Wizard

by Marc Seifer

  FAUST: Gnash not so thy greedy teeth against me!—Great and glorious spirit, thou that deniest to appear to me, who knowest my heart and soul, why yoke me to this shame-fellow, who feeds on mischief and feasts on ruin?

  MEPHISTOPHELES: Who was it that plunged her into ruin? I or thou?

  36

  THE CHILD OF HIS DREAMS (1907-1908)

  I do not hesitate to state here for future reference and as a test of the accuracy of my scientific forecast that flying machines and ships propelled by electricity transmitted without wire will have ceased to be a wonder in ten years from now. I would say five were it not that there is such a thing as “inertia of human opinion” resisting revolutionary ideas.

  NIKOLA TESLA, MAY 16, 19071

  “It’s three o’clock in the morning, Mr. Tesla,” George Scherff rasped into the phone as his wife grumbled in her sleep.

  “The sheriffs seized the land.”

  “You owed Warden a hundred ninety-nine dollars!” Scherff said in amazement.

  Fighting back a flood of tears, the inventor rasped, “I don’t have it.”

  “I’ll take care of it, Mr. Tesla.”2

  “Thank you,” Tesla said as his hand limply hung up the line. His hair disheveled, his clothes scattered about, the former man of the hour was going to have to let the maid in soon. What would she say about the drapes he had placed over the mirrors? And then there was the tower. He had to go back there to seal up the property. Would he have the strength to make the journey?

  His appetite all but gone, Tesla hadn’t seen his friends for months. He managed a letter to Katharine as he rang room service to send up breakfast. “I’m ever in so much greater trouble,” he scratched out on his letterhead.3 But he would allow no one to truly know the hell he had entered. No sunlight must enter his room. He sat in the shadows and petted a wounded pigeon he had found floundering by the New York Public Library. If Boldt ever knew, the bird would have to be smuggled back out.

  The withered man reached over to the envelope addressed to him in a feminine hand. Carefully he removed the letter and theater ticket. Marguerite Merrington had invited him to her new play Love Finds a Way. He stared at the title and broke down once again into uncontrollable sobs.4

  Reconciling the torment, Tesla eased himself back into the social net as 1907 commenced. As part of his therapy, the recluse would surreptitiously board a moonlight train to Wardenclyffe. There, in the wizard’s chambers, the Balkan genie would hook up high-frequency apparatus to his skull and thereby impress macabre waves of soothing electrical energy through his brain. “I have passed [150,000 volts]…through my head,” Tesla told the New York Times, “and did not lose consciousness, but I invariably fell into a lethargic sleep some time after.”

  In May, Tesla was inducted as a member of the New York Academy of Sciences.6 Slowly, he began to see once again that perhaps his grand plan could be resurrected. To raise the capital to keep his ship afloat, the inventor took out a series of mortgages, subdividing the enterprise into a string of hypothetical parcels. In the spring of 1904 he had borrowed $5,000 from Thomas G. Sherman, a law partner of Stanford White’s brother-in-law, and in the winter of 1906 he obtained $3,500 from Edmund Stallo, a son-in-law of one of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil partners; but those funds had long disappeared. Having dodged the Waldorf management for nearly three years, he took out another mortgage for an additional $5,000 against the rent he owed with the proprietor, George Boldt.7 And thus began a fresh plan for continuing to live in the lap of luxury without laying out another dime.

  Boldt had done exceptionally well for himself. Having hobnobbed with the megarich for many years, the Waldorf manager had been able to take advantage of a number of inside opportunities. By 1907, a millionaire in his own right, he had expanded his base to become a banker, orchestrating the creation of the Lincoln Trust Company, which was located across the street from Madison Square Garden.8

  Everyone except Tesla seemed to be flourishing. Morgan, through Jacob Schiff, had finally iced his deal with the Guggenheims to form the “Alaska Syndicate,” an enormous corporation which had been set up to exploit a copper find in the inviolable northern wilderness. Whereas the Guggenheim mountain in Utah contained only 2-3 percent ore, this lode, according to John Hays Hammond’s report, was 75 percent pure copper! A site of incalculable wealth, it would take a fleet of steamships, a thousandman crew, and an up-front capital investment of $25 million to construct a railroad just to reach the find.

  But copper was not all the “Morganheims” had their eye on. They also began purchasing coal and iron reserves and hundreds of thousands of acres of forestland. “Thus the press, the few environmentalists active at the time, and a significant portion of the American people began to vigorously oppose the Guggenmorganization of Alaska.”9

  With the growing need for copper wire came also a demand for insulation. Seizing the opportunity, Thomas Fortune Ryan and Bernard Baruch went to Europe to sign a contract with the king of Belgium (the former Prince Albert, an acquaintance of Tesla’s). Their plan was to take over the rubber industry in the African Congo. The financiers negotiated an even split, with the king allocating 25 percent for his country and retaining 25 percent for himself. As Baruch returned to Wall Street to handle marketing, Ryan traveled to Africa to oversee the product’s manufacture. Naturally, the tire companies were just as interested as the electrical concerns.

  Once it was realized that Tesla’s plans to do away with transmission lines had been abolished, it seemed as if there began a feeding frenzy on copper stocks, as this market was now assured a continually increasing demand.

  PANIC OF 1907

  The first signs of economic distress was heralded in August, when John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil was fined the staggering sum of $29 million for price gouging and illegal tariffs. Suddenly, Wall Street became edgy. In October, F. Augustus Heinze, a well-known speculator and enemy of the Guggenheim syndicate, began dumping large blocks of United Copper onto the market. Heinze miscalculated in his attempts to buy back the stock at a much lower price, and his shifty scheming resulted in a drop in the market and a run on his bank, the Mercantile Trust Company. Due to Heinze’s links to other financial institutions, the hysteria spread, and the Panic of 1907 began. Depositors emptied out every bank they could get into.

  J. Pierpont Morgan called an emergency conference of all the bank and trust presidents, gathering them together in his newly constructed library in an all-night vigil. Sitting among his tapestries, original manuscripts, paintings, and jewels, the Wall Street monarch did his best to orchestrate a bailout of those institutions that were salvageable. Some, however, were beyond repair, and the stronger banks would go only so far in dipping into their reserves. Charles Barney, director of the Knickerbocker Trust Company, and father of “two awfully pretty sisters,” pleaded for assistance, but he was rebuked. Barney went home and put a pistol to his head. This act produced a wave of suicides, particularly among the Knickerbocker’s eighteen thousand depositors. With Henry Clay Frick acting as liaison, President Theodore Roosevelt would transfer $25 million into Morgan’s control. Although this figure matched the pledge of the stronger institutions, the new influx could only stretch so far. Boldt’s bank, the Lincoln Trust, along with the Knickerbocker, the Mercantile, and half a dozen others, had gone under by the end of the week.10 Now Tesla’s chances of resurrecting his own enterprise became even more remote.

  “These are simply awful times,” Tesla told Scherff. “I cannot understand at all how Americans who are so daring and reckless in other respects can get scared to such a degree. My ship propulsion scheme is really great, and I feel sure that it will pull me out of the hole. Just how, I do not see as yet because it seems almost impossible to [amass] any money at all.”

  “We’re still waiting to hear from the International Mercantile Marine Company,” Scherff said.

  “Be patient, my man. They are certainly interested, but make conditions which I am unable to accept for the
present. If I had just a little capital I would not worry about finishing my place.”

  “What about Astor?”

  “He told me over the phone, that he would see me as soon as possible, but up to present, nothing has materialized. I know now, that if I am to get capital, I can only get it from some fellow who has not less than a hundred million.”

  “Then, Mr. Tesla, let’s hope for the best.”11

  “Dulled by [his] own suffering,”12 Tesla began edging himself out of his depression by producing a number of acerbic essays for the electrical journals and local newspapers. Covering a wide range of topics, the inventor sought to vindicate himself and thereby try and make sense out of an absurdly ironic situation. Simultaneously, he sought to explain the Wardenclyffe vision yet again in the vain hope that some financier with a transcendent vision would come to his rescue. He was searching for a hero, not only for selfish desires but, in his eyes, for the future of the planet.

  Under the guise of commenting on Commodore Perry’s exploration of the North Pole, Tesla explained in detail the modus operandi of his world wireless scheme.13 For Harvard Illustrated, he discussed Lowell’s Martian discoveries and the way to signal the nearby planet;” for the World and English Mechanic & World of Science, he described how a tidal wave could be created by using high explosives to set the entire earth in oscillation and discussed how this wall of water could be harnessed to “engulf” an advancing enemy;15 and for the New York Sun and New York Times he drafted a flurry of letters to the editor on such topics as his dirigible wireless torpedo,16 the transmission of voice by means of wireless, the “narcotic influence of certain periodic currents” when transmitted through the body for therapeutic reasons, the inefficiency of Marconi’s system, and the piracy of his oscillators by Marconi and another wireless inventor Valdemar Poulsen. Tesla also declared that the telephone was invented by Philip Reis before Bell and the incandescent lamp by King and J. W. Starr before Edison.17

  Unlike Bell and Edison, Tesla wrote, “I had to cut the path myself, and my hands are still sore.” After reviewing his bitter battle for vindication as the true author of the AC polyphase system against such “feeble men” as Professor Ferraris, the wizard went on to discuss his seminal work in wireless telegraphy. “It will never be possible to transmit electrical energy economically through this [planet] and its environment except by essentially the same means and methods which I have discovered,” he declared, “and the system is so perfect now that it admits of but little improvement…Would you mind telling a reason why this advance should not stand worthily beside the discoveries of Copernicus?”18

  This was a new Tesla—resentful, indignant, defiant, petulant. He was the discoverer of the AC polyphase system, the induction motor, fluorescent lights, mechanical and electrical oscillators, a novel steam propulsion system, wireless transmission of intelligence, light, and power, remote control, and interplanetary communication. He was an original discoverer, whereas Bell and Edison had merely modified the works of others. How dare the world deny him his due?

  Tesla’s inventions were even at the heart of the new electric subway system which had just opened its doors beneath the thriving metropolis. Flooding, however, was a continual problem which marred this newest Tesla spin-off. The public had to be warned lest water cause corrosion of vital components, thereby increasing the risk of causing an explosion, and so another article advised the authorities on ways to cure the problem.

  After one of his biweekly trips to his esteemed tonsorial artist for the warm compresses on his face and vigorous head massage to stimulate brain cells,19 Tesla picked up his walking cane and strolled out in his green suede high-tops to Forty-second Street, to the entranceway of the freshly tiled Interborough catacombs. He was looking for new office space. Descending the staircase, the creator was overtaken with a pompous sense of pride as he stood by the tracks to await the next train. It was an almost magical experience for him to drop down in one part of the city, only to pop up majestically in another spot a few minutes later.

  While waiting at a stop one ordinary day in 1907, he was approached by a lad and asked if he were the great Nikola Tesla. Catching a gleam in the inquirer’s eye, the inventor answered in the affirmative.

  “I have many questions to ask you,” the youngster said as Tesla moved forward to step aboard the train.

  “Well, then, come on,” Tesla responded, unable to understand why the boy hesitated.

  “I do not have enough money for the fare” was the embarrassed reply.

  “Oh, is that all,” the electronic savant chuckled as he tossed the youngster the required sum. “What’s your name?”

  “O’Neill, sir, Jack O’Neill. I’m applying for a job as a page for the New York Public Library.”

  “Good. We can meet there and you can help me research the history of some patents I am investigating.”

  O’Neill, who also had a keen interest in psychic phenomena, would go on a decade later to become a science reporter for the Long Island paper, the Nassau Daily Review Star. Eventually he took a position at the Herald Tribune, where he won the Pulitzer Prize before penning Prodigal Genius.20

  In June came yet another legal suit, again from Warden, only this time from his heirs, as he had passed away. The amount was for $1,080, for money owed on an option Tesla had on four hundred acres adjacent to the two hundred he controlled.

  “This is an old case which has been dragging in the courts for years,” Tesla told the Sun reporter. “I [had] intended to use this land for an agricultural experiment in fertilizing soil by means of electricity. I thought that by the use of certain electrical principles [in producing nitrogen], the soil could be increased very much, [and thus I had] agreed to take a certain option. But subsequently [I] discovered that the person who entered into the agreement had no right to make such a disposition…I told him the option was off…[but] the heirs of the owner had simply pressed the claim, and it is very likely that it will have to be paid.”21

  VTOL’S: A HISTORY OF VERTICAL & TAKE-OFF LANDING AIRCRAFT

  June 8, 1908

  My dear Colonel,

  I am now ready to take an order from you for a self-propelled flying machine, either of the lighter or heavier-than-air type.

  Yours sincerely,

  Nikola Tesla22

  Astor was particularly interested in flying machines, but as would become his habit, Tesla would be working at cross-purposes. He wanted the good colonel to fund this work in aeronautics, but, in actuality, his ultimate goal was to earn enough money so that he could return to Long Island and reopen his world telegraphy plant. Thus, any potential profits were always threatened by the greater plan. This problem would continue to encumber any possible deal, especially with someone like Astor, who knew full well the inventor’s primary intentions.

  One of Tesla’s most confounding prognostications came at the onset of 1908. Having finally located a new work space at 165 Broadway, Tesla felt that he was getting back on track. Shortly after he moved in, he received an invitation to speak at a Waldorf-Astoria dinner in honor of himself and Rear Adm. Charles Sigsbee. “Th[is] coming year will dispel [one]…error which has greatly retarded aerial navigation,” Tesla prophesied. “The aeronaut will soon satisfy himself that an aeroplane…is altogether too heavy to soar, and that such a machine, while it will have some use, can never fly as fast as a dirigible balloon…In strong contrast with these unnecessarily hazardous trials are the serious and dignified efforts of Count Zeppelin, who is building a real flying machine, safe and reliable, to carry a dozen men and provisions, and with a speed far in excess of those obtained with aeroplanes.”23

  Assuming that the viscosity of the atmosphere exceeded that of water, Tesla had calculated that an airplane could never fly much faster than “an aqueous craft.” The inventor further reasoned that for highest velocities “the propeller is doomed.” Not only was its rotational speed restrictive, it was also subject to easy breakage. The prop plane, according to calculatio
ns, would have to be replaced by “a reactive jet.”24

  In the short run, that is, for the next thirty years, the airship was the preferred method of passenger travel.

  BERLIN, May 30 [1908]. Count Zeppelin, whose remarkable performances in his first airship brought such signal honors, today accomplished the most striking feat in his career so far. He guided his Zeppelin II, with two engineers and a crew of seven aboard, a distance of more than 400 miles, without landing…

  All through the night the vessel…sped over Wertenberg and Bavaria, passing over sleeping countryside and villages and cities hardly less asleep…

  It was announced and widely published…that the Count would come to Berlin and land at the…parade ground. In expectation of the event…the Emperor and Empress…and hundreds of thousands gathered there.25

  It would be two decades before Lindbergh would capture the imagination of the public by flying solo in a propeller-driven airplane across the high seas, but airships were already close to accomplishing that feat. In 1911, Joseph Brucker formed the Transatlantic Airship Expedition, but he was beaten in the quest by the British air force, which succeeded in crossing the Atlantic eight years later.26 During World War I, the zeppelin ran frequent bombing missions from Berlin to London; Robert Underwood Johnson flew with fifty other passengers in a similar “leviathan” over Rome just two years later, in 1919.27 However, by the late 1920s this infamous legacy was all but forgotten, as these great airships were flying regularly across the Atlantic from Europe to both North and South America, and Germany was enjoying a reputation as the new leader in futuristic technology.

  One curious and unfortunate footnote to history was the senseless choice to fill those blimps with hydrogen, a highly explosive gas, instead of nonflammable helium. Had engineers insisted on the much safer medium by heeding Tesla’s 1915 warning, the great Hindenburg disaster of 1937 would never have taken place, and the use of zeppelins would probably have continued for many more years to come. The problem stemmed all the way back to the late 1700s, when Jacques Charles, a French scientist, discovered that hydrogen was fourteen times lighter than air and filled a balloon with it. Monsieur Charles, like Count Zeppelin of Tesla’s time, gained great notoriety by traveling in his balloon fifteen or twenty miles at a stretch.