Tesla: The Life and Times of an Electric Messiah

by Nigel Cawthorne

  Tesla then tried to sell his turbine to Sigmund Bergmann (1851 – 1927), an old colleague of Edison’s who had set up a large manufacturing concern in Germany. But the deal was not concluded before the start of World War I, when Jack Morgan became involved in helping Britain and France to finance the war and lost interest.

  Marconi versus Tesla

  Tesla was bitter when Marconi won the Nobel Prize in 1909 for what Tesla considered was his invention. Jack Hammond tried to balance the two men’s contributions in his article ‘The Future of Wireless’ in the National Press Reporter in 1912:

  Mr Tesla in 1892 showed that the true Hertzian effect was not a means by which it was possible for a sending station to communicate with a receiving station at any great distance. He demonstrated furthermore, that waves propagated at a transmitting station travelled along the ground as a conductor. Today it is acknowledged that these views are correct. It was, however, left to the splendid enterprise of Marconi to crystallize the results of previous investigators into a complete and practical system of space telegraphy … In 1897, Mr Marconi transmitted messages to a distance of 8.7 miles. Today Mr Marconi says that the maximum effective distance of transmission is 6,000 miles.

  Remote Control Mechanical Dog

  A disgruntled Tesla resented that any credit should go to Marconi. He also heard that, while working with Alexander Graham Bell and Tesla’s former assistant Fritz Lowenstein, Hammond had invented a mechanical dog that worked by remote control. While Hammond assured Tesla that he had not infringed any of his patents, Tesla insisted that he get a share in any profits. The two of them formed the Tesla-Hammond Wireless Company funded by Hammond’s father. Tesla saw this new company as a way to market his bladeless turbine, perhaps to the military. But Hammond was more interested in Tesla’s patents on selective tuning, which divided up the radio spectrum into numerous channels – a crucial development in radio.

  Hammond contacted the War Department with the proposal for a ship-to-shore communication system and hired Fritz Lowenstein and Benjamin Franklin Miessner to form a military research group at the family estate in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Again Tesla was sidelined.

  Sending Messages through the Air

  While practical work was underway in Gloucester, Tesla was making more outrageous claims to the convention of the National Electric Light Association in 1911. He said that he would be able to run the streetcars in Dublin by a power station in Long Island City. His wireless transmitter would generate enough power to light the entire United States.

  ‘The current would pass into the air and, spreading in all directions, produced an effect of a strong aurora borealis,’ he said. ‘It would be a soft light, but sufficient to distinguish objects.’ The New York Times said: ‘Queen Isabella of Spain could not have been more amazed when meeting Christopher Columbus to hear about the new world.’

  Tesla was even prepared to take on Euclid:

  I have annihilated distance with my scheme and when perfected it will not be one mite different than my present plans call for. The air will be my medium, and I will be able to transmit energy of any amount to any place in the world. I will also be able to send messages to all parts of the world, and I will send words out into the world, which will come out of the ground in the Sahara Desert with such force that they can be heard for 15 miles around.

  I also hope to set up a central wireless telephone station whereby there will be a force of a million horsepower behind each word uttered into my instrument, and in which distance will play no hindrances whatever. Many hundreds of people will be able to talk at the same time and without any interference with each other.

  He also said that he had perfected a new steam engine, a turbine that would produce 10 horsepower but weighed only one pound. The machine would be ‘the smallest thing ever seen on wheels and will be more powerful than any automobile engine ever manufactured’.

  Ending the Hammond Partnership

  Tesla made overtures to the Japanese, hoping that they would take 500 of his turbines to power their torpedoes. He also had meetings with GE and the Seiberling Company, who developed high-speed power boats. Then he worked on prototype car engines, approaching Ford. Kaiser Wilhelm II also took an interest in possible military applications. But Tesla was having problems with the design. The ball bearings wore down too quickly.

  As Tesla preferred to work during the night, labour costs soared. Though he did not take a salary himself, in just a few months he found he had laid out $18,000 and asked Hammond for another $10,000 to keep going. But Hammond and Lowenstein were busy installing wireless equipment on naval vessels and competing with De Forest for a $50,000 amplifier deal with AT&T. So Hammond’s main interest now was perfecting wireless and he ignored Tesla’s request. By then it was clear that it would take a great deal more than $10,000 to perfect the turbine. This effectively ended their partnership.

  Hammond spent the money he saved developing remote control, spending around $750,000 dollars on crewless ships, aircraft and submarines. He was eventually compensated by the War Department and did a separate deal with the Radio Corporation of America – later RCA – shortly after Tesla’s wireless patents had run out. Yet again the inventor had failed to profit from his inventions. However, they had made Hammond a millionaire in his own right. He used the money to build a faux medieval castle less than a mile from his parents’ house. It boasted a nude statue of the famous inventor.

  Is It Electrified?

  Tesla was never idle for long. An experiment with his Tesla Coils in Sweden had demonstrated that children in an electrified environment grew more quickly and scored higher in aptitude tests. So Tesla went to work for the superintendent of New York’s public schools installing Tesla Coils in the walls of a school for a pilot study. The guinea pigs were 50 backward pupils and it was said that ‘the brains of the children will receive artificial stimulation to such an extent that they will be transformed from dunces into star pupils’.

  For Tesla, there would be limitless applications. The New York Times reported:

  According to the inventor this experiment in schools will be merely an opening wedge, a suggestion to the people that by the use of high potential electricity they may do away with the use of bromides, phosphates, pepsin tablets, and all kinds of drugs taken for disorders of the nervous and digestive system. If his dream comes true, 10 years from now people will inquire when renting an apartment or a house, ‘Is it electrified?’ Everyone will have at least one room in his house furnished with a coil generating high-frequency currents. By that time the appliance will be inexpensive, so that at a moderate cost people will be able to obtain superb health and mental brilliancy. Ordinary conversation will then be carried on in scintillating epigrams, and the mental life of the average adult will be so quickened as to equal the brain activity of the most brilliant people living before the time when a generator of high-frequency currents was a household essential.

  Everyone Wants to be Tesla

  Tesla also told the newspaper that one of his assistants had been exceedingly stupid, but after a time working around high-voltage equipment the man grew brighter and worked better. Asked about any harmful side-effects, Tesla said that the rays of light issuing from ordinary household incandescent lamps were more harmful than those from a high-voltage coil. He also maintained that the increased prevalence of baldness was due to the effect on the scalp of rays from incandescent bulbs. But the electromagnetic radiation from his coils was, he insisted, perfectly safe.

  Constant Legal Battles

  When the Titanic sank, Marconi was credited with saving the lives of the 710 survivors, as it was his equipment that had summoned the rescue ships. This was galling for Tesla and other pioneers. So Tesla began suing Marconi for patent infringement. In Britain, Tesla already had let a vital patent lapse. However, Sir Oliver Lodge, the inventor of the coherer, won a suit against Marconi. In France, Tesla succeeded in challenging two of Marconi’s patents.

  Tesla was sued hims
elf, first by an investor who failed to reap the riches he was promised, then by Westinghouse over equipment they had lent him. Tesla argued that he was not personally liable for this, but agreed to return the equipment. Though his losses were small, he was deeply in debt and the bad publicity damaged his reputation. It seemed he was now fair game. A Mrs Tierstein wanted to shoot him for ‘throwing electricity at her’. She was confined to an asylum.

  While Telefunken in Germany infringed Tesla’s patents, it was too important to sue. But, when the company came to America to set up transatlantic stations at Tuckerton, New Jersey, and Sayville, New York, its founder Adolf Slaby (1849 – 1913), sought out Tesla in the hope that they could present a united front to Marconi. However, in 1914, Tesla was also approached by the American Marconi company. But they only offered stock; Tesla needed cash. He appealed to Jack Morgan for help, saying the US government had already installed $10-million-worth of his equipment and he was expecting to receive compensation.

  Meanwhile Telefunken was suing Marconi who, in turn, was suing Lowenstein and the US Navy. However, as the wireless equipment Hammond supplied the War Department was being used to test guided missiles, it was classified, so Hammond was immune from litigation.

  World War I

  With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the British cut Germany’s transatlantic cables. Consequently, the Telefunken stations at Tuckerton and Sayville became of vital importance. Fearing that they may be used to direct the movements of battleships and submarines, the British wanted them shut down. While ostensibly neutral, President Woodrow Wilson (1856 – 1924) signed a bill prohibiting radio stations from sending or receiving messages of an ‘unneutral nature’ and took over the station at Tuckerton.

  Although one-tenth of the population of the United States was of German origin, most Americans backed Britain and Tesla’s connections with Telefunken made him unpopular. Indeed, he was receiving royalties from their subsidiary, the Atlantic Communication Company, and was giving them advice on how to boost the output of their station at Sayville, which was on Long Island just a few miles from Wardenclyffe. On 23 April 1915, The New York Times reported that its power had been increased from 35 kilowatts to 100 kilowatts and that two 500 ft (150 m) towers were about to be erected, transforming it into one of the most powerful transatlantic communication stations. In a test transmission the previous year, The New York Times had received a message from the Burgomaster of Berlin.

  Tesla’s Day in Court

  Marconi won its case against Lowenstein, but lost its suit against the US Navy. In preparation for the case, the Assistant Secretary for the Navy – later president – Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882 – 1945) reviewed Tesla’s 1899 file at the Lighthouse Board. In it was the letter asking Tesla whether he could supply wireless telegraphy apparatus. A review of Marconi’s patents was also made.

  In 1900, the commissioner of patents John Seymour – who had already upheld Tesla’s patents against Michael Pupin’s claim that he had invented the AC system – had rejected Marconi’s first patent application because of the prior claims of Tesla, Lodge and Ferdinand Braun, who had shared the Nobel Prize for physics with Marconi in 1909. In 1903, the patent office wrote: ‘…Marconi’s pretended ignorance of the nature of a Tesla oscillator being little short of absurd... the term Tesla oscillator has become a household word on both continents’ – that is, Europe and North America.

  In 1904, after Seymour had retired, Marconi had been granted a patent. This was being contested in Telefunken’s suit against Marconi now going to trial. The Brooklyn Eagle reported that some of the world’s greatest inventors were on hand to testify – not least Marconi himself. He arrived in New York on the Lusitania in April 1915, telling reporters that he had seen the periscope of a German submarine on the crossing. The press were on his side as Italy sided with the Allies in World War I.

  Also appearing for the defence was Tesla’s old adversary, Columbia Professor Michael Pupin, who shocked the court by saying: ‘I invented wireless before Marconi or Tesla and it was I who gave it unreservedly to those who followed!’

  A local newspaper reported that Tesla was so shocked that ‘watching his fellow Serb upon the stand, Tesla’s jaw dropped so hard, it almost cracked upon the floor’.

  Pupin had already made it clear where he stood. In the press he said of Marconi: ‘His genius gave the idea to the world, and he taught the world how to build a telegraphic practice upon the basis of this idea … In my opinion, the first claim for wireless telegraphy belongs to Mr Marconi absolutely, and to nobody else.’

  Tesla the Trailblazer

  While Pupin could only assert that Marconi was the inventor, Tesla came armed with lectures, articles and patents. While Marconi had only been granted his first US patent in 1904, Tesla had given a practical demonstration of wireless in St Louis, Missouri in 1893. He had transmitted a signal from his Houston Street laboratory to West Point before 1897. People who visited his lab saw the equipment. He then compared the Marconi patent to his own, saying: ‘If you take these two contemporaneous diagrams, and examine the subsequent developments, you will find that absolutely not a vestige of that apparatus of Marconi remains, and that in all the present system there is nothing but my four-tuned circuits. Everybody is using them.’

  Following Tesla to the stand was John Stone Stone, who could himself claim to be the inventor of the radio. He filed a crucial patent on tuning 2 years before Marconi, and he acknowledged that it was Tesla, not Marconi, who was a trailblazer.

  Due to World War I, the legal battle was abandoned before the case was decided. Fearing a German attack, Marconi did not return to Europe on the Lusitania. Instead under a false name and in heavy disguised, he set sail on the St Paul. On 7 May 1915, the Lusitania was sunk by a German submarine with the loss of 1,134 lives, including 128 US citizens. America was outraged. It was already suspected that the Telefunken radio station was passing coded messages to submarines. Two weeks later The New York Times reported that the Germans had developed ‘air torpedoes’ which were dropped from zeppelins and controlled by wireless – the very thing Tesla had claimed to have invented.

  When the US joined World War I in 1917, the former head of the Tuckerton station was arrested for spying and the Sayville station was taken over by the government. Tesla’s monthly royalty cheques from Telefunken stopped. Edison, Fessenden, Pupin, Thomson and others got jobs as advisors to the government, but Tesla – possibly because of the connections with Telefunken – was left out.

  Chapter 11 – The Nobel Prize

  I have concluded that the honour has been conferred upon me in acknowledgement of a discovery announced a short time ago which concerns the transmission of electrical energy without wires. This discovery means that electrical effects of unlimited intensity and power can be produced, so that not only can energy be transmitted for all practical purposes to any terrestrial distance, but even effects of cosmic magnitude may be created.

  Nikola Tesla

  On 6 November 1915, The New York Times announced that Tesla and Edison had been awarded the Nobel Prize for physics. The source of the story, apparently, was the Copenhagen correspondent of the Daily Telegraph. Tesla had received no notification, but when interviewed by the Times he said that he thought he had been given the Nobel Prize for a device he had filed a patent for a month earlier that made it ‘practicable to project the human voice not only for a distance of 5,000 miles, but clear across the globe. I demonstrated this in Colorado in 1899.’ He went on to explain how it would work:

  The plant would simply be connected with the telephone exchange of New York City and a subscriber will be able to talk to any other telephone subscriber in the world, and all this without any change in his apparatus. This plan has been called my ‘world system’. By the same means I propose also to transmit pictures and project images, so that the subscriber will not only hear the voice, but see the person to whom he is talking …

  A further advantage would be that the transmission is
instant and free of the unavoidable delay experienced with the use of wire and cables. As I have already made known, the current passes through the earth, starting from the transmission station with infinite speed, slowing down to the speed of light at a distance of 6,000 miles, then increasing in speed from that region and reaching the receiving station again with infinite velocity.

  It’s all a wonderful thing. Wireless is coming to mankind in its full meaning like a hurricane some of these days. Some day there will be, say, six great wireless telephone stations in a ‘world system’ connecting all the inhabitants of this earth to one another not only by voice but by sight. It’s surely coming.

  Illuminating the Sky

  This discovery had a direct bearing on the problems uppermost in the public’s mind, he said, the perfection of wireless telephony. On 7 November, he told the Times:

  We will deprive the ocean of its terrors by illuminating the sky, thus avoiding collisions at sea and other disasters caused by darkness. We will draw unlimited quantities of water from the oceans and irrigate the deserts and other arid regions. In this way we will fertilize the soil and derive any amount of power from the sun. I also believe that ultimately all battles, if they should come, will be waged by electrical waves instead of explosives.

  He would say nothing further on the matter. However, he agreed that Edison deserved a dozen Nobel Prizes, though he said he had no idea which one he had been awarded the prize for. When shown the despatch, Edison wisely declined to comment. Meanwhile the idea of winning the prize had gone to Tesla’s head. He wrote to the Johnsons:

  In a thousand years, there will be many recipients of the Nobel Prize. But I have not less than four dozen of my creations identified with my name in the technical literature. These are honours real and permanent, which are bestowed not by a few who are apt to err, but by the whole world which seldom makes a mistake, and for any of these I would give all the Nobel prizes during the next thousand years … Josie will never had the chance of turning me away as a beggar, but I shall give her soon, the opportunity of slamming your door in the face of a millionaire.