla claimed that there would be “no diminution in the intensity of the transmitted impulses. It is even possible to make the actions increase with distance from the plant according to an exact mathematical law.”22
By regulating the height of the aerial, different wavelengths could be created which could be measured in terms of their harmonic relationship to the natural electrical properties of the earth.
A few weeks later, Tesla summoned Fritz Lowenstein. Just twenty-five years old and a recent German immigrant, Lowenstein had only been working for Tesla for a month. Thus, t
here was a question about his ability to be reticent about the work. Nevertheless, he was, as Tesla said, “a man possessed of the highest technical training”23 and probably the most formally educated of his crew.
In June, Tesla experimented with a wireless telephone, although it is not known whether he actually transmitted spoken words.24 To Astor, he wrote, the following year, “There is nothing novel in telephoning without wires to a distance of five or six miles, since this has been done often before…In this connection, I have obtained two patents.”25
Whether or not Astor was completely aware of Tesla’s plan to leave New York to set up an experimental station in Colorado Springs is unknown. Astor had been in Europe during much of the planning stages of the venture, returning to New York on June 14. Certainly Tesla notified Astor of his plans, but this author suspects that the financier did not find out until after their business arrangement was solidified. As Astor was expecting progress on the oscillators and cold light, he probably had mixed feelings when he contacted Scherff to check on Tesla’s progress.26
Professor Meyers’s balloons had finally arrived. “They should only be about two-thirds inflated,” Meyers warned, “as otherwise they may burst when they attain some height.”27 “He has also included some kites,” Scherff wrote with the shipment. The balloons were launched in July, “but they [are] too heavy and do not work well.”28 The scheme, although plausible, was cumbersome, as energy would have had to be transmitted up a long wire, which weighed down the balloon (or kite) in a somewhat haphazard fashion, and then another balloon placed at some distance would be needed to receive the transmission and then send it down long wires to instruments on the ground. For numerous reasons this line of investigation was abandoned.
Next on the agenda was the measurement of the electrical properties of the earth, monitoring electrical storms, and creating electromagnetic oscillations that would be in a harmonic relationship to terrestrial currents.
Uppermost in Tesla’s mind was the problem of individualization of messages and protected privacy. Therefore, most of his experiments involved the combination of two or more frequencies and the construction of receiving instruments tuned to these specific arrangements. “The chief feature of a practical wireless telegraph system,” Tesla told Lowenstein, “is the secrecy, immunity and selectivity of the oscillating and receiving apparatus.” The inventor thereby set about to create a variety of mechanisms to produce multiple wavelengths. Whereas Marconi and the others were using inefficient Hertzian “pulsed oscillations at very high frequencies,” Tesla worked with “continuous [undamped] oscillations in the low HF [high-frequency] range.”29
“Do you understand what we are now trying to achieve?”
“Yes, Mr. Tesla,” Lowenstein replied, “I understand that in this invention the elements of the receiving apparatus respond to the elements of the transmitter, and that only the co-action of the responding of all these elements of the receiver apparatus make the registering apparatus register.”
“Excellent.”30
On June 16, Tesla set out to create an efficient ground connection. His workers were instructed to dig a hole twelve feet deep near a water main, and a copper plate twenty feet square was buried there. “Water was kept constantly flowing upon the ground to moisten it and improve the connection,” but the dry earth and the problem of rock formations interfered with the creation of a completely efficient setup. Nevertheless, “purposely unsensitive receiving instruments placed 200 feet from the shop responded when connected to the ground. The action of the device was strong even though it was concluded that the earth resistance was still too great.”31
For the next series of experiments, Lowenstein was in charge of the transmitter, and Tesla attended to his numerous receivers. Lowenstein recalled, “I handled myself the big transmitter sending two vibrations through the ground by two separate secondary circuits…Mr. Tesla would then…go outside of the building leaving me instructions for continuously switching the oscillator on and off in certain intervals…I don’t know how far he went, but by the time he came back again…[in] the afternoon, you may easily build an idea how far Mr. Tesla could have gone at the time I was standing at the switch.”32 In 1916, Tesla stated that he occasionally conducted experiments as far as ten miles from the station.
On the eve of July 4, one of the most stupendous electrical storms ever recorded in the region rocked Pikes Peak. “Observations made last night. They were not to be easily forgotten for more than one reason. First of all a magnificent sight was afforded by the extraordinary display of lightning, no less than 10,000-12,000 discharges being witnessed inside of two hours…Some…were of a wonderful brilliancy and showed often 10 or twice as many branches.”33
While tracking the storm with his sensitive receiving apparatus, Tesla noticed that even though the storm had passed out of sight, the instruments “began to play periodically.” This was experimental verification of “stationary waves,” periodic electronic vibrations impressed upon the earth itself. Also troughs and nodal points were detected. “It is now certain that they can be produced with an oscillator,” Tesla wrote in his notebook, and then added in brackets, “[This is of immense importance.]”34
Tesla wrote to his secretary the same day: “Dear Mr. Scherff, I have received messages from the clouds 100 miles away.” And two days later: “We have just about finished all [the] details; my work is really to begin in earnest right now.”35
26
CONTACT (1899)
My dear Luka,
Everybody is after me since I was favored by the “Martians.”…My friend J. Collier…has persuaded me to make a short statement regarding the subject of interplanetary communication.
Yours sincerely,
Nikola Tesla1
The Colorado notebook is virtually a daily record of Tesla’s work at the time. Nowhere in the notes can there be found a distinct passage of the pivotal moment when he received unidentified impulses that he came to attribute to extraterrestrials; however, he does refer, on December 8, to this event, writing to friend and columnist Julian Hawthorne: “The art of transmitting electrical energy through the natural media…will…perhaps make it possible for [man] to produce…wonderful changes and transformation on the surface of our globe as are, to all evidence, now being wrought by intelligent beings on a neighboring planet.”2
And just a few weeks later, during the holiday season, while still in Colorado, Tesla, in a Christmas message to the local Red Cross Society “when it asked me to indicate one of the great possible achievements of the next hundred years,”3 wrote: “I have observed electrical actions, which have appeared inexplicable. Faint and uncertain though they were, they have given me a deep conviction and foreknowledge, that ere long all human beings on this globe, as one, will turn [their] eyes to the firmament above, with the feelings of love and reverence, thrilled by the glad news: ‘Brethren! We have a message from another world, unknown and remote. It reads: one…two…three…’”4
Throughout July, Tesla was carefully monitoring the electrical activity of the earth, verifying that it had a specific geomagnetic pulse and harmonics off of that pulse. On the twenty-eighth, he worked on increasing the sensitivity of his receivers by “magnifying the effects of feeble disturbances.” The inventor had tuned his equipment so carefully that “in one instance the devices recorded effects of lightning discharges fully 500 miles away, judging from the periodical action of the discharges as the storm moved away.”5 Thus, he reasoned, he did not have to test transmitted oscillations by installing a receiver fifty, two hundred, or five hundred miles away, as he was already proving that this could be accomplished simply by monitoring these distant electrical storms. This was one way Tesla rationalized his decision not to conduct long-distance experiments; he had verification that they would work.6 Three days later, on August 1, the inventor departed from writing out his growing file of complex equations to compose a discourse of four thousand words on the atmosphere and the climate. In these passa
ges, he describes the “baffling power of the moonlight” for taking night photographs, the “amazing brilliancy of the stars,” magnificent sunsets and shooting stars, the peculiar ability of voices to travel several miles from the center of town to his laboratory, the “curious phenomena of the rapid formation and disappearance of cloud formations,” and the numerous unusual shapes that appeared therein.
“The days were clear with just enough clouds in the sky to break the monotony of the blue,” he wrote. “No wonder…people in feeble health are getting on here so well…I soon learned there were thousands of consumptives in the place…and concluded that while this climate is certainly in a wonderful degree healthful and invigorating, only two kinds of people should come here: Those who have the consumption and those who want to get it…” Placing himself back into the mood of scientific observations, he ended the essay with the following line: “But the most interesting of all are the electrical observations which will be described presently.”7
It appears likely that this sudden burst of poetic reverie could be attributed to the mystical moment he had encountered three nights earlier while monitoring his equipment alone at the lab.
This event, which was to alter his destiny in many ways, as we have seen, did not come out of the blue. Tesla had been planning for nearly a decade to make contact.
Talking With the Planets
Nikola Tesla
The idea of communicating with other worlds…has been regarded as a poet’s dream forever unrealizable…
[Having] perfected the apparatus…for the observation of feeble effects [from] approaching thunderstorms…so far from my laboratory in the Colorado mountains, I could feel the pulse of the globe, as it were, noting every electrical charge that occurred in a radius of eleven hundred miles.
