by Marc Seifer
Within two months of Tesla’s letter to Morgan, the plant at Sayville tripled its output by erecting two more pyramid-shaped transmission towers, five hundred feet tall. Utilizing Tesla’s theories on the importance of ground transmission, resonating accoutrements spread out over the land for thousands of more feet. Thus, by shifting emphasis away from aerial transmission, Telefunken’s output was boosted from 35 kilowatts to over 100, catapulting Germany into the number-one spot in the wireless race. The New York Times reported on their front page, “Few persons outside radio officials knew that Sayville was becoming one of the most powerful transatlantic communicating stations in this part of the world.”6
Tesla Sues Marconi on Wireless Plant
Alleges That Important Apparatus
Infringes Prior Rights7
Calling wireless “the greatest of all inventions,” Tesla made an additional appeal for legal assistance to Morgan. “Can you put yourself for a moment in my place?” he wrote the financier. “Surely, you are too big a man to permit such an outrage and historical crime to be perpetuated as is now being done by cunning promoters.” Expecting to “receive satisfaction from the Government,” since they had installed “$10,000,000 of [his] apparatus,” the inventor also revealed that “the Marconi people approached me to join forces, but only in stock and this is not acceptable.”8
Again Morgan declined assistance in protecting their patents held in common. The Wall Street mogul, however, had not at all abandoned the field, for he was funding a college radio station near Boston at Tufts University.9
The years preceding America’s entrance into World War I contained an overwhelming quagmire of litigation involving most countries and virtually every major inventor in the wireless field. At about the time of Tesla’s breakup with Hammond, Fritz Lowenstein, who was paying royalties to both men (and to Morgan, through Tesla), began installing wireless apparatus aboard navy ships. Although the equipment was also being used by Hammond to test the guided missiles, this work was classified, and Hammond’s patents became immune from litigation.10
Tesla polyphase generator used by Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company to electrify the Chicago’s World Fair of 1893.
Tesla at his Houston Street laboratory in 1898 sending 500,000 volts through his body to light a wireless fluorescent light in a multiple-exposure photograph. (MetaScience Foundation
The wizard at his Colorado Springs laboratory sitting among sixty-foot electrical sparks in this illustrious multiple-exposure photograph. (Nikola Tesla Museum)
Wardenclyffe, circa 1903. (MetaScience Foundation)
Jack Hammond (center) with some of his friends, including Leopold Stokowski, far right. Hammond had formed a partnership with Tesla, circa 1912, to perfect remote-controlled torpedoes and guidance systems for the U.S. Navy. (Hammond Castle)
A dinner of the Institute of Radio Engineers in 1915 honoring John Stone Stone, president of the society. Standing along the back wall from the left are Karl F. Braun, winner with Marconi of the Nobel Prize in physics in 1909; John Stone Stone; Jonathan Zeaneck, of the Sayville wireless plant; Lee DeForest, radio pioneer; Nikola Tesla; Fritz Lowenstein, Tesla’s longtime associate; Rudolf Goldschmidt, a physicist who worked with Emil Meyer, third from the left, seated in center row, who ran the German wireless plant at Tuckerton, New Jersey. Seated in back, at far left in front of Braun, is David Sarnoff, later head of RCA and NBC-TV. (Smithsonian Institution)
(Opposite) How the Wardenclyffe tower would have looked when completed. (Drawing by sci-fi artist Frank R. Paul; Smithsonian Institution)
(Right) Nikola Tesla illuminated by his wireless cold lamp. (Smithsonian Institution)
(Below) Nikola Tesla, circa 1925 (Nikola Tesla Museum)
(Top) A statue of Nikola Tesla located in the town square of Gospić, Croatia. Designed by Franco Krsinic, this particular statue was purposely destroyed by a bomb during the recent war between Serbs, Croats, and Muslims in the former Yugoslavia. An exact replica sits calmly on Goat Island beside Niagara Falls. (Marc J. Seifer)
(Bottom) Tesla, shortly before his death in 1942, meeting with King Peter of Serbia. Tesla’s nephew, Sava Kosanovic, the ambassador from Yugoslavia, is on the left. (Smithsonion Institution)
(Opposite) Time celebrated Tesla’s seventy-fifth birthday with a cover. (© 1931 Time Inc. Reprinted by permission)
1990s promotional mailer. (Westinghouse Corporation)
Aside from Tesla’s priority battle, Telefunken was also suing Marconi, who, in turn, was suing the U.S. Navy as well as Fritz Lowenstein for patent infringement.
During the following spring, Marconi was subpoenaed by Telefunken. Due to the importance of the case, he sailed off for America on the Lusitania, arriving in April 1915 to testify. “We sighted a German submarine periscope,” he told astonished reporters and his friends at dockside.” As three merchant ships had already been torpedoed without warning by the German U-boats the month before, Marconi’s inflammatory assertion was not taken lightly.
The Brooklyn Eagle reported that this suit brought “some of the world’s greatest inventors on hand to testify.”12 Declared a victor in the Lowenstein proceedings by a Brooklyn district-court judge, Marconi clearly had the press behind him. Nevertheless, he was beaten by the navy in his first go-around with them,13 so this case against Telefunken, with all the heavyweights in town, promised to be portentous. Once and for all, it appeared, the true legal rights would be established in America.
Aside from Marconi, there was, for the defense, Columbia professor Michael Pupin, whose testimony was even quoted in papers in California. With braggadocio, Pupin declared, “I invented wireless before Marconi or Tesla, and it was I who gave it unreservedly to those who followed!”14 “Nevertheless,” Pupin continued, “it was Marconi’s genius who gave the idea to the world, and he taught the world how to build a telegraphic practice upon the basis of this idea. [As I did not take out patents on my experiments], in my opinion, the first claim for wireless telegraphy belongs to Mr. Marconi absolutely, and to nobody else.”15 Watching his fellow Serb upon the stand, Tesla’s jaw dropped so hard, it almost cracked upon the floor.
When Tesla took the stand for Atlantic, he came with his attorney, Drury W. Cooper, of Kerr, Page & Cooper. Unlike Pupin, who could only state abstractly that he was the original inventor, Tesla proceeded to explain in clear fashion all of his work from the years 1891-99. He documented his assertions with transcripts from published articles, from the Martin text, and from public lectures, such as his well-known wireless demonstration which he had presented to the public in St. Louis in 1893. The inventor also brought along copies of his various requisite patents which he had created while working at his Houston Street lab during the years 1896-99.
COURT: What were the [greatest] distances between the transmitting and receiving stations?
TESLA: From the Houston laboratory to West Point, that is, I think, a distance of about thirty miles.
COURT: Was that prior to 1901?
TESLA: Yes, it was prior to 1897…
COURT: Was there anything hidden about [the uses of your equipment], or were they open so that anyone could use them?
TESLA: There were thousands of people, distinguished men of all kinds, from kings and greatest artists and scientists in the world down to old chums of mine, mechanics, to whom my laboratory was always open. I showed it to everybody; I talked freely about it.16
As virtually no one knew about the West Point experiment, this statement was somewhat deceptive, although it was true that thousands of people had witnessed Tesla’s other wireless experiments, such as in St. Louis in 1893. Referring explicitly to Marconi’s system, having brought the Italian’s patent along with his own, the inventor concluded:
TESLA: If you [examine these two diagrams]…you will find that absolutely not a vestige of that apparatus of Marconi remains, and that in all the present systems there is nothing but my four-tuned circuits.17
Another jolt to Marconi came fr
om John Stone Stone (his mother’s maiden name, by coincidence, was also Stone). Having traveled with his father, a general in the Union army, throughout Egypt and the Mediterranean as a boy, Stone was educated as a physicist at Columbia University and Johns Hopkins University, where he graduated in 1890. A research scientist for Bell Labs in Boston for many years, Stone had set up his own wireless concern in 1899. The following year, he filed for a fundamental patent on tuning, which was allowed by the U.S. Patent Office over a year before Marconi’s.18 Stone, who never considered himself the original inventor of the radio, as president of the Institute of Radio Engineers and owner of a wireless enterprise, put together a dossier of inventor priorities in “continuous-wave radio frequency apparatus.” He wanted to determine for himself the etiology of the invention. Adorned in a formal suit, silk ascot, high starched collar, and pince-nez attached by a ribbon to his neck, the worldly aristocrat took the stand:
Marconi, receiving his inspiration from Hertz and Righi…[was] impressed with the electric radiation aspect of the subject…and it was a long time before he seemed to appreciate the real role of the earth…, though he early recognized that the connection of his oscillator to the earth was very material value…Tesla’s electric earth waves explanation was the more serviceable in that it explained [how]…the waves were enabled to travel over and around hills and were not obstructed by the sphericity of the earth’s surface, while Marconi’s view led many to place an altogether too limited scope to the possible range of transmission…With the removal of the spark gap from the antenna, the development of earthed antenna, and the gradual enlargement of the size of stations…greater range could be obtained with larger power used at lower frequencies, [and] the art returned to the state to which Tesla developed it.
Attributing the opposition, and alas, even himself, to having been afflicted with “intellectual myopia,” Stone concluded that although he had been designing wireless equipment and running wireless companies since the turn of the century, it wasn’t until he “commenced with this study” that he really understood Tesla’s “trail blazing” contribution to the development of the field. “I think we all misunderstood Tesla,” Stone concluded. “He was so far ahead of his time that the best of us mistook him for a dreamer.”19
Another case which did not receive much publicity but which became vital to the Supreme Court’s 1943 ruling in Tesla’s favor, was Marconi v. U.S. Navy, brought July 29, 1916, two years after their first go-around. The Italian was seeking $43,000 in damages, suing for infringement of fundamental wireless patent no. 763,772, which had been allowed in June 1904.
E. F. Sweet, acting secretary of the navy, and also Assistant Secretary Franklin D. Roosevelt began a correspondence in September to review Tesla’s 1899 file to the Light House Board.20 The history of Marconi’s patent applications to the U.S. Patent Office provided additional ammunition. In 1900, John Seymour, the commissioner of patents, who had protected Tesla against the demands of Michael Pupin for an AC claim at this same time, disqualified Marconi’s first attempts at achieving a patent because of prior claims of Lodge and Braun and particularly Tesla. “Marconi’s pretended ignorance of the nature of a ‘Tesla oscillator’ [is] little short of absurd,” wrote the commissioner. “Ever since Tesla’s famous [1891-93 lectures]…widely published in all languages, the term ‘Tesla oscillator’ has become a household word on both continents.” The patent office also cited quotations from Marconi himself admitting use of a Tesla oscillator.
Two years later, in 1902, Stone was granted his patent on tuning which the government cited as anticipating Marconi, and two years after that, after Seymour retired, Marconi was granted his infamous 1904 patent.21
EDWIN ARMSTRONG
“I have had a lot of fun at Columbia,” Armstrong said. The lecturer in physics that semester loftily disparaged the experiments of Nikola Tesla. “He even went so far as to say that there was very little originality about Tesla.” Ever the audacious student, Armstrong used the professor’s ignorance of Tesla’s teachings to cause the man to receive a hearty shock from some electrical equipment. “He couldn’t let go, and pulled most of the apparatus off the table before the current was turned off.”22
Just after graduation, Armstrong invented a feedback amplifier, which was, in essence, a refinement and further development of De Forest’s audion tube. Influenced by the “Edison effect” or flow of electrons studied by Tesla in the early 1890s in his “brush” vacuum tube, Armstrong had discovered a way to take the De Forest audion and amplify its sensitivity and boost its power to another magnitude by connecting a second circuit, or wing circuit, to the grid inside the tube and feeding it back into the grid. The end result was that with this new invention the young whippersnapper could pick up wireless messages from Nova Scotia, Ireland, Germany, San Francisco, and even Honolulu.
As Armstrong was one of Professor Pupin’s star pupils, Pupin was able to set up meetings with Lee De Forest, David Sarnoff, representing Marconi Wireless, and Dr. Karl Frank, head of the Atlantic Communication Company. Since De Forest’s audion lay at the center of the new device, De Forest claimed the “ultra-audion” as his own invention, so Marconi Wireless stepped aside to wait for the dust to settle. Frank, on the other hand, had Armstrong put the equipment into the wireless plant at Sayville and paid him a royalty of $100 per month.23 Destined to invent AM and FM radio and a nonconformist by nature, this new wizard on the block had come upon his 1912 discovery because he had rejected the inferior Marconi spark-gap apparatus that most of his wireless buddies were still playing with and, like Stone, plunged himself into the continuous-wave technology developed by Tesla.
With Professor Pupin training many of the new breed of electrical engineers, it is no wonder that few of them would have the gumption of an Armstrong to see that Marconi’s success was based on the work of another and, furthermore, that Marconi succeeded in spite of the fact that he only partially understood what Tesla had attempted. Blinded by the Hertzian spark-gap research, Marconi spread his “myopic vision” through Pupin to the vast hordes of researchers in the field of wireless; and this policy has continued to this day. With Marconi’s highly visible early success, large-scale wireless enterprise, and Nobel Prize on his side of the balance, it became much easier to credit him with the discovery. The ongoing Great War served to further cloud the issue, as the important legal battle between Atlantic Cable Company (Telefunken) and Marconi Wireless was abandoned before it was resolved.
Due to the dangers that existed on the high seas, and the rumors that the Germans were out for Marconi’s head, the senatore did not sail back on the Lusitania; he returned on the St. Paul with a disguised identity and under an assumed name.
Marconi set sail as the new head of the AIEE, John S. Stone, was honored at a dinner attended by a potpourri of leaders in the industry. Guests included Lee De Forest, who was about to receive a quarter of a million dollars for sale of his patents to AT&T, J. A. White, editor of Wireless magazine; David Sarnoff, on the verge of launching his radio empire; Rudolf Goldschmidt, the force behind the Tuckerton plant; A. E. Kennelly; Fritz Lowenstein, who was about to earn $150,000 from AT&T for one of his inventions; and Nikola Tesla, who stood between De Forest and Lowenstein for an official photograph.24
A fortnight later; in May 1915, a German submarine torpedoed the Lusitania, killing 1,134 persons. The sinking, in lieu of the alternative procedure of boarding unarmed passenger ships to check cargo, was unheard of. Quite possibly, Marconi could have been a target; however, the Germans used as their reason the cargo of armaments onboard headed for Great Britain. With only 750 survivors, this “turkey shoot” took almost as many lives as the sinking of the Titanic. According to Lloyd Scott of the Navy Consulting Board, “press reports stated that the Germans seemed to revel in this crime, and that various celebrations were held in Germany on account of it. Medals were being struck to commemorate the sinking, and holidays were given to school children.”25 No longer neutral, Teddy Roosevelt hailed th
e event as “murder on the open seas.”
The huge loss of life, however, did not stop George Sylvester Viereck from supporting the German position. Having traveled by zeppelin above Berlin during the war, Viereck stated in the New York Times that had the weapons made it to England, “more Germans would have been killed than died in the [boat] attack.” Viereck’s callous argument inflamed the populace against him. The former renowned poet was now hailed as “a venom-bloated toad of treason.”26
The enemy seemed within. German spies were everywhere. Reports started filtering in that the Germans were creating a secret submarine base around islands off the coast of Maine. It was also alleged that the broadcasting station out at Sayville was not merely sending neutral dispatches to Berlin but also coded messages to battleships and submarines.
As Tesla, just a few months earlier, had boasted to Morgan that he was working for the Germans and with the Times reporting on their front page that “Grand Admiral von Tirpitz [was] contemplat[ing] a more vigorous campaign against freight ships…[and planning] a secret base on this side of the Atlantic,”27 it is quite possible that the inventor became tainted with a smattering of “venom-bloated toad’s blood.”
On July 2, 1915, the senate chambers in Washington were rocked by a terrorist bomb. The following day, the fanatic who planted it, Frank Holt, a teacher of German from Cornell University, walked into Jack Morgan’s Long Island home toting a six-gun in each hand. With his wife and daughter leaping at the assailant, Morgan charged forward. Shot twice in the groin, Morgan was able, with the help of his fearsome wife, to wrestle the guns from the man and get him arrested. Recuperating at the hospital, the hero received a get-well letter from Nikola Tesla.28
