Wizard

by Marc Seifer

  of my heart to give it up…[Thus] I would honestly rather [present it to

  you, than sell it]…as my only desire…is to please you.” But Morgan insisted on compensating him for the statue, paying White “double the normal commission” in order to show that he, too, felt their affiliation transcended “business.”26

  April 26, 1901

  Dear Nikola,

  I send you with this a new revised plan for your power house, also a very close estimate which we have made ourselves in this office…The work could be done for about $14,000. I am very sure for a building of this size, that it would be impossible to get these figures down lower.

  Affectionately,

  Stanford White27

  Bids were taken from Sturgis and Hill and also Mertz and Co., two contractors White often worked with. In May blueprints for the laboratory were sent over to Tesla for his approval, in June a contract with Sturgis and Hill was finalized,28 and in July the land was cleared, and a road was put in.29 White recommended one of his associates, W. D. Crow, as architect in charge. Crow would also do the actual construction of the tower.30

  The sun was out bright one morning in the early spring as the inventor strutted down Peacock Alley and up Fifth Avenue toward Forty-second Street and Grand Central Station, to transfer to Pennsylvania Station and take an early train to Wardenclyffe. Golden shafts of light billowed through the upper windows of the cathedral-like edifice as Tesla crossed the mighty corridor and stepped aboard the luxury car. Ordering a pot of coffee, he began to peruse his mail. The train rattled out of the city, past Manhassett, Oyster Bay, where Vice President Roosevelt lived, St. James near Smithtown, where White had his family estate, Port Jefferson, and finally to Wardenclyffe. With stops at the various towns, the trip took about an hour and a half, the Connecticut shoreline sometimes visible across the Sound. It was when he reached page 280 of the Electrical Review that his jaw dropped and his cup of coffee spilled all over the prim white tablecloth.

  Syntonic Wireless Telegraphy

  Guglielmo Marconi

  A large amount of inacurrate and misleading information is being published…even in the scientific press…[on] telegraphy through space…I shall endeavor to correct some of the[se] misstatements…

  It is my intention to describe fully the efforts I have made in order to tune or syntonize the wireless system, efforts which, I am glad to say, have been crowned with complete success…

  I first constructed an arrangement which consists of a Leyden jar or condenser circuit in which included the primary of what may be called a Tesla coil [and a] secondary [which] is connected to the earth or aerial conductor. The idea of using a Tesla coil to produce oscillations is not new. It was tried by the Post Office [i.e., with Preece] when experimenting with my system in 1898 and also suggested in a patent specification by Dr. Lodge dated May 10, 1897 (No. 11,) and by Professor Braun in…1899.31

  Tesla described to Morgan in a letter written three years later how this information affected him:

  When I discovered, rather accidentally, that others, who openly cast ridicule on what I had undertaken and discredited my apparatus were secretly employing it, evidently bent on the same task, I found myself confronted with wholly unforeseen conditions…Your [Morgan’s] participation called for a careful revision of my plans. I could not develop the business slowly in grocery-shop fashion. I could not report yacht races or signal incoming steamers. There was no money in this. This was no business for a man of your position and importance. Perhaps you have never fully appreciated the sense of this obligation.32

  This passage displays misunderstanding by Tesla of Morgan’s personality. Unlike the inventor, whose ideas existed in abstract and futuristic forms, the pragmatic financier’s mind was on the present. Morgan loved sailing and yacht races and would resent another suggesting what a man in his position should or should not do.

  Tesla reveals in this letter that he had to change his plans due to the “advantage shrewd competitors had” (e.g., due to Marconi’s pirating and connections with Pupin, Edison, European investors, and sovereign rulers). He thereupon decided to abandon the agreed-upon scheme of building a modest-sized transmitter and replaced it with the idea of constructing a skyscraping tower six hundred feet high, designs for which he scratched out on his fancy Waldorf-Astoria stationery.33 Ironically, for the ofttimes altruistic Tesla, it was his greed, vanity, and megalomania which drove him into the new venture. To have his ideas stolen from him was abhorrent. In his autobiography, Tesla would later refer to Marconi (although not by name) as a “parasite and microbe of a nasty disease.” It was at this moment that the inventor decided to scrap the trivial idea of sending mere Morse codes across the Atlantic. He would inaugurate a world communications enterprise to pulverize the vermin as a pachyderm would crush a toad.

  Having reached the pinnacle of the ruling class, Tesla’s self-image swelled with the occasion, for he had conceived a telecommunications enterprise more efficient than the combined forces of today’s radio, television, wire service, lighting, telephone, and power systems! His ultimate plan even included the production of rain in the deserts, the lighting of skies above shipping lanes, the wireless production of energy for automobiles and airships, a universal time-keeping apparatus, and a mechanism for achieving interplanetary communication. Having attained cosmic consciousness, he offered this creation to the king of the financial world, and the king had accepted. To the inventor, it was simply a detail that this vision was not in agreement with the specifics of the contract or that Tesla never really told Morgan his greater scheme; this work, like White’s statue, transcended the traditional rules of business.

  PANIC ON WALL STREET

  It was just sixty days since Tesla had signed his contract with Morgan, thirty days after Morgan sailed for Europe. Yet already Tesla had irreversibly changed his plans. Since he had been a gambler and pool player in his salad days and was now living among the most audacious of high rollers at the Waldorf, these old tendencies resurfaced now that he had “hooked the biggest fish on Wall Street.” He had calculated the odds based on certain assumptions about the stability of the economy and the quickness of his access to Morgan’s $150,000, and he proceeded boldly with the completion of the masterwork.

  How could the inventor know that on May 10 the stock market would crash and that the main culprit in the catastrophe would be his backer, J. Pierpont Morgan?

  The collapse of the stock market occurred because of a bitter rivalry that existed between Morgan and Ned Harriman. Morgan, who was in charge of the Northern Pacific Railroad, having tossed Henry Villard out a decade earlier, had bought control of an enormous line called the Chicago Burlington. This concern stretched its tracks from Atlantic ports to Chicago and down the Mississippi all the way to New Orleans. Harriman, who controlled the Union Pacific, or southern route to the west, wanted access to the Burlington as well, and he tried to negotiate with Morgan for a seat on the board of directors. Unfortunately, due to bitter disagreements stemming from an old railroad deal in which the crafty Harriman had outwitted the commodore, Morgan came to detest the man. Therefore, he would not share the Burlington and became irrational whenever Harriman’s name was mentioned.34

  Thus, while Morgan enjoyed his art purchases in England and his mistress in France, Harriman, with the help of his broker, Jacob Schiff, clandestinely began purchasing Morgan’s Northern Pacific. Instead of trying to outbid Morgan for the Burlington, Harriman boldly bought Morgan’s own holding company out from underneath him! To accomplish this coup(!), it would take the adventuresome Harriman close to $100 million, which he raised by selling enormous blocks of Union Pacific bonds, and Harriman actually successfully carried out the operation. By the first week in May, Harriman owned more than 50 percent of Morgan’s precious company, which had been affectionately called the Nipper. When Morgan received the fateful telegram from his underlings while in France, he tossed his paramour off his lap and wired back the order to buy Northern Pacific back
at any price, for Harriman did not yet own a majority of the voting common shares.

  On May 9, the stock rocketed from $150 to $1,000 per share! A panic ensued as people who bought in on the Nipper were unable to obtain possession of their shares, as neither Morgan nor Harriman would release any; most of the other stocks dropped when investors sold in order to cover their losses. The end product was the tumbling of the market and the creation of extreme economic and political times and also monetary chaos. Stanford White was one of many who lost heavily in the market. For Tesla, costs increased dramatically, and credit was nearly impossible to obtain. The front page of the New York Times reported the calamity: “The greatest general panic that Wall Street has ever known came upon the stock market yesterday, with the result that before it was checked many fortunes had been swept away…”35

  Even Morgan’s precious U.S. Steel dropped from its current price of forty-six to a low of eight dollars a share.36 Numerous investors were financially ruined, and some purportedly committed suicide. (One rumor concerning this famous event was that Morgan won back the company because Harriman’s broker, Jacob Schiff, was in the synagogue on the fateful Saturday when Morgan began buying more shares of Northern Pacific. Schiff, however, never intended to wrest the company from Morgan. His goal was simply to obtain a large enough percentage of the company to force Morgan to give Harriman a piece of the Chicago Burlington. Harriman, in his frenzy, wanted to change their plan so as to gain control over all three railroads, but Schiff overruled him. Thus, the skyrocketing of the stock and ensuing crash of the market were based solely on Morgan’s buy orders.)

  The economic upheaval created heavy financial burdens on Tesla. However, he would not completely realize the increasing financial difficulties immediately, for the affects on construction costs, wages, and incidentals would ripple throughout the summer and fall.

  Before Pierpont’s departure for England, in April, he had assured Tesla that now he “had no doubts” about the inventor’s abilities,37 and even if, by some fluke of misfortune, Morgan should not supply additional funds, Tesla still had his own money and the personality to attract additional investors. At forty-five years of age, wealthy, established as a leader of his field (however controversial), and rubbing elbows with the crème de la crème, the tall inventor was well equipped for the task he foresaw.

  31

  CLASH OF THE TITANS (1901)

  Make a Tesla or buy a Tesla coil. I made one, find it…Get books on wireless telegraphy.

  FROM THE PRIVATE NOTEBOOK OF THOMAS EDISON1

  Throughout the late spring and summer, Tesla commuted regularly to Wardenclyffe, often with a servant of Serbian extraction and a box lunch from the Waldorf-Astoria.2 At night he returned to the city, where he could stop in at the Players’ Club, attend a concert, or dine at Delmonico’s or Sherry’s. In June, having to forgo yet another “Johnson blowout,” he apologized to Robert and Owen for being “unable to meet the lady who inspired the celebrated author of the Arrows of the Almighty.”3

  White was on his yearly fishing vacation in Canada,4 so Tesla was on his own for the month. Some of the time was spent scouting out possible apartments to rent in Shoreham, and George Scherff also had to look for a place. In July the architect returned, and talks resumed concerning the construction of the tower. Having recently joined the Automobile Club of America, which had its headquarters in Locust Valley and counted Vice President Teddy Roosevelt among its members,5 White would motor out from the city to the club or to St. James in his new “steam-powered Locomobile,” which required a driver, or on his own in a fashionable “electric two-seater runabout.”6 With his estate just a few miles from Shoreham, the avid motorist could drive out past the endless flats of potato fields, along the same road that also led to the site of Wardenclyffe to oversee the work and perhaps take the inventor for a spin. The architect’s son recalled: “I remember Tesla well, as he often came down to stay with us on Long Island. He used to wander around at night in the garden in the moonlight; and when my mother asked him why he wasn’t asleep, he replied: ‘I never sleep.’ I also remember going to his laboratory [in the city] as a boy, and watching him put several million volts through his body lighting up two Crookes tubes which he held in his hand.”7

  White made Tesla realize that a six-hundred-foot-high transmitter (roughly two-thirds the height of the Eiffel Tower) was simply out of the question, so Tesla dabbled with harmonic ratios of one-half and one-quarter that size. With prices so unstable, it would be difficult to calculate the new costs.

  The Johnsons were as excited as Tesla about the purchase of Wardenclyffe. By July, with the land cleared, it became an opportune moment to visit the site—just a few miles from a lovely beach on the Sound at Wading River and also not far from Southampton on the Atlantic side. A weekend was set aside to coax Tesla into spending some time swimming. It was a delightful moment, a time to enjoy the salt water and picnic grounds and pose for whimsical photographs of their heads placed in the notches of standard billboard pictures of bodies in striped bathing suits or, gaily adorned, sitting in the seats of an imitation automobile.8

  In August, with the frame up on the lab and plans for the facing under way, Tesla once again refused a respite in Maine with the Johnsons, writing a teasing letter that as a member of the Four Hundred he could not meet with “people whose fathers have been fruit peddlers and grocers.”9 Perhaps Katharine’s father had been such.10 With the tower now planned as a much larger venture and Morgan delaying payment of promised funds, Tesla pondered a way not only to obtain owed funds but also to get Morgan to increase his investment.

  The monarch with the bulbous snout returned from Europe on the Fourth of July. Leaving the ocean liner from the stern in order to avoid the throng of reporters, Morgan ignored his home and moved to the Corsair, his 300-foot-long yacht, living there for the month and staying in Bar Harbor, Maine, through part of August.11 The art connoisseur was pleased with his recent acquisitions of paintings, gemstones, and rare manuscripts—he did not shorten his yearly European excursion on account of a Wall Street crisis—but he was irritable, irrationally perturbed with Harriman, and fearful that the press and public might threaten his empire, if not his life. Morgan was an opinionated man, fair-minded much of the time but dangerously stubborn at other times. Having detested Harriman for outwitting him not once but twice, he must have been furious when the world viewed him as the villain who had destabilized the economy because of a personal vendetta. A turbulent labor strike by the steel workers added to his unhappiness and the uncertainty of the times. Headlines such as the following caused him to seek armed protection:

  The Rich Denounced by Socialist Labor

  Thousands at Cooper Union

  Cheer Wordy Assaults on Capital.

  J. P. Morgan Accused of Trying to “Trustify the Earth.”

  “This is the century,” said chairman Lucien Sanial, “in which there is going to be social revolution.”

  Whoop went the audience waving hats and yelling madly for a minute or so…Charles Knoll [followed and] said he favored the adoption of such resolutions as would “chill and make to shiver the spinal column of the capitalists.”12

  To end the Northern Pacific fiasco, Morgan and Harriman allowed investors to settle their accounts at $150 a share. The public was not supposed to notice that this price would yield hefty profits to the giants who had purchased their stock for one-third less than that price only days earlier. Instead, they were perceived as noble in their attempts to restore order and sanity to the economy. At first, the government wanted Morgan to return stocks to the original investors at original prices. In response, Morgan was quoted as saying that it would be quite a feat to “unscramble the eggs and return them to their original hens!” When accused of avoiding his responsibility to society, Morgan responded in anger, “I owe the public nothing.” For this remark, Morgan would be interrogated by the governmental investigative committees until his dying days, but he weathered the storm easily.


  Before Morgan left for Maine, he met with the inventor. In a new satchel purchased for the occasion, Tesla brought his latest patent applications, drawings of the half-completed laboratory, and schematics for the tower. The secretary at 23 Wall Street ushered him in.

  “Mr. Morgan, you have raised great waves in the industrial world and some have struck my little boat. Prices have gone up in consequence, twice, perhaps three times higher than they were and then there were expensive delays, mostly as a result of activities you excited.”13

  “We’ve all suffered, Mr. Tesla,” Morgan said, already perturbed and testy because of the more important imbroglios he was enmeshed in.

  Tesla pushed on, informing Morgan that he had decided to design a larger tower than agreed upon because of Marconi’s piracy. Morgan looked on, at first in detached amazement, as Tesla continued.

  “Suppose a plant is constructed capable of sending signals within a given radius, and consider an extension to twice the distance. The area being then four times as large, the returns will become more valuable. Approximately computed, the average price will be tripled. This means that a plant, with a radius of activity twice as large, will earn twelve times as much. But it will cost twice as much…The greater the distance the greater the gain until, when the plant can transmit signals to the uttermost confines of the Earth, its earning power becomes, so to speak, unlimited.

  “The way to go, [Mr. Morgan, is] to construct such a plant…It [will] give the greatest force to my patents and ensure a monopoly…[and] offer[s] possibilities for business on a large, dignified scale commensurate with your position in life and mine as a pioneer in this art, who has originated all essential principles.”14