Wizard

by Marc Seifer

  I am your affectionate son,

  John Hays Hammond Jr.47

  It would be many years, however, before the U.S. government recompensed Jack for his remote-controlled guidance system. He would expend over the next decade in the neighborhood of three-quarters of a million dollars on the operation, expanding the system of radiodynamic control to include aircraft as well submersibles.48 Problems in the creation of secret channels were made apparent in 1915 and 1916 when the USS Dolphin successfully interfered with a torpedo launched by Hammond over distances of two hundred to three hundred feet, but the Hammond system was successful when the torpedo was launched farther away.49 The War Department also wanted to sustain visual contact of the weapon, so Jack began working on a device to be directed from flying machines. Every problem he encountered he was able to overcome.

  The technology was still too new to be used during World War I, and the military kept avoiding expenditures of any funds. Ostensibly waiting for Tesla’s fundamental telautomatic patents to expire, Jack finally presented his case before members of Congress. He stated that he had overtures from foreign governments, but he would refuse to negotiate with them because of the importance of the work and loyalty to his country. And so, in 1919, while his father, John Hays Hammond Sr., continued to gain publicity for his idea of a World Court to prevent war, the U.S. Congress and President Wilson approved an appropriation of $417,000 for the war patents for Hammond’s son; however, still no monies changed hands.50

  In the 1920s, Jack began working with David Sarnoff, who, along with Guglielmo Marconi and Edwin Armstrong, was forming the seeds of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). And, in 1923, the fruits of his labor paid off when Jack sold a series of wireless patents to RCA for $500,000,51 but he was still to be compensated by the U.S. government. In 1924, Hammond sent yet another dispatch to the War Department to gain the release of the appropriated funds, which were now up to $750,000. “I have brought the development to a state where we have demonstrated the feasibility of control of standard naval torpedoes while running at depths of 6 feet or over, submerged at speeds of 27-30 knots/hr,” Hammond wrote.52 Finally, in December 1924, with the help of Curtis Wilbur, secretary of the navy and admirer of Hammond’s father, the government made good, recompensing Hammond and assigning his work to a secret file in the patent office. Assurances were also given that their exclusive patents did not compete with those sold to RCA. All this took place a full decade after his breakup with his Serbian mentor, who “now [had] the pleasure of simply looking on when others are using my inventions.”

  “I wish him luck,” Tesla said. “But still, I ought to have had something for it.” Tesla also pointed out that Hammond sought his patents just a few months after Tesla’s had run out.53

  Now a millionaire on his own merits, Jack set out to fulfill a dream that began in his youth, when the family moved to England, namely, to live in a castle. He also fell in love with an artist, Irene Fenton, a lovely daughter of a shipbuilder who unfortunately was married to a shoe merchant. Irene, forty-five, got divorced and married Jack, thirty-seven, clandestinely in 1925, as he began construction of the medieval dwelling which was situated on the cloistered and treacherous coastal cliffs where Longfellow wrecked the fictitious schooner Hesperus in Gloucester. The site was less than a mile from his parent’s home.54

  Jack’s passion was music. Although not a musician, he had many acoustical patents and also an organ that was so enormous, comprising eight thousand pipes, that a palace would be the only edifice capable of housing it. Hammond designed the all-stone building around the instrument, complete with parapets, a moat, and a chain-link drawbridge. Inside could be found dark, winding corridors, hidden doorways, and breakaway walls at the entrance of the great room for moving organ pipes into it and out. In the center of the castle, which today is a museum, Hammond placed an indoor swimming pool and an atrium filled with plants and tropical birds. Ancient artifacts from Europe were purchased, and a nude statue of the celebrated innovator was sculpted, Irene designing a metal fig leaf to subdue the piece.

  Jack continued to work on a long series of top-secret inventions for the War Department and for himself as he lived the life of the bon vivant. Visitors to his estate and to his pipe-organ concerts in the 1930s included the Hearsts, George Gershwin, Helen Hayes, David Sarnoff, Ann and Theodore Edison, the Marconis, J. Pierpont Morgan’s daughter Louisa and her husband, Herbert Satterlee, Helen Astor, Marie Carnegie, David Rockefeller, the Barrymores, Noël Coward, and Leopold Stokowski.

  It is doubtful that Tesla ever visited the castle, although he might have, but on March 30, 1951, nearly a decade after the Serb’s death, another Slav and Teslarian, Andrija Puharich, stopped by.55 Still interested in extrasensory perception, Jack had invited Puharich, a medical doctor and inventor of hearing aids, along with psychic Eileen Garrett, to his citadel for the purpose of testing her telepathic abilities. Placed in a Faraday cage so that electromagnetic waves could be screened out, Garrett performed at a level that astounded the experimenters.56

  A world traveler and prodigious innovator throughout his life, Jack spent much of his time in the latter years traveling, with his wife, across the country in a mobile home he had designed. One day on a trip to see his friend Igor Sikorsky, in Bridgeport, the inventor of the helicopter asked if Jack wanted one as a present. “Only if it can take my mobile home,” Jack responded. After a long pause, with time out to stare at the mobile monstrosity, Igor responded, “It can be done.”

  John Hays Hammond Jr. died in 1965 at the age of seventy-seven. A genius in his own right, it is unfortunate that his relationship with Tesla was thwarted. Together they invented a rather sizable chunk of the appliances of the modern era.

  39

  J. P. MORGAN JR. (1912-14)

  April 18, 1912

  My dear Mr. Tesla:

  I attended the Marconi meeting last night, in company with illustrious society. The everlasting toast-master, [T.C.] Martin, read, in most theatrical fashion a telegram; and after a pause of fully three minutes, announced its author as: “THOMAS A. EDISON!”

  Mr. Marconi gave the history, as he sees it, of wireless up to this date. [He] does not speak any more of Hertzian Wave Telegraphy, but accentuates that messages he sends out are conducted along the earth. Pupin had the floor next, showing that wireless was due entirely to one single person…

  The only speaker of the evening who understood Mr. Marconi’s merit, who did not hesitate to vent his opinion was Steinmetz. In a brief historical sketch, he maintained that while all elements necessary for the transmission of wireless energy were available, it was due to Marconi that intelligence was actually transmitted…

  That evening was, without any question, the highest tribute that I ever have heard paid to you in the language of absolute silence as to your name.

  Sincerely yours,

  Fritz Lowenstein1

  Tesla was in the midst of working for W. M. Maxwell, superintendent of New York’s public schools, on a controversial project to electrify classrooms with high-frequency currents. Following in the footsteps of a highly publicized experiment in Stockholm whereby a group of children in such an environment apparently showed increased scores on aptitude tests and accelerated growth, Maxwell was hoping to boost the health and intelligence of students in America. With the prestigious inventor wiring the walls with his “Tesla coil,” guaranteeing complete safety, and concurring with the general conclusions of the hypothesis, Tesla helped Maxwell set up a pilot study with “fifty mentally defective school children.” If the study proved successful, the superintendent boldly stated, “the new system would overturn all methods hitherto applied in its schools and introduce a new era in education.”2

  Marconi’s talk, before eleven hundred members of the New York Electrical Society, was held on the very day the Titanic sank. Frank Sprague, who gave the eulogy, “visibly affected Mr. Marconi when he credited him with saving the lives of from 700 to 800 persons.”3 Unfortunately, Mar
coni was unable to save fifteen hundred other individuals, including Colonel Astor, who went down with the ship after helping his new bride board one of the remaining lifeboats.

  If ever an event epitomized the loss of innocence, the myopic condition of humanity, it was the sinking of the Titanic. Reminiscent of Tesla’s own voyage, this watershed recapitulated the story of Icarus, the prideful aeronaut who crumbled because of lack of respect for his limitations. With Tesla’s outlandish wish to transmit unlimited energy to the far reaches of the world and bring rain to the deserts, to become a master of the universe, it was inevitable that he, too, would succumb. The tragedy prompted Congress to pass into law an act requiring the use of wireless equipment on all ships carrying fifty or more passengers. It also focused national attention on twenty-one-year old David Sarnoff, latter-day head of RCA, who was credited as the first wireless operator to pick up the Titanic distress signal.4

  Tesla was not the only casualty in the wireless game. Reginald Fessenden’s concern “all but ceased functioning in 1912” due to his erratic nature, infighting, and “prolonged litigation.” And Lee De Forest, who by now had nearly forty patents in wireless, also went under when he was convicted with officers of his company in a stock fraud.5 Concerning Lowenstein, Tesla was backing his protégé’s attempts to install equipment on U.S. Navy ships using equipment based on some of his fundamental designs. “He is much abler than the rest of the wireless men,” he wrote Scherff, “[so] this has given me great pleasure.”6 The one edge Lowenstein had over Marconi was the Italian’s insistence on an all-or-nothing deal with the military. Either all ships were hooked into his system, or none were. The U.S. government, however, was loath to relinquish their upper hand to a private concern, so Marconi had great difficulty integrating his system into the American marketplace.

  Nevertheless, Marconi was still the only major competitor, so Tesla set out to reestablish his legal right. Conferring with his lawyers, the pioneer began a strategy to sue the pirate in every country he could.

  In England, Tesla had allowed an important patent to lapse, so progress there was halted. Oliver Lodge, on the other hand, was able to prevail and received 1,000 pounds per year for seven years from the Marconi concern there.7 In the United States, where Tesla was applying for a renewal of his most fundamental patent, he had yet to formalize the suit, but in “the highest court in France” the inventor achieved a resounding success. Sending his written testimony to Judge M. Bonjean in Paris, Tesla explained his work in 1895, when he “erected a large wireless terminal above the building…[and] employed damped and undamped oscillations.” He also enclosed two patents from 1897 and specifications for his telautomaton, which confirmed that he had displayed it before G. D. Seely, the examiner-in-chief of the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, D.C. in 1898. Concerning Marconi’s June 2, 1896, patent, Tesla testified that the patent was “but a mass of imperfection and error…If anything, it has been the means of misleading many experts and retarding progress in the right direction…It gives no hint as to the length of the transmitting and receiving conductors and the arrangements illustrated preclude the possibility of accurate tuning…[Marconi replaced] the old-fashioned Rumhkorff coil [with]…the Tesla coil.”8

  Speaking in support of Tesla’s cause for Popoff, Ducretet & Rochefort, the French company that had initiated the action, was electrical engineer M. E. Girardeau, who described in detail the technical accomplishments of Tesla’s invention. “Indeed,” Girardeau began, “one finds in the American patent extraordinary clearness and precision, surprising even to physicists of today…What a cruel injustice would it be now to try to stifle the pure glory of Tesla in opposing him scornfully.”9

  Judge Bonjean struck down Marconi’s patents and reestablished Tesla’s as superseding. Most likely, compensation was also paid to him from the French company that won the case.

  With this victory, however, came other defeats. The year 1912 saw legal entanglements against Tesla by Edmund K. Stallo, who was seeking damages of $61,000 for advances tendered in 1906; and also the Westinghouse Corporation, which sued for $23,000 for equipment loaned out in 1907. In the first instance, the Stallo syndicate, which had ties to Standard Oil, had invested only $3,500 and was frivolously suing for the promise of an enormous profit. The inventor’s liability was thus minimal. In the second instance, Tesla argued that he was not personally liable, as the machinery was loaned to the company he was organizing. He did offer, however, to return the equipment which was still being guarded at the Long Island laboratory.10 Although his financial losses were small, the negative publicity undermined his reputation and caused the inventor to become a more invisible presence at the prestigious Waldorf, where he was still residing and piling up debt. And then there was Mrs. Tierstein, who Tesla said, “wanted to shoot me for throwing electricity at her.” Tesla “pitied the poor woman” but had her sent, by way of Judge Foster, “to the asylum.”11

  The suit by Westinghouse caused quite a stir among the inner circle, and even prompted Tom Edison to pen a rare missive of commiseration.

  February 24, 1912

  My dear Mr. Edison,

  Acknowledging your kind letter…I wish to reiterate the sentiments and express my great regret that I was unable to transmit them in person.

  With assurance of high regard, I remain as ever,

  N. Tesla12

  The Westinghouse Corporation, however, was not a monolithic enterprise, and its legal department, in some ways, was an autonomous entity. Tesla continued to borrow equipment on a regular basis throughout the period (1909-17), and he frequently conferred with various engineers, particularly Charles Scott, whom he began educating in the field of wireless. Tesla also continued to meet with the recently deposed chieftain George Westinghouse, who was working in semiretirement at his offices in New York City.

  “I suppose you cannot help feeling disappointed at the ingratitude of some who are now heading the great enterprise which your genius has created,” the inventor remarked. “I sincerely hope that you will very shortly be again in the position you have heretofore occupied. I know that the large majority of the public shares my sentiments.”

  “Thank you for your concern,” the descendent of Russian noblemen replied.13

  THE GERMAN CONNECTION

  Marconi’s greatest rival in the legal arena may have been Nikola Tesla, but in the battleground of the marketplace it was Telefunken, the German wireless concern. Although Marconi had patents in Germany, the Telefunken syndicate had too many important connections on its home front and easily maintained a monopoly there. Formed through a forced merger, under orders of the kaiser, of the Braun-Siemens-Halske and Arco-Slaby systems, Telefunken had fought the Marconi conglomerate vigorously on every front. It was, without doubt, the number-two competitor in the world. Although Marconi had achieved a recent coup in Spain, Telefunken gained an edge in America when it constructed two enormous transatlantic systems in Tuckerton, New Jersey, and Sayville, New York.

  For nationalistic reasons, Tesla had been prohibited from obtaining his rightful royalties in Germany, but Professor Adolf Slaby never hid the fact that he considered Tesla the patriarch in the field. Thus, when Telefunken came to America, Slaby sought out his mentor not only on moral grounds but also for gaining a legal foothold against Marconi and to obtain the inventor’s technical expertise.

  A meeting was held between Tesla and the principles of Telefunken’s American holding company, the innocuous-sounding Atlantic Communication Company, at 111 Broadway, the location of their offices. Present was its director, Dr. Karl George Frank, “one of the best known German [American] electrical experts,” and his two managers, Richard Pfund, a frequent visitor to Tesla’s lab, who was head of the Sayville plant, and “the monocle,” Lt. Emil Meyers, head of operations at Tuckerton.

  Tesla asked for an advance of $25,000 and royalties of $2,500 per month but settled for $1,500 per month, with a one month advance.14 The inventor met with Pfund to discuss the turbine deal with
the kaiser and also to fix a transmitter that the Germans were working on at the Manhattan office. Shortly thereafter, he traveled out to the two wireless stations with his plan to institute his latest refinements in order to boost their capabilities.15 With Professor Jonathan Zenneck out at Sayville, Tesla calculated that they were wasting nearly 25 percent of their energy in electromagnetic radiations. “Those waves will dissipate only a few miles off shore,” he told Zenneck, “whereas the energy that will reach Germany will be from your ground connection.”16

  After a grueling search along the imponderable ice field, John Jacob Astor’s emaciated body was fished from the sea for a New York funeral. Documents from his estate revealed five hundred shares of Tesla Electric Company.17 A year later, J. Pierpont Morgan, the sultan of Wall Street, the octopus, was dead. Considering the resentment and disillusionment the inventor felt, he also bore great admiration for the man he called a “towering” historical figure.

  Although Morgan’s son-in-law, Herbert Satterlee, could only provide a back-row seat at the chapel, nevertheless, even to be present at the solemn occasion was a great honor. The hall was speckled with numerous faces of colleagues and adversaries, many of whom could track a large percentage of their wealth, and even their station, to Tesla’s creations. No doubt, the inventor endured some snickering, particularly from the hydra’s underlings, but Tesla, ever the nobleman, transcended the petty titters as he walked up to Anne and J. P. Junior.

  “Please accept my heartfelt condolences on the death of the great man who was the head of your famous firm,” he told them. “When I can feel such a void in my heart and brain at the passing of Morgan, I can appreciate, in a measure, the depth of feeling of those who were his lifelong comrades. All the world knew him as a genius of rare powers, but to me he appears as one of those colossal figures of [the] past which mark epochs in the evolution of human thought.”18