Tesla: The Life and Times of an Electric Messiah (3 page)

During his recuperation, he would take long walks in the forest. Along the way he conceived a way to send letters and parcels between continents via tubes under the oceans. Mail would be packed in balls that would be forced along the pipes by water at high pressure. However, he did not take into account the resistance to the flow of water and the system would not have worked.

He also thought up a scheme to speed up worldwide travel. A stationary ring would be erected high above the equator, with the world turning underneath it. People would travel up onto the ring, then wait for their destination to appear below. He conceded that it would be impossible to build such a ring, but these thought experiments prepared his mind for later work. He said:

I observed to my delight that I could visualize with the greatest facility. I needed no models, drawings or experiments. I could picture them all as real in my mind. Thus I have been led unconsciously to evolve what I consider a new method of materializing inventive concepts and ideas, which is radically opposite to the purely experimental and is in my opinion ever so much more expeditious and efficient.

As good as his word, Tesla's father secured a scholarship for him from the
Grenzlandsverwaltungsbehoerde
– the Military Frontier Administration Authority – paying 420 gulden a year for him to attend the Joanneum Polytechnic in Graz, Austria. When he has finished, he would then have to serve 8 years in the Military Authority. Tesla left for college with a bag covered with the embroidered designs his mother was famous for. He treasured that bag for the rest of his life.

Chapter 2 – Electric Brainwaves

 

It has cost me years of thought to arrive at certain results, by many believed to be unattainable, for which there are now numerous claimants, and the number of these is rapidly increasing …

Nikola Tesla

 

Arriving at the Polytechnic in 1875, Tesla did not study engineering initially. Perhaps in deference to his father, he studied physics and mathematics with the aim of becoming a professor like his Uncle Josif. The Polytechnic had recently bought a
Gramme dynamo
which physics professor Jacob Pöschl used to teach his students about electric currents. During his lectures, he connected the dynamo to a battery, so it would work as a motor.

While Professor Pöschl was making demonstrations, running the machine as a motor, the brushes gave trouble, sparking badly, and I observed that it might be possible to operate a motor without these appliances. But he declared that it could not be done and did me the honour of delivering a lecture on the subject, at the conclusion he remarked, ‘Mr Tesla may accomplish great things, but he certainly will never do this. It would be equivalent to converting a steadily pulling force, like that of gravity into a rotary effort. It is a perpetual-motion scheme, an impossible idea.' But instinct is something which transcends knowledge. We have, undoubtedly, certain finer fibres that enable us to perceive truths when logical deduction, or any other wilful effort of the brain, is futile.

Tesla would go on to make a motor that did without troublesome brushes. It was his first great invention.

 

Experimenting with Thought

While somewhat intimidated by his professor's authority, Tesla was determined to prove that he was right and ‘undertook the task with all the fire and boundless confidence of youth'. To take up the challenge of building a spark-free motor, Tesla switched to the engineering course. However, electrical engineering was in its infancy and the course in Graz concentrated on civil engineering. Consequently, Tesla returned to his thought experiments:

I started by first picturing in my mind a direct-current machine, running it and following the changing flow of the currents in the armature. Then I would imagine an alternator and investigate the progresses taking place in a similar manner. Next I would visualize systems comprising motors and generators and operate them in various ways. The images I saw were to me perfectly real and tangible.

Tesla was a diligent student – for the first year. He worked from 3 am until 11 pm, 7 days a week, taking no holidays. He passed his exams way ahead of his fellow students. But when he went home with his exemplary exam certificates his father was furious. ‘That almost killed my ambition,' he wrote.

It was only later, after his father had died, that he discovered letters from his professors telling him to take his son away from the polytechnic, otherwise he would kill himself with overwork.

 

Carousing and Gambling

In his second year at college Tesla gave himself over to carousing and, in his third year, he gave up going to lectures altogether. This led to his scholarship being cancelled. He tried to get another scholarship from the publishers of the pro-Serbian newspaper,
Queen Bee
, calling himself a ‘technician' and saying he could speak Italian, French and English, as well as Serbian, Croatian and German. It was refused and he was thrown out of school for gambling and, it was said, ‘womanizing'. He disappeared from Graz without a word and friends feared that he had drowned in the river.

In 1878, he re-appeared in Maribor, which was then in the Austrian province of Styria, now in Slovenia. He found work there as a draftsman in a tool and die shop, though he seems to have spent much of his time playing cards for money. His father, who did not approve of gambling, found out where he was and came to beg him to return to school, this time in Prague.

A few weeks after his father's visit, Tesla was arrested as a vagrant and deported back to Gospic. At his father's church, he met and fell in love with a girl called Anna. Strolling by the river or on long walks back to his hometown of Smiljan, they discussed the future. She wanted a family; he wanted to be an electrical engineer. Then his father fell seriously ill. He died soon after, aged 60, and was given a funeral fitting for a saint.

Tesla continued gambling. One day his mother came to him and gave him a roll of notes, saying: ‘The sooner you lose all we possess the better it will be. I know that you will get over it.'

He said: ‘I conquered my passion then and there and only regretted that it had not been a hundred times as strong. I not only vanquished but tore it from my heart so as not to leave even a trace of desire. Ever since that time I have been as indifferent to any form of gambling as to picking teeth.' He reported giving up excessive smoking and coffee drinking with similar ease. And he seems to have given up his passion for Anna too.

 

The Coming of the Telephone

Tesla then honoured his dead father's wishes. Supported by two maternal uncles, he went to Prague University and signed up for courses in mathematics, experimental physics and philosophy. This introduced him to the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711 – 76) and the idea that human beings were born a blank slate that was shaped through life by sensory perceptions – ideas that would come into play when he later worked on robotics.

The intellectual ferment of Prague stimulated Tesla and, again, he put his mind to building a new type of electric motor, removing the commutator to eliminate the sparking. Eventually, the money from his uncles dried up. Tesla needed a job and he saw in the newspapers that one of
Thomas Edison
's agents, Tivadar Puskás, was setting up a telephone exchange in Budapest, having already built one in Paris. Puskás' idea was to build telephone exchanges in major European cities. Until then
Alexander Graham Bell
had only thought of installing his invention on private lines linking two locations.

However, in Budapest, no work was forthcoming, so Tesla took a government job as a draftsman in the Central Telegraph Office. This bored him and he quit to devote himself full time to inventing. Coming up with no practical idea, he had a nervous breakdown.

 

A Flash of Inspiration

Tesla was only rescued from a deep depression by his new friend Anthony Szigeti. One afternoon they were walking in the City Park reciting poetry. ‘At that age,' he said, ‘I knew books by heart, word for word.' As the sun was setting, he began a passage in German from Goethe's
Faust
. The quote concludes:

Alas the wings that lift the mind no aid

Tesla said:

As I uttered these inspiring words the idea came like a flash of lightning and in an instant the truth was revealed. I drew with a stick on the sand the diagram shown six years later in my address before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, and my companion understood them perfectly. The images I saw were wonderfully sharp and clear and had the solidity of metal and stone, so much so that I told him, ‘See my motor here; watch me reverse it.' I cannot begin to describe my emotions.

The idea Tesla had come up with was using a rotating electric field within the motor.

Although Tesla described his ‘Eureka!' moment in his autobiography, he did not patent the alternating current (AC) motor until 1903. He did further experiments on it in 1883 and 1887, and the idea was still not fully worked out when he addressed the AIEE in 1888.

However, Tesla had solved the problem that Professor Pöschl had said was impossible. He was now convinced he was an inventor, and he had made the intellectual breakthrough that would make him rich and famous.

Tesla may have also found inspiration at the works of Ganz and Company in Budapest where AC electrical distribution was being developed. Electricity can be transmitted down wires with less loss at higher voltages. With AC electricity you can step up the voltage – and step it down again – using a transformer. In the Ganz works, engineers found that a metal ball placed on top of a transformer would revolve. Later, Tesla would use this in his Egg of Columbus demonstrations.

 

Passport to Paris

Eventually, Tesla was taken on by Tivadar Puskás' brother Ferenc to work on the new telephone exchange. Tivadar was then in Paris, helping introduce Edison's incandescent lighting system. When the telephone exchange in Budapest was finished, Ferenc sold it to a local businessman and Tivadar offered Tesla and Szigeti jobs in the Edison organization in Paris. Tesla was immediately struck by the ‘City of Light'.

I never can forget the deep impression that magic city produced on my mind. For several days after my arrival I roamed through the streets in utter bewilderment at the new spectacle. The attractions were many and irresistible, but, alas, the income was spent as soon as received. When Mr Puskás asked me how I was getting along … I [replied] ‘the last 29 days of the month are the toughest'

Employed at the Edison works in the suburb of Ivry, Tesla learned a great deal about the practical business of building generators and motors. At the time, little of the basic science had been done and progress was made by trial and error. However, Tesla had the advantage that, unlike the other engineers, he had studied physics and mathematics, and could make calculations.

His schedule, as usual, was unrelenting. He would get up in the morning at 5 am and swim 27 laps of a bathhouse on the Seine. In the evenings he would play billiards with his colleagues. Even then, he would explain his idea for an AC motor, again in the dirt with a stick.

In his spare time, he worked on alternative designs for his flying machine and outlined the specifications for his AC motor in a notebook. It would need three different alternating currents delivered to the motor down six wires at 120° out of phase. This would produce a rotating magnetic field. But he could not get any of Edison's men interested. The business making money at the time was delivering electric light rather than powering motors. The other problem was that, using six wires, rather than the three used in Edison's system, would use much more copper which was a major factor in the cost of new equipment at the time.

Only one Edison man, David Cunningham, saw the potential in Tesla's motor and suggested that they set up a stock company. But Tesla was unfamiliar with the American way of doing business and nothing came of it.

He was still suffering from seeing flashing lights. One night in Paris, he said: ‘I felt the positive sensation that my brain had caught fire. I was alight, as though a small sun was located in it and I passed the whole night applying cold compressions to my tortured head.'

However, though painful, these did not worry him. Throughout his life, he said, ‘these luminous phenomena still manifest themselves from time to time, as when a new idea opening up possibilities strikes me …'

 

Secrets in Strasbourg

Tesla was sent as a trouble-shooter to lighting stations in France and Germany. He oversaw the illumination of an opera house in Paris, a theatre in Bavaria and cafés in Berlin. After helping develop an automatic regulator for Edison dynamos, he was sent to fix the illuminations at the central railway station in Strasbourg, which, in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870
–
71, had been taken over by Germany.

There had been a problem there when the wiring had shorted, blowing out a section of the wall during a visit of Kaiser Wilhelm I and a German-speaking engineer was needed to sort it out. In the station's powerhouse, there was a Siemens AC generator. In their spare time, Tesla and Szigeti secretly experimented with the prototype of one of Tesla's AC motors.

‘It was the simplest motor I could conceive of,' said Tesla. ‘It had only one circuit, and no windings on the armature or the fields. It was of marvellous simplicity.'

The problem was it did not work. The initial trouble was that it used a brass ring that would not magnetize. Steel had to be added in various positions. Then, said Tesla, ‘I finally had the satisfaction of seeing rotation effected by
alternating current
of different phase, and without sliding contacts or commutator, as I had conceived a year before. It was an exquisite pleasure, but not to compare with the delirium of joy following the first revelation.' He had finally proved Professor Pöschl wrong.

 

Passage to New York

Tesla tried unsuccessfully to raise money to back his invention in Strasbourg. He returned to Paris expecting a bonus for his work in Strasbourg which did not materialize. He tried to find financial backing there too, again unsuccessfully. However, he did catch the eye of Charles Batchelor who had been head of the Edison organization in Paris. He was returning to New York to head the Edison Machine Works there and asked Tesla to come with him. To smooth Tesla's passage into the Edison organization Batchelor got a letter of introduction from Tivadar Puskás addressed to Edison, saying: ‘I know two great men and you are one of them; the other is this young man.'

Just before leaving for America, Tesla spent time with scientists studying microscopic organisms in drinking water. Having suffered cholera before, he now shunned unpurified water, avoided poor quality restaurants, and scoured the crockery and cutlery before eating. Later he wrote: ‘If you would watch only for a few minutes the horrible creatures, hairy and ugly beyond anything you can conceive, tearing each other up with the juices diffusing throughout the water – you would never again drink a drop of unboiled or unsterilized water.'

His uncles again paid for the trip. The journey to New York was not a happy one. His money and most of his belongings were stolen, and there was some sort of mutiny on the ship and Tesla nearly got pushed overboard. On 6 June 1884, Tesla sailed into New York on the
City of Richmond
just as the first stones of the Statue of Liberty's pedestal were being hauled into place. He was 28 years old.