by Marc Seifer
The most important ruling, concerning the true identity of the inventor of the radio, became neatly sidestepped by the War Powers Act of President Wilson, calling for the suspension of all patent litigation during the time of the war. France had already recognized Tesla’s priority by their high court, and Germany recognized him by Slaby’s affirmations and Telefunken’s decision to pay royalties; but in America, the land of Tesla’s home, the government backed off and literally prevented the courts from sustaining a decision. The Marconi syndicate, in touch with kings from two countries, with equipment instituted on six continents, was simply too powerful.
With the suspension of all patent litigation and the country in the midst of a world war, Franklin Roosevelt, assistant secretary of the navy, penned the famous Farragut letter. This document allowed such major companies as AT&T, Westinghouse, and American Marconi the right to pool together to produce each other’s equipment without concern for compensating rightful inventors. Furthermore, it “assured contractors that the Government would assume liability in infringement suits.”43
On July 1, 1918, Congress passed a law making the United States financially responsible for any use of “an invention described in and covered by a patent of the United States.” By 1921, the U.S. government had spent $40 million on wireless equipment, a far cry from Secretary Long’s policy of refusing to pay a few thousand dollars for Tesla’s equipment eighteen years before. Thus, the Interdepartmental Radio Board met to decide various claims against it. Nearly $3 million in claims were paid out. The big winners were Marconi Wireless, which received $1.2 million for equipment and installations taken over (but not for their patents). International Radio Telegraph received $700,000; AT&T, $600,000; and Edwin Armstrong, $89,000. Tesla received a minuscule compensation through Lowenstein, who was awarded $23,000.44
In 1921 the navy published a list of all the inventors in wireless who received compensation from them. The list contained only patents granted after 1902. Inventors included Blockmen, Braun, Blondel, De Forest, Fuller, Hahnemann, Logwood, Meissner, Randahl, Poulsen, Schiessler, von Arco, and Watkins. Note that both Tesla’s and Marconi’s names are missing.45 Marconi’s could be missing either because his patents had lapsed or, more likely, because they were viewed as invalid from the point of view of the government. In the case of Tesla, all of his twelve key radio patents had “expired and [were] now common property.”46 However, Tesla had renewed one fundamental patent in 1914,47 and this should have been on the list, as should have Armstrong’s feedback patent.
RADIO CORPORATION OF AMERICA
The U.S. government, through Franklin Roosevelt, knew that Marconi had infringed upon Tesla’s fundamental patents. They knew the details of Tesla’s rightful claims through their own files and through the record at the patent office. In point of fact, it was Tesla’s proven declaration which was the basis and central argument that the government had against Marconi when Marconi sued in the first place, and it was this same claim, and the same Navy Light House Board files, that would eventually be used by the U.S. Supreme Court to vindicate Tesla three months after he died, nearly twenty-five years later, in 1943.
Rather than deal with the truth and with a difficult genius whose present work appeared to be in a realm above and beyond the operation of simple radio telephones and wireless transmitters, Roosevelt, Daniels, President Wilson, and the U.S. Navy, in the midst of war, took no interest in protecting Tesla’s tower.
In July 1917, Tesla packed his bags and said goodbye to the Waldorf-Astoria. Having lived there for nearly twenty years, he talked George Boldt Jr. into allowing him to keep a large part of his personal effects in the basement of the hotel until he found a suitable place for transferring them. “I was sorry to hear about your father,” Tesla told the new manager, George Boldt Sr. having died just a few months before.
Preparing to move to Chicago to work on his bladeless turbines, Tesla was invited to the Johnsons for a farewell dinner. Robert was now directing the affairs of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an organization which counted among its ranks Daniel Chester French, Charles Dana Gibson, Winslow Homer, Henry James and his brother William, Charles McKim, Henry Cabot Lodge, Teddy Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson. Katharine had been in bed for over a week with the grippe, but this evening was too important, and she dragged herself out of bed and put on her best gown.
Dressed in straw hat, cane, white gloves, and his favorite green suede high-tops, Tesla arrived with a large bouquet of flowers and a check for Johnson.
“Kate’s been ill,” Robert managed to say before the lady of the house appeared.
Taking center stage, as she always tried to do when “He” was around, Kate radiated an intense glow of amorous pride as she held back the flood of tears while she chatted on an on about “how crazy [she was] about all of her grandchildren.”48
Taking a weekend train to Chicago, Tesla moved into the Blackstone Hotel, alongside the University of Chicago. On Monday morning the inventor hired a limousine to drop him at the headquarters of Pyle National Corporation. Having already shipped prototypes to give them a head start, he would now work at an intense pace in an entirely new setting, his goal being the perfection of his revolutionary bladeless turbines.49
At night he liked to walk down the street from his hotel to the Museum of Arts and Sciences, the only building remaining from the World’s Fair of 1893. There he could stand by the great columns and think back to a time when, daily, hundreds of thousands would stream into a magical city powered by his vision. One Saturday, in the heat of summer, he took the mile walk along Lake Michigan, past the Midway, to a series of small lakes and a park which was once the Court of Honor. There, at the entranceway, to a place that once was, he found, to his delight, the Statue of the Republic still standing, its gold plating all worn away. With him was a letter from George Scherff.
August 20, 1917
Dear Mr. Tesla,
I was deeply grieved and shocked when I read the enclosed, but I have the supreme confidence that more glorious work will arise from the ruins.
I trust that your work in Chicago is progressing to your satisfaction.
Yours respectfully,
George Scherff50
At the height of the world conflagration, the Smiley Steel Company’s explosives expert had circled the gargantuan transmitter to place a charge around each major strut and nail the coffin shut on Tesla’s dream. With the Associated Press recording the event and military personnel apparently present, the magnifying transmitter was leveled, the explosion alarming many of the Shoreham residents.
And with the death of the World Telegraphy Center came the birth of the Radio Broadcasting Corporation, a unique conglomerate of private concerns under the auspices of the U.S. government. Meetings were held behind closed doors in Washington between President Wilson, who wanted America to gain “radio supremacy,”51 Navy Secretary Daniels, his assistant Franklin Roosevelt, and representatives from GE, American Marconi, AT&T, and the Westinghouse Corporation. With J. P. Morgan & Company on the board of directors and the Marconi patents as the backbone of the organization, RCA was formed. It would combine resources from these megacorporations, all of which had cross-licensing agreements with each other and co-owned the company.52 (Cross-licensing agreements also existed with the government, which also owned some wireless patents.) Here was another entente cordiale reminiscent of the AC polyphase days, which was not so for the originator of the invention. It was a second major time Tesla would be carved from his creation,53 a secret deal probably concocted which absolved the government from paying any licensing fee to Marconi in lieu of their burying their Tesla archives. David Sarnoff, as managing director, would soon take over the reins of the entire operation.
The New York Sun inaccurately reported:
U.S. Blows Up Tesla Radio Tower
Suspecting that German spies were using the big wireless tower erected at Shoreham, L.I., about twenty years ago by Nikola Tesla, the Federal Government ordere
d the tower destroyed and it was recently demolished with dynamite. During the past month several strangers had been seen lurking about the place.54
The destruction of Nikola Tesla’s famous tower…shows forcibly the great precautions being taken at this time to prevent any news of military importance of getting to the enemy.55
At the end of the war President Wilson returned all remaining confiscated radio stations to their rightful owners. American Marconi, now RCA, of course, was the big beneficiary.56
In 1920 the Westinghouse Corporation was granted the right to “manufacture, use and sell apparatus covered by the [Marconi] patents.”57 Westinghouse also formed an independent radio station which became as prominent as RCA. At the end of the year, Tesla wrote a letter to E. M. Herr, president of the company, offering his wireless expertise and equipment.
November 16, 1920
Dear Mr. Tesla,
I regret that under the present circumstances we cannot proceed further with any developments of your activities.58
A few months later, Westinghouse requested that Tesla “speak to our ‘invisible audience’ some Thursday night in the near future [over our…] radiotelephone broadcasting station.”59
November 30, 1921
Gentleman,
Twenty-one years ago I promised a friend, the late J. Pierpont Morgan, that my world-system, then under construction…would enable the voice of a telephone subscriber to be transmitted to any point of the globe…
I prefer to wait until my project is completed before addressing an invisible audience and beg you to excuse me.
Very truly yours,
N. Tesla60
42
TRANSMUTATION (1918-21)
I come from a very wiry and long-lived race. Some of my ancestors have been centenarians, and one of them lived 129 years. I am determined to keep up the record and please myself with prospects of great promise. Then again, nature has given me a vivid imagination…
NIKOLA TESLA1
Tesla’s lifework was his World Telegraphy Center. Partially materialized on the physical plane as Wardenclyffe, this was the inventor’s Holy Grail, the key to anointment. In 1917 the project was demolished, and in that sense, so was the inventor. Capable of recognizing the absurdities of life and drawing from transcendent energies, the mystic sought regeneration by consummating his grand plan in fantasy form and by seeking a new philosopher’s stone.
One year earlier, when Tesla’s project was at its bleakest, he had formed an alliance with one of his most ardent admirers, Hugo Gernsback, editor of Electrical Experimenter. Gernsback had first heard about Tesla when he was a child growing up in Luxembourg in the late 1890s. It was at this time that the ten-year-old came across the fantastic picture of the emblazoned electrician sending hundreds of thousands of volts through his body and the declaration in the accompanying article that he was the grandest wizard of the age. Considered by most futurologists to be the “founder and father of science fiction,” Gernsback studied electronics at Bingen Technicum in Europe, before immigrating to America, at the age of nineteen, in 1903.2
With his mind totally captivated by the fantastic union of science and fantasy, the exuberant youth wrote a spectacular tale which took place in the year 2660 called RALPH 124C41 +, which he serialized in his new magazine Modern Electronics. Simultaneously, he also opened up Hugo Gernsback’s Electro Importing Company, an all-purpose electronics shop located under the “el” at Fulton Street. There the new breed of amateur ham operators could buy whatever they wanted and browse through “the biggest bunch of junk you ever saw.”3
Gernsback’s first meeting with Tesla was in 1908, when he stopped at the inventor’s lab to view the new turbine.4
Gernsback wrote, “The door opens, and out steps a tall figure—over six feet high—gaunt but erect. It approaches slowly, stately. You become conscious at once that you are face to face with a personality of a high order. Nikola Tesla advances and shakes your hand with a powerful grip, surprising for a man over sixty. A winning smile from piercing light bluegray eyes, set in extraordinarily deep sockets, fascinates you and makes you feel at once at home.
“You are guided into an office immaculate in its orderliness. Not a speck of dust is to be seen. No papers litter the desk, everything just so. It reflects the man himself, immaculate in attire, orderly and precise in his every movement. Drest [sic] in a dark frock coat, he is entirely devoid of all jewelry. No ring, stickpin or even watch-chain can be seen.”5
In 1916 the inventor edited a consequential article for Gernsback on the magnifying transmitter. The inventor also promised to think more seriously about putting his life story down on paper; in fact, he wrote a short first draft for Scientific American which he embellished for the Edison Medal acceptance speech.6
By this time, Gernsback had also secured the talents of the gifted illustrator Frank R. Paul. Destined to be the most influential science-fiction artist of the twentieth century, Paul was able to “render the possible development of any invention [from]…a raw idea into a picture fantasy.” With a penchant for drawing futuristic scenarios such as Goliath-sized insects, spaceships orbiting planets, and a variety of humanoidian mad scientists conquering galactic empires, Paul advanced to become the premier cover artist for Electrical Experimenter, and later Amazing Stories and Science Wonder Stories.7 He was assigned the role of completing Tesla’s tower in picture form. The drawing, replete with fully functioning Wardenclyffe transmitters and Tesla wingless airfoils beaming down death rays to incoming ships, not only became a fantastic cover for Electrical Experimenter; it also became the centerpiece of the wizard’s new letterhead.
As alchemist, Tesla transformed the ruins of his station into a fantastic Gernsbackian World Telegraphy Center, as he also transformed himself, leaving New York City to begin anew with his next major creation.
Before he left, in June 1917, the inventor wrote Jack Morgan, hoping, optimistically, because of new developments, to pay off his debt to the financier “in about four months…My big ship is still to come in, but I have now a marvelous opportunity having perfected an invention which will astound the whole world.” Cryptically, Tesla said that the invention would “afford an effective means for meeting the menace of the submarine.” Whether he was talking about a long-range radar system, a remote-controlled torpedo, or some other invention is uncertain.8
The following month, Tesla moved to Chicago, and he stayed there through November 1918, working with Pyle National on the perfection of his turbines. Here, during the day, with the slate clean, the gangly mechanic could continue to battle the demons by plunging himself into a brand-new endeavor. At night, as creative author, the cognoscente sketched out the first draft of his expanded autobiography.
Most of the time, he drew from his own capital for fear of causing difficulties with the new partners.9 He knew he would eventually receive compensation because the Chicago company had signed an agreement promising “cash payments and guarantees” with the expiration of their option, but carrying costs were becoming a problem.10
To handle expenses in the interim, the inventor requested that Scherff step up the pressure on receiving royalties from the various wireless companies. His greatest source of income was probably the Waltham Watch Company, which was now in the active stage of marketing his speedometer. Even though the war was still going on, the inventor expected to receive compensation from Telefunken “after the hostilities cease,” even though he would have to “apply to the War Trade Board under the Trading with the Enemy act for a license to receive payment.”11
Progress on the turbines was hampered by numerous obstacles. Nevertheless, the inventor was delighted with the “extraordinarily efficient personnel” and overall organization of the Chicago firm. As the disks could rotate at speeds ranging from 10,000 to 35,000 rpm, the centrifugal force tended to elongate them. Thus, they were subject to fatigue and ran the risk of cracking after performing for long periods of time. Perceived by skeptical engineers as fatal flaw
s, Tesla endeavored to hammer home the point that stress was a factor in all engines.12 Thus, much of the time in Chicago was spent experimenting with different alloys and inventing means for instantaneously regulating orthorotational speed and centrifugal pressure to minimize the stress factor. “For instance, suppose that the steam pressure of the locomotive would vary from say 50 to 200 lbs, no matter how rapidly, this would not have the slightest effect on the…performance of the turbine.”13
In January 1918, the U.S. Machine Manufacturing Company inquired about placing one of Tesla’s turbines inside an airplane, and a few months later, the Chicago Pneumatic Tool Company also expressed interest. Tesla was writing Scherff, expecting the invention to yield $25 million per year. However, there was still the difficulty of perfecting it, and Tesla was still not free of the numerous other problems of his life, such as the past debts and the continuing quagmire of litigation. During the summer, the inventor twisted his back and was laid up for several weeks.14
During Tesla’s time in Chicago, he calculated his operating expenses at $17,600, with revenues of $12,500. Pyle National tried to get out of their debt by sending a check for $1,500, but Tesla returned the token payment and threatened suit. Meanwhile, back at home, the sheriff took possession of the Woolworth office, so Tesla had to wrestle some capital from Pyle National to release his company. In New York, George Scherff continued to handle all of the details.
