Clockwork Futures

by Brandy Schillace

  Tesla arrived in Paris in 1882—a city he would often describe as a wonderland—to work for Edison’s man Charles Batchelor in Ivry-sur-Seine (at Edison’s Société Industrielle). It would be some time before Tesla met Edison himself, but they were not instant enemies by a long shot. Edison teased Tesla for his manners, calling him “our Parisian”; Tesla writes that the moment was “thrilling,” but that he also received his first comeuppance: “I wanted to have my shoes shined, something I considered beneath my dignity. Edison said, ‘You will shine the shoes yourself and like it.’”12 Tesla did exactly as instructed. He would not be treated any differently than Edison’s other hardworking engineers, for he permitted no exceptions. But Tesla was (as he repeatedly pointed out) exceptional. Tesla describes his childhood home as idyllic, but also shattered by personal tragedy. His autobiography keeps to this type of balance, but it is uneven terrain. He glosses over fundamental years of his life: “I had a complete nervous breakdown and while the malady lasted I observed many phenomena strange and unbelievable,”13 and then spends pages on details and minutiae of other seemingly more trivial occurrences. He makes lists, citing manias against certain colors, a hatred of earrings, and a deep dislike for the touch of human hair. He had strange powers of eidetic memory, seeing the things he imagined as though they were real, had what we might call out-of-body experiences, and suffered strange flashes of light. Tesla claimed they preceded his discoveries, but he never attributed the psychoneurological disturbances to anything like providence (an interesting point as he was originally destined for the clergy like his father). By his own admission, Tesla had been “almost drowned,” “nearly boiled alive,” and “just missed being cremated”; he became “entombed, lost and frozen,” and escaped “mad dogs, hogs, and other wild animals,” and yet he believed in no miracles and accepted nothing but the solid, material world as his foundation. Tesla seemed somewhat miraculous himself, all the same; he could “mold his various creations, and even run and modify them in his mind” before writing up his first blueprint.14 His litany of bizarre characteristics are given as though already highly familiar to his audience (and they probably were). But he is just as free with accolades for his genius. “We have, undoubtedly, certain finer fibers that enable us to perceive truths when logical deduction, or any other willful effort of the brain is futile,” Tesla explained.15 And it was due, he claimed, to the same principle of energy and power mankind had so long attempted to control.

  The Secret of Life

  “[T]here is no word in any language I know which is an exact synonym for vril. I should call it electricity, except that it comprehends in its manifold branches other forces of nature . . . These people consider that in vril they have arrived at the unity in natural energetic agencies . . . they can exercise influence over minds, and bodies animal and vegetable, to an extent not surpassed in the romances of our mystics.”

  —Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Vril: The Power of the Coming Race

  “Of all the forms of nature’s immeasurable, all-pervading energy, which ever and ever change and move,” Tesla announced, “electricity and magnetism are perhaps the most fascinating.”16 We live within a teeming sea of electric impulses, the hum and beat of their movement within our bodies as well as without. Who among us can readily grasp the idea that our sturdy bones and muscles are vibrating with electrons or spinning with atoms? Recall the first images of the human cell, or of neurons, or any of the other tiny structures of biological life: an endless variety of galaxies are here contained, as awesome as the stars and just as uncountable. For Tesla, the gap between humanity and electricity could be easily closed, and to prove it, he would pass tens of thousands of volts through his own body. Ada Lovelace would have loved the show and the meaning it suggested: In an electrified state, Tesla grasped exhausted Crookes tubes and caused them to glow. He used his fingers to light up lightbulbs, bestowing power as if by magic, and with the same magisterial wonder commanded by Armstrong on frostbitten nights at the Literary and Philosophical Society. Onlookers compared him to the archangel, and James O’Neill, his first biographer, compared him to a god—though even “the gods of old, in the wildest imaginings of their worshippers, never undertook such gigantic tasks of world-wide dimension.”17

  Imagine for a moment the whirl and dash of white-hot light. Imagine a mere mortal, sparks bounding from his fingertips in a room made darker by his own luminescence—and imagine a voice, soft and precise and accented, speaking from that fire as if from the great beyond: “We are whirling through endless space, with inconceivable speed [. . .] all around us everything is spinning, everything is moving, everywhere is energy.”18 Contemporary accounts describe a scene of wonders that can scarcely be imagined, lamps burning with “magnificent colors” among sheets of light and directed beams. And in the midst of them was Tesla, a genius, a madman, firing up his great coils with the sound of thunderbolts, and claiming that he, like Frankenstein, could endow a mass of shapeless wire with the essence of life.19

  Tesla was not the first to describe the life force of electricity, of course, and electric therapy (as rather horrid quack devices) had already been employed for the better part of a century. For those practitioners, the emphasis had been upon the shock. Like so much early medicine, the cure came pretty near to killing you. And life and death did seem to hang in the balance. By mid-century, charlatans of the life spark, animal electricity, and a new foray into “magnetism” tacked up shop signs and spread tents in the malls, and a person of good breeding could get herself invited to a séance. Alison Winter describes a “tea party” in November 1844, where a late-arriving guest arrives to find her hostess lying cold and lifeless on the reclining sofa. The other invitees gather around in awe and fear as a “magnetizer” with “dark, animal eyes” hovered over the entranced woman: the power to hold her in such a state, he claimed, owed to his “moral and intellectual superiority.”20 The guest challenged the hypnotist, who took her hand in his until she felt a current run through it, an “electric” feeling of shock as from a galvanic machine. The experience was known as mesmerism, but it didn’t originate with the Victorians. Franz Anton Mesmer first produced the effect in 1774, at the height of the electrical craze and contemporary with the kites and keys and Leiden jars of Benjamin Franklin. Mesmer claimed that the secret to health and even to life itself lay with animal magnetism. Each body produced flow, a concept that had gained ground with the new ideas of “flowing” electricity. To Mesmer, illness was a block in this flow that magnetism (the magnetic pull of the practitioner upon his patient) could release. In other words, mesmerism was science, and predicated on the same principles that caused a frog’s leg to jump with touched with copper wire, or which caused static to form on the hand that touched a Hauksbee machine. But Mesmer’s work did not get far in his own time; an investigation appointed five commissioners, one of which was Ben Franklin himself. The resulting conclusion: there could be no evidence of animal magnetism. Mesmer was branded a charlatan and driven into exile. So why was a teatime guest subjected to mesmerism in 1844? Engineers like Edison and Tesla had provided new material, and with each discovery the race was on to find it a home to live in. Electricity was real—why not stranger things? It’s a question worth revisiting, and one that would later entrance an aging Arthur Conan Doyle. But first, to the scientists: who would be the first to experiment with electricity’s mysterious force?

  “My whole scientific education,” said English chemist and physicist William Crookes, “has been one long lesson in the exactness of observation, and I wish it to be distinctly understood that this firm conviction [in spiritualism] is the result of most careful investigation.”21 Crookes’s work in spectroscopy earned him the respect of the age. He invented the Crookes tubes, glass tubes with vacuum to test electrical discharge, instrumental to the first x-rays and also to Tesla’s experiments. A gentleman scientist, white bearded and sporting a comically waxed mustache, Crookes joined the Royal Society, rubbed shoulders with Lord Kelvin, and c
arried with him a gravitas of credit. And yet, he systematically investigated and supported the claims of leading spiritualists, including Daniel Dunglas Home, Kate Fox, and Florence Cook.22 Crookes published his own Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism in 1874, claiming to have witnessed “the movement of material substances, and the production of sounds resembling electric discharges” occurring during spiritualist séances and inexplicable by known physical laws.23 But “spiritualist” activity did not necessarily suggest paranormal intervention—what if, suggested journalist and medical man Andrew Wynter, technologies like the electric telegraph acted as “spirits” to “carry our thought with the speed of thought to the uttermost ends of the earth”?24 What if electricity, the spirit, and the body were all one, and the telegraph system “like the great nerves of the human body, unit[ed] in living sympathy all the far-scattered children of men.”25 In other words, what if electricity were the very secret of life and power itself? The answer, for some, turned up first in fiction.

  Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton wrote Vril, The Power of the Coming Race, in 1871. Though few recognize his name now, he had a popularity second only to Dickens, and his adventure tales made deep impressions on the reading public. Vril begins with a mild-mannered narrator talked into joining an expedition into the heart of a chasm (not so different from Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth). An accident leaves him stranded and alone, and he follows tunnels into a strange and alien world—the home of a master race called the Vril-ya. Though no sun penetrated the endless cavern, the sweeping terrain “was bright and warm as an Italian landscape at noon [. . .] I could distinguish at a distance, whether on the banks of the lake or rivulet, [. . .] embedded amidst the vegetation, buildings that must surely be the homes of men.”26 Like the racing narratives of eighteenth-century explorers in Jamaica or Tahiti, he finds an unknown paradise. Like the crews that imagined worlds beyond the ice, he discovers a race of people unlike other men—but Bulwer-Lytton’s underworld is not a step backward to a more primitive society. Instead, the Vril-ya represents an astonishing leap forward. They could burrow “through the most solid substances, and open valleys for culture through the rocks of their subterranean wilderness,” and “extract the light which supplies their lamps.”27 They keep no slaves, but are served by strange automatons “so ingenious [. . .] that they actually seem gifted with reason. It was scarcely possible to distinguish the figures I beheld [. . .] from human forms endowed with thought.”28 Everything from vast engines to earth-moving machines operate without the interference or guidance of pilot and driver, all powered entirely by a mysterious substance called vril. Just fiction, of course. Except two decades later, Tesla would unveil wireless vehicles, unmanned boats that operated at his command. Rumors circulated. Suspicions abound. Did Tesla take his ideas from Bulwer-Lytton’s fiction? Or was vril never a fiction to begin with?

  The idea enticed like a magic spell, a new alchemy of power. Vril offered just enough possibility (and profitability) that some so-called engineers took the part of medical charlatans, offering false science at the expense of a willing public. The worst of these offenders might be John Ernst Worrell Keely. He claimed to have invented a perpetual motion machine, a motor which proved the existence of this “mysterious force of the universe.”29 Using senseless jargon, a showman’s platform, and something akin to religious fervor, Keely would commune with this “essence” to run the motor, which would release steam as evidence of its operation. Eventually arrested, Keely divulged his secret: A connecting copper tube moved the motor on his signal. So much for magic. But, then, electrical science sounded almost as far-fetched. Edison declared he’d light up lower New York: Tesla said he would put “100,000 horse-power on a wire.”30 Edison wanted to sell affordable power: Tesla claimed mankind could access the power driving the universe for free, powering lights and small crafts without a single connecting thread. When Tesla unveiled his first “teleautomatics” machine, a boat controlled by remote radio transmitter, at the Electrical Exposition in Madison Square Garden, he caused a stir. Even a hundred years after Davy’s arc light exhibition, everyone still loved a show.

  We have all seen and probably played with Christmas toys of one variety or another, robots and cars that trundle along on short-lived batteries and controlled by invisible waves from our remote antennae. Most of us probably never thought to question the whys and wherefores, but imagine such a thing at its first debut, as amazing in its way as Jaquet-Droz’s writing boy. Taken to the next level, Tesla’s boat had been equipped with the ability to communicate and even to answer questions through signals, just like a trained circus counting horse. In reality, the same radio transmission that controlled the boat’s movement in the water also allowed Tesla to give responses on its behalf, but the public called the boat “magical,” and Tesla let them. “You see with what ease the Vril-ya destroy their enemies?” Bulwer-Lytton’s novel asks. Tesla’s model could fire explosives by remote control, and a similarly radio-guided torpedo offered the possibility of disaster at a distance, not unlike Armstrong’s Big Gun.31 And also like it, those who did see its possibilities worried about an era where “quarrels will be settled in view of the terror of the cataclysms promised by science.”32 That was partly the point of Vril’s “utopic vision”; among the Vril-ya, the “art of destruction” through death-ray type weapons had surpassed everything, and so annulled all “superiority in numbers, discipline, or military skill.”33 As a result, the “age of war was therefore gone.” If this seems illogical, consider: WWI was called the “war to end all wars.” The Cold War, too, with its proliferation of nuclear weapons no one wanted to use, suggested that humankind had learned from the horror of destruction not to use their powers for evil. In theory. The trouble, of course, has to do with practice. I mentioned that Tesla and Twain team up in Five Fists of Science; in the novel, the two of them build giant automatons against which “fleets and armies would be helpless,” not to destroy the world but to save it. . . . In history, Mark Twain did in fact approach Tesla. He urged him to sell the patents of the remote control boats to all countries. That way, with such a level playing field, war would have no place. We can perhaps be pleased that Tesla never did; the trouble isn’t with Bulwer-Lytton’s technological premise, but with the length of human memory. The power of vril, unleashed into military designs, would not guard against future generations who lived to forget the dead and the dying. And perhaps this, as much as the sheer implausibility, is what caused the military to balk. Guns to bigger guns they could understand. Death by magic rays and invisible ether was not only harder to conceptualize, it had no precedent. Then again, neither did AC power systems when Edison opened his Pearl Street Station. And Tesla would work on the concept of death rays well into his waning years.

  Birth of a Myth-Maker

  To understand how Tesla arrives at his vril-like teleautomatics, we have to start further back. Like Frankenstein (and, by extension, its author), Tesla found the wonders of nature utterly fascinating. Also like him, Tesla wasn’t originally in pursuit of destructive creations, but in harnessing lightning and taming it. Tesla wrote, “if only we could produce electric effects of the required quality, this whole planet and the conditions of existence on it could be transformed.” His aim was no less than godlike; “The sun raises the water of the oceans and winds drive it to distant regions where it remains in a state of most delicate balance. If it were in our power to upset it when and wherever desired, this mighty life-sustaining stream could be at will controlled.”34 What might men do if they harnessed a power as great as the sun? Might we, like Victor Frankenstein, discover the secret of life itself? The answer certainly seemed to be electricity—but even caught “in a bottle” use of so sublime a substance had long eluded man’s control.

  “Practical” electricity simply didn’t exist during Tesla’s school years; Michael Faraday had long since demonstrated that electrical current alternates in its natural state, that is, the flow of electric charge reverses directio
n, but no one had sorted out how to harness it for everyday uses. Marc Seifer compares the electric flow to water in a river—if the river keeps changing direction on you, running a water wheel would seem impossible or at least impractical. The Gramme dynamo (or motor) used a commutator, or series of wire brushes, to translate the current into a single direction for use—the direct current that later powered Edison’s light. But by forcing the current to flow only one way, the commutator also wasted energy by encumbering the motor (and throwing sparks in the process).35 The spitting, whirring electrical motors simply didn’t work any other way; they never had, and, as Tesla’s professor Poeschl explained, “they never will.” Wasn’t it worth trying to capture AC instead, Tesla asked? “Mr. Tesla may do many things,” Poeschl chided, “but this he cannot accomplish. His plan”—like Keely’s—“is simply a perpetual motion scheme.”36 But, unlike Keely, Tesla was no charlatan, and he would not cease until he’d proven them all wrong. “With me it was a sacred vow,” he claimed, “a question of life and death.”37