Tesla (38 page)

“Colorado Springs!” the stationmaster announced through his nose.

“Why have you come to Colorado?” a newspaper reporter took out a notebook from the pocket of his plaid jacket.

By the reception desk of the Alta Vista Hotel, Tesla shook hands with a man of few words, the contractor Joseph Dozier. Before he became a contractor, Dozier was a common laborer. “I was buying my boss the newspaper every morning for ten years,” he complained, scratching himself with fingernails suitable for woodcarving and strangling bears. “He didn’t pay once. And I had six kids to support.”

The man of few words agreed to build a laboratory for Tesla. Dozier raised his palms with an expression on his face as if the job was already done and forgotten.

Tesla arrived at Knob Hill together with the first workers.

“Don’t the words
patience
and
pain
come from the same root in Latin?” he muttered to himself.

If asked to define what a genius was, his answer would have been—impatience. In the following months, a wooden structure grew in the middle of nowhere. A steel tower rose from the roof of a barn. A mast spiked up from the tower.

In the strangest barn in the world, Tesla and his young assistant Fritz Lowenstein shouted to each other in German.

“Faster!” Tesla yelled at Lowenstein just like Ferenc Puskás used to yell at him.

In the middle of the barn, they installed an enormous coil, nicknamed “Gorgon.” They put another coil nearby, which was precisely set to the electrical vibrations of the first one. As always, Tesla’s apparatuses were shipped to him in magician’s crates. It seemed to Tesla that the last pieces of his equipment arrived too slowly. Finally, a pair of oxen pulling a carriage brought the transmitter that resembled a spider’s web. When they assembled it, they put a sign in front of the log barn:

“Extreme danger! Keep out!”

Surprised, Dozier concluded, “We’re done.”

The first person Tesla thought of in his newly finished barn was John Muir. The bright-eyed Scot looked like the Irish magical imp, the leprechaun, or like an ancient Serbian elf with a beard that reached his waist. Muir went blind at a young age. When he regained his sight, he swore he would never take for granted “God’s smile” reflected in nature. In the spectacular environment of Colorado Springs, Tesla saw the world through Muir’s eyes. Just like at Niagara, he sank into the magnificence of nature and merged with it. Did not Saint Bernard of Clairvaux say that one can learn more from the woods than from books?

The solitude thrust upon him long ago started to agree with Tesla. Most people were too slow for him. He felt fine without them.

Not before spring would he allow himself a game of whist at the local El Paso Club.

“We live in the oddest place in the world,” Jeremiah Falconer, the fat president of the club, bragged. “Many come to Colorado Springs for their health, but only bachelors”—he drew a line along the threshold of the club—“enter
here.
”

There was a shadow under the learned treasurer’s eyes.

The secretary with a goiter handed him a business card the size of an opera program. It bore the inscription:
John “Duck” Harris: I believe in peace, progress, and brotherhood of all the people in the world.
Below it was a picture of the smiling “Duck” with his sideburns and mouth full of large teeth. The sworn misogynist warned Tesla: “You’ll see how mountain ranges and other giant things will look dwarfed in this place.”

“On the contrary, people far away will seemingly acquire gigantic proportions,” Falconer rasped.

“The light and the laws of optics play games with our eyes here,” the treasurer added in a dull, onanistic voice.

“You’ll see.” Falconer put down an empty glass of claret. “Colorado Springs is a different world.”

As a matter of fact, the clarity of the atmosphere intoxicated Tesla. He had never seen such light. The distant lamps at the bottom of the mountains shone as clearly as if they were just a few blocks away. Sound spread unusually far, especially high-pitched voices. As in Budapest long before, Tesla heard bells ringing in far-off towns right in his head. On Knob Hill, the squealing of wheels and people’s voices from the town seemed to be right outside his door.

“I ascribe this to the high level of electricity in the air,” he explained to his faithful Lowenstein. “Electricity purifies and amplifies everything.”

“Can you believe that the best photographs of the snowy mountain peaks were taken in moonlight?” the learned bachelors from the El Paso Club asked him.

In moonlight, the inky shadows of the clouds rushed silently across the prairie. One evening, Tesla recognized Joseph Dozier’s melancholy face from a quarter mile away.

“How are you?” Tesla took his hat off to him.

Dozier pointed his finger toward the sky: “Huh! The moon! The stars! Huh?!”

Did not Tesla’s father, Milutin, once see
a waterfall of sparks that appeared both distant and yet so close he could touch it with his hand? The sparkling waterfall left blue tracers behind and “paled the stars.”

Colorado Springs was a beautiful phenomenon every day. Here more shooting stars glided across the firmament than there were wishes to make. Once he saw a star explode and bloom in the sky. “Is this the true face of the world?” Tesla shook in hope. Goose-bumpy intuition tickled the marrow of his bones.

Here he embarked on something truly cosmic and—for the first time in his life—was able to work as hard as he possibly could.

Each morning was worth waking up to. As soon as Helios moved his coach, parts of the sky would turn the color of blood. Mountaintops became furnace doors gushing out molten ore. Clouds formed and dissipated quickly. Huge masses of something resembling snow floated through the air.

One evening, he wrote in his diary:

The hovering icebergs looked so solid it was hard to believe they were made of vapor. It was impossible to distinguish the celestial mountain ranges from the real ones. Tesla wrote to Robert and Katharine that he had seen an ocean with deep green, dark blue, and black waters in the sky more than once. Green islands, shiny icebergs, sailboats, and even steamships were strewn across the ocean, and they were not less real because they were made of glittering mist. Another time he saw something like heavenly Switzerland.

John Ruskin said that he poured clouds into bottles, like his father, the wine merchant, used to do with sherry. Clouds became Tesla’s exterior soul. He categorized them with love:

CHAPTER 77

The Gorgon’s Hair

A glowing stinger flashed in the distance. It exposed the shining fabric of the sky, woven of lightning and metals. For a second, Fritz Lowenstein appeared in the angelic world, but another thunderbolt spiked him back into the darkness.

“Forty-eight point five seconds exactly!” Manfred noted in a ringing voice while everything around them shook, rattled, and shivered. The seismic wave he correctly anticipated almost ripped the laboratory off its foundation.

“Pssst!” Tesla hissed at Lowenstein.

The underground reverberation of the thunder disappeared and came back. As pale as a jasmine flower, with his hair sleekly brushed back, our cosmic spy listened to how
that
abated and then stirred again. Two hundred miles away, he could still hear the oscillations.

“That’s important, that’s very important…,” he whispered.

“
Bang!
Dang!” His assistant tripped over a broom at the other end of the laboratory.

“Fritz! Be quiet…”

Lowenstein shivered whenever he as much as brushed Tesla with his elbow. He constantly apologized, felt chilled, and hunched his shoulders around Tesla. His thinning hair looked more like down than hair. The young man’s skin was as delicate as an eyelid. He saw Tesla—who considered clumsiness to be rude—as divine. Finally, when Lowenstein ignored Tesla’s
pssst
too many times, his boss sent him back to New York.

“He’s not good to the ones who love him,” the young German complained to Scherff.

Scherff looked at him through his monstrous glasses behind which floated the eyes of a giant emotionless squid.

The man with dangerous-looking eyes, Koloman Czitó, replaced Lowenstein as Tesla’s assistant. He brought a letter from the Lighthouse Board in Washington in which they informed Tesla that they would much rather sign a contract regarding wireless communication with an American than with Marconi. Tesla was already convinced that doing business with the military was like dealing with fools. He responded with demonic pride:

What was it Johnson told him? “There’s no happiness outside the community of humans?” Ha!

Non serviam!

They did not call him Manfred in Prague for nothing. That same evening he proudly wrote in a letter to Johnson, “I am ready to produce effects bigger than any effects
ever
produced by a human factor.”

The next morning, Manfred turned his mighty machines on for the first time. The Gorgon flamed with all of her bright hair. Tesla pumped electricity hundreds of times stronger than lightning into the ground. The ground shivered slightly. The vibrations spread over the entire planet in ever widening circles and formed a bow on the opposite end—right between the French islands of Amsterdam and Saint Paul.

The earth was a huge cat.

Now he knew who was rubbing it.

The earth purred.

The wave turned into an echo, which produced the same effect in Colorado Springs. As he kept pumping in more electricity, the resonance grew like the snowball he made in his childhood. In theory, that “electric avalanche” could destroy the planet.

Under the sublimely clear skies his mighty machinery registered three signals from Mars. On the planet Colorado Springs, Tesla flew into the depths of cosmic reverberations. Taking each breath was a miracle. He was steeped in a remorseless natural force. There was no going back—he was wedded to it. He had to deal with phenomena as big as death.

John Muir was far away. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux was dead. Who else could understand his ideas that ripened in the wilderness? Did not Mara tell the Buddha: Don’t even try to announce it! And yet… Letters flew to New York and letters flew back from New York.

“Imagine spherical lightning that the wind blows across the nocturnal wasteland,” the hermit who went wild wrote to his urban friends. “Imagine a race of spirits through the night! Such lightning that resemble tumbleweeds are naturally created here in the prairie. Something similar was released during my experiments—it snapped my mast, and damaged some of my equipment. The Gorgon’s hair hissed around me, and I had to roll across the ground.”

“I’ve had wonderful experiences here,” the bandaged Tesla wrote to Johnson. “I was taming a wild cat, so I turned into a mass of bloody scratches.”

He dropped the pen that wanted to embellish the story.

“The Furies!” he whispered in disgust. “The Furies!”

He grabbed the disobedient pen again. He subdued it and continued to write. “The wireless transfer of messages, images, sounds and—most importantly—energy will be possible,” he promised in the letter to somebody who could not understand him. “I personally tested the transfer of energy at a distance of twenty-six miles. Trust me, Robert, with a 3000 HP pumping oscillator, I could light up a lightbulb anywhere on earth.”

CHAPTER 78

Zeus Commands the Thunderbolt

Suddenly there came from heaven a sound as of a violent wind,