Tesla: The Life and Times of an Electric Messiah (16 page)

The primary purpose of the tower, your honour, was to telephone, to send the human voice and likeness around the globe. That was my discovery, that I announced in 1893, and now all the wireless plants are doing that. There is not another system being used. Then the idea was to reproduce this apparatus and connect it just with a central station and telephone office, so that you may pick up your telephone and if you wanted to talk to a subscriber in Australia you would simply call up that plant and that plant would connect you immediately. And I had contemplated to have press messages, stock quotations, pictures for the press and reproductions of signatures, cheques and everything transmitted from there.

Tesla was asked whether he had any warning that the tower was going to be demolished. He replied, ‘No, sir. It came like a bolt from a blue sky…'

Although the Waldorf-Astoria had not accounted for the machinery, they had sold off and destroyed property worth $350,000 to recoup $20,000, the judge found in favour of the hotel, who also had the last word:

As a solace to the wild hopes of this dreamy inventor, if prior to that time he should grasp in his fingers any one of the castles in Spain which always were floating about in his dreams, and had he paid the board bills which he owed, this wild scrubby woodland, including the Tower of Babel thereon, would cheerfully have been reconveyed to him.

 

Listening to Communist Overtures

The 1920 US Presidential Election was the first to be broadcast to a national audience – though Lee De Forest had announced the wrong winner to a small audience four years before. In Italy, Fascist leader Benito Mussolini (1883 – 1945) saluted Marconi. His national broadcasting system allowed the dictator to reach the entire Italian nation after he came to power in 1922. Meanwhile, Vladimir Ilich Lenin (1870 – 1924), who had led the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917, made overtures to Tesla, asking him to come to the Soviet Union to build power stations and an AC distribution system.

Tesla was also invited to speak at a meeting of the Friends of Soviet Russia in Springfield, Massachusetts, travelling there with Ivan Mashevkief from the Russian Workers Club of Manhattan. At the meeting, the organizers, a group of Italian radicals, addressed Tesla mysteriously as ‘Bettini'. According to an FBI agent at the event, Tesla ‘prophesied that Italy would soon adopt a communist form of government'. However, there is no evidence that he knew what he was getting himself into. Tesla took little interest in politics and he was, at best, naïve.

 

Waiting for the Midnight Hour

While commuting to Milwaukee, Tesla was paying $15 a day for room 1607 in the Hotel St Regis on Fifth Avenue. However, he neglected to pay for 7 months and was forced to move to the Hotel Marguery on Park Avenue and 48th Street. Fortunately this was still close to his night-time haunts, Grand Central Station and Bryant Park behind New York Public Library. He was spotted there one night, sporting his derby, cane and white gloves by the
New York World
:

Midnight is the hour he chooses for his visits … Tall, well-dressed, of dignified bearing, he whistles several times, a signal for the pigeons on the ledges of the building to flutter down about his feet. With a generous hand, the man scatters peanuts on the lawn from a bag. A proud man, yet humble in his charities – Nikola Tesla.

 

How This Man Worked …

A young science journalist named Kenneth Swezey, once praised by Albert Einstein for his explanation of the Archimedes principle, sought out Tesla. While Swezey was only 19 and Tesla in his late sixties, they became firm friends for the rest of his life. According to Swezey, Tesla sometimes greeted him at the door stark naked, but insisted that Tesla was ‘absolutely celibate'.

He confirmed that Tesla slept less than 2 hours a night, though he would occasionally doze to recharge his batteries. He would walk 8 to 10 miles a day and relax in a bathtub, though gone was the electric shower that bombarded him with cleansing particles. He would also clench and unclench his toes a hundred times each night to stimulate the brain cells. Swezey recalled:

And how this man worked! I will tell you about a little episode … I was sleeping in my room like one dead. It was three after midnight. Suddenly the telephone ring awakened me. Through my sleep I heard his voice, ‘Swezey, how are you, what are you doing?' This was one of many conversations in which I did not succeed in participating. He spoke animatedly, with pauses [as he had worked] out a problem, comparing one theory to another, commenting: and when he felt he arrived at the solution, he suddenly closed the telephone.

In 1926, Tesla moved to the Hotel Pennsylvania. There the ‘tall, thin, ascetic man' was interviewed by
Colliers
magazine and he gave another of his predictions: ‘This struggle of the human female toward sex equality will end in a new social order, with the human female as superior.' Tesla forwarded his prediction to J.P. Morgan's daughter Anne, who he had remained in touch with and was now an advocate for the women's movement.

 

Into the Realms of the Future

It was around that time, Tesla retired. Miss Dorothy F. Skerritt, Tesla's secretary until he closed his office at 70, described him at that age:

As one approached Mr Tesla you beheld a tall, gaunt man. He appeared to be an almost divine being. When about 70, he stood erect, his extremely thin body immaculately and simply attired in clothing of a subdued colouring. Neither scarf pin nor ring adorned him. His bushy black hair was parted in the middle and brushed back briskly from his high broad forehead, deeply lined by his close concentration on scientific problems that stimulated and fascinated him. From under protruding eyebrows his deep-set, steel grey, soft, yet piercing eyes, seemed to read your innermost thoughts. As he waxed enthusiastic about fields to conquer and achievements to attain his face glowed with almost ethereal radiance, and his listeners were transported from the commonplaces of today to imaginative realms of the future. His genial smile and nobility of bearing always denoted the gentlemanly characteristics that were so ingrained in his soul.

 

Too Great a Sacrifice

In an interview with the
New York World
in 1926, he said: ‘Sometimes I feel that by not marrying I made too great a sacrifice to my work, so I have decided to lavish all the affection of a man no longer young on the feathery tribe. I am satisfied if anything I do will live for posterity. But to care for those homeless, hungry or sick birds is the delights of my life. It is my only means of playing.'

One particular pigeon was special to him. When he found it, it had a broken leg and wing. ‘Using my mechanical knowledge, I invented a device by which I supported its body in comfort in order to let the bones heal.' He kept the bird in his hotel suite and figured that it cost him more than $2,000 to heal her. It took a year-and-a-half before she was well again and, Tesla said, she was ‘one of the finest and prettiest birds I have ever seen'.

 

My Life's Work was Finished …

His love of that one pigeon and her death affected him profoundly. He told John J. O'Neill:

When she was ill I knew, and understood; she came to my room and I stayed beside her for days. I nursed her back to health. That pigeon was the joy of my life. If she needed me, nothing else mattered. As long as I had her, there was a purpose in my life.

Then one night as I was lying in my bed in the dark, solving problems, as usual, she flew in through the open window and stood on my desk. I knew she wanted me; she wanted to tell me something important so I got up and went to her.

As I looked at her I knew she wanted to tell me – she was dying. And then, as I got her message, there came a light from her eyes – powerful beams of light … it was a real light, a powerful, dazzling, blinding light, a light more intense than I had ever produced by the most powerful lamps in my laboratory.

When that pigeon died, something went out of my life. Up to that time I knew with a certainty that I would complete my work, no matter how ambitious my programme, but when that something went out of my life I knew my life's work was finished.

Chapter 14 – A New Source of Energy

 

I'm happy to hear that you are celebrating your 75th birthday, and that, as a successful pioneer in the field of high-frequency currents, you have been able to witness the wonderful development of this field of technology. I congratulate you on the magnificent success of your life's work.

 

While working on his petrol-powered turbine in Philadelphia in 1924 – 25, Tesla met John B. Flowers, an inspector of an aircraft factory. With development of his bladeless turbine reaching a dead end, Tesla returned to the idea of powering planes and cars remotely from large central power stations like the one he had tried to build at Wardenclyffe. In Tesla's hotel suite, Flowers helped draft a proposal to test and implement Tesla's Wireless Power System to present it to J. H. Dillinger, head of the Radio Laboratory at the Bureau of Standards in Washington, DC.

Flowers told Dillinger that Tesla's system would power a plane at any point around the world and that Tesla had already developed an oscillator to provide the power which he was willing to give to the American government if they agreed to build the plant. A meeting in Washington was arranged and Dillinger sent the proposal to physicist Harvey L. Curtis (1875 – 1956).

The 10-page document outlined a plan to use
standing waves
to operate cars and planes. To demonstrate this, a sketch showed a balloon, standing in for the Earth, and a mechanical oscillator standing in for the electrical device:

… a mechanical oscillator arm was fastened to the tied opening of a rubber balloon 20 inches [50 cm] in diameter. The oscillator arm was operated with an electrical motor at 1,750 rpm by means of an eccentric on the motor shaft. The balloon hung free in the air. The rubber surface of the balloon represented the earth's conducting surface and the air inside its insulating interior. The waves were propagated in the rubber surface at the rate of 51 ft per second [15.5 m per second], the frequency of transmission was 29 cycles per second and the wavelength was 21 inches [53 cm].

The mechanical oscillator was used in place of Tesla's electrical oscillator as it presents an almost perfect analogy. Standing or stationary waves of the rubber surface replace the electromagnetic waves of Tesla's system. By the test of this analogue, the operation of Tesla's system can be forecast. When the oscillator arm was set in motion by operating the motor, there were three standing waves having six loops on the Earth's surface – all having the same amplitude of vibration!

When the finger was pushed against one or more loops, all the loops were reduced in amplitude in the same proportion showing the ability to obtain all the power out at one or more points! The waves extended completely around the world and returned to the sending station.

Curtis rejected the proposal as, with Tesla's standing waves, there would be a concentration of energy at the nodes. But, as Curtis pointed out:

The system proposed by Mr Flowers does not have this feature. He proposes to collect energy at any point … some means would have to be devised for concentrating this energy and making it available. No such method has been proposed, and I do not think of any that would be feasible … I do not know of any wireless apparatus of sufficient magnitude to warrant the expectation that power can be economically transmitted by radio methods.

 

Faster than the Speed of Light

Tesla denied that the electricity would be available only at the nodal points, advising that, in a hydraulic system, the pressure of the fluid is the same throughout. There was energy available at an electrical outlet even when nothing is plugged in. He explained that the oscillations would spread from his magnifying transmitter theoretically at an infinite speed, then slow down – at first very quickly, then at slower rate. After around 6,000 miles (9,500 km) they would travel at the speed of light.

From there on it increases in speed, slowly at first, and then more rapidly, reaching the antipode with approximately an infinite velocity. The laws of motion can be expressed by stating that the waves on the terrestrial surface sweep in equal intervals of time over equal areas, but it must be understood that the current penetrates deep into the Earth and the effects produced on the receivers are the same as if the whole flow was confined to the Earth's axis joining the transmitter with the antipode. The mean surface speed is thus about 471,200 km per second [292,790 miles a second] – 57 per cent greater than that of the so-called Hertz waves.

There was a problem with this. James Clerk Maxwell's equations predicted the speed of light at 186,000 miles a second (300,000 km a second). At first, it was assumed that this speed was relative to the background ether that electromagnetic radiation propagated through. But the Michelson-Morley experiment showed there was no such thing as ether. Einstein realized that this meant the speed of light was an absolute – and there was no such thing as a speed faster than light.

Tesla railed against Einstein and relativity. He would not accept the concept of curved space, as predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity, either. But Einstein, with his Nobel Prize, was the new star in the scientific firmament. Tesla, Edison, who died in 1931, Bell, who died in 1922, and the Wright brothers, who died in 1912 and 1948, were old hat.

 

Business As Usual

Despite the rejection of their plans in Washington, Flowers and Tesla went to Detroit to try and sell his ‘flying automobile' to General Motors. Tesla also tried to sell his speedometer to Ford, but its high cost made it better suited to luxury cars. In Detroit, Tesla met his nephew Nicholas Trbojevich and there was an incident that became part of family lore. The two were going for a late snack in an expensive hotel. The head waiter suggested that they wait five minutes. Then the $5 cover charge would be lifted. This was in the middle of the Great Depression when $5 would feed a family for a week. But Tesla was not prepared to wait. When Trbojevich questioned his uncle over the matter of the cover charge, Tesla said: ‘I'll never die rich unless the money comes in the door faster than I can shovel it out of the window.'

Tesla held talks with US Steel concerning installing his bladeless turbines on the exhaust from the blast furnaces, generating huge amounts of electricity. But, apparently, a test did not go ahead. Then in Buffalo, Tesla conducted some top-secret experiments. It was said that the petrol engine of a Pierce-Arrow sedan was replaced by an AC induction motor. A ‘power receiver' using 12 vacuum tubes was set in the dashboard connected to a 6 ft (2 m) antenna. There is other speculation that it was powered by a steam or petrol-driven turbine, but no physical evidence of either design has been found.

While experimenters were using Tesla Coils to try and split the atom, Tesla himself was making more outlandish predictions, saying that all the machinery on Earth could be powered by cosmic rays. Unlimited quantities of power could be transmitted through wires or wirelessly from a central station to anywhere on the globe, eliminating the need for coal, oil, gas or any other terrestrial energy source. Already the central source of energy on Earth was the Sun, he said, but the new source of power would not be turned off at night.

 

Heralding a New Industrial Revolution

With just five days to go to his 75th birthday, Tesla said that he would soon announce ‘by far the most important discovery' of his long career. ‘It will throw light on many puzzling phenomena of the cosmos,' he said, ‘and may prove also of great industrial value, particularly in creating a new and virtually unlimited market for steel.'

He said that he had been wonderfully fortunate in coming up with new ideas that he was sure would be remembered by posterity. He was confident that his rotating magnetic field, induction motor and wireless system would live on long after he was gone, but he still considered his latest discoveries the most important. They would mark a new departure in science, be of great practical values and inaugurate a new industrial revolution, he said.

He had already succeeded in proving his theories by experimentation and, if the calculations based on them turned out to be true, the world would have a new source of energy in practically unlimited amounts, available at any point on the globe. But, again, he was tantalizingly vague when it came to the details:

I can only say at this time that it will come from an entirely new and unsuspected source, and will be for all practical purposes constant, day and night, and at all times of the year. The apparatus for capturing the energy and transforming it will partake both mechanical and electrical features, and will be of ideal simplicity. At first the cost may be found too high, but this obstacle will be overcome. Moreover, the installment will be, so to speak, indestructible, and will continue to function for any length of time without additional expenditures.

The press had heard such promises from Tesla before and wanted to know when he was going to make an official announcement of his new discoveries. But the great man was unwilling to be pinned down. These ideas had not come to him overnight, but as the result of intense study and experimentation for nearly 36 years. He said he was anxious to give the facts to the world as soon as possible, but wished to present them in a finished form. That may take a few months, or a few years, he said.

All the energy that the Earth receives from all the suns and stars of the universe is only about one-quarter of one per cent of that which it receives directly from the Sun. Therefore, it would be incomparably more rational to harness the heat and light rays of the Sun than attempt to capture the insignificant energy of this radiation … We can do it now, and we are doing it to a certain extent. But the tremendous handicap is found in the periodic character of this kind of energy supply. Many attempts have been made in this direction, but invariably it was found that the power was too expensive.

 

Dismissing Atomic Energy

Having rejected Einstein's theory of relativity, Tesla also dismissed the idea of atomic energy. ‘The idea of atomic energy is illusionary,' he said, ‘but it has taken so powerful a hold on the minds that, although I have preached against it for 25 years, there still are some who believe it to be realizable.'

He claimed to have disintegrated atoms in his experiments with the high-potential vacuum tube he developed in 1896, which he considered one of his best inventions. He operated at a range of potentials from 4 million to 18 millions volts. More recently, he said, he had designed an apparatus that would work at 50 million volts, which should produce results of great scientific importance. ‘But as to atomic energy, my experimental observations have shown that the process of disintegration is not accompanied by a liberation of such energy as might be expected from present theories,' he said.

 

Cosmic Rays and Beyond

Tesla claims to have discovered cosmic rays while investigating X-rays and radioactivity in Colorado Springs in 1899, but his findings were in disagreement with theories advanced more recently:

I have satisfied myself that the rays are not generated by the formation of new matter in space, a process which would be like water running up hill. Nor do they come to any appreciable amount from the stars. According to my investigations the Sun emits a radiation of such a penetrative power that it is virtually impossible to absorb it in lead or other substances. It has, furthermore, other extraordinary properties in regard to which I shall express myself at some future date. This ray, which I call the primary solar ray, gives rise to a secondary radiation by impact against the cosmic dust scattered through space. It is the secondary radiation which now is commonly called the cosmic rays, and comes, of course, equally from all directions in space.

He also dismissed the idea that radioactivity resulted from activity within radioactive substances. It was caused by rays emitted from the Sun. If radium could be screened effectively from this ray, it would cease to be radioactive, he said. He had also been designing rocket-ships that he said could attain speeds of nearly a mile a second – 3,600 miles an hour (5,793 km per hour) – through the rarefied medium above the stratosphere. Again, he hoped his rocket-ships would bring world peace:

I anticipate that such machines will be of tremendous importance in international conflicts in the future. I foresee that in times not too distant wars between various countries will be carried on without a single combatant passing the border. At this very time it is possible to construct such infernal machines which will carry any desired quantity of poisoned gases and explosives, launch them against a target thousands of miles away and destroy a whole city. If wars are not done away with, we are bound to come eventually to this kind of warfare, because it is the most economical means of inflicting injury and striking terror in the hearts of enemies that ever has been imagined. Densely populated countries, like England and Japan, will be at a great disadvantage as compared with those embracing vast territories, such as the United States and Russia.

Although some of Tesla's ideas in later life can be dismissed as the ravings of a mad scientist, sometimes he shows remarkable prescience.

 

Sending Signals to the Stars

When
Time
magazine put the ageing and eccentric inventor on their cover of the 20 July 1931 issue to celebrate his 75th birthday, Tesla did not disappoint. He told them of his new invention, the Tesla-scope, that he could use to signal to the stars, saying:

I think that nothing can be more important than interplanetary communication. It will certainly come some day, and the certitude that there are other human beings in the universe, working, suffering, struggling like ourselves, will produce a magic effect on mankind, and will form the foundation of a universal brotherhood that will last as long as humanity itself.