Tesla: The Life and Times of an Electric Messiah (9 page)

Long ago, I conceived the idea of constructing an automaton which would mechanically represent me, and which would respond, as I do myself, but, of course, in a much more primitive manner, to external influences. Such an automaton evidently has to have motive power, organs for locomotion, directive organs, and one or more sensitive organs so adapted as to be excited by external stimuli … Whether the automaton be of flesh and bone, or of wood and steel, it matters little, provided it can perform all the duties required of it like an intelligent being.

However, people found it hard to take his ideas seriously. Tesla called his remotely controlled boat ‘The First Telautomaton', but the examiner-in-chief of patents found the concept so unbelievable that he had to come and see it for himself. And when he thought of offering it to the government, the official in Washington he spoke to burst out laughing.

During the Spanish-American war, the Secretary of the Navy also turned down Tesla's offer of wireless transmitters to help coordinate ship and troop movements for fear of the sparks that they might give off. Tesla assured him that he had overcome this problem, but the persistent image of Tesla with lighting bolts pouring from his fingers was too vivid.

 

Ignited by Cosmic Forces

Tesla also believed that we are shaped by cosmic forces ‘not in the vague and delusive sense of astrology, but in the rigid and positive meaning of physical science'. After all, science ‘admits that the suns, planets, and moons of a constellation are one body, and there can be no doubt that it will be experimentally confirmed in times to come, when our means and methods for investigating psychical and other states and phenomena shall have been brought to great perfection'.

The spark of life was present in every inanimate object too. ‘Even matter called inorganic, believed to be dead, responds to irritants and gives unmistakable evidence of a living principle within,' he said. ‘Thus, everything that exists, organic or inorganic, animated or inert, is susceptible to stimulus from the outside … What is it that causes inorganic matter to run into organic forms? … It is the Sun's heat and light. Wherever they are there is life.'

 

Not Mad At All

Some people still had faith. Tesla boasted that he had produced a lamp that was far superior to the incandescent bulb, using one-third of the energy.

As my lamps will last forever, the cost of maintenance will be minute. The cost of copper, which in the old system is a most important item, is in mine reduced to a mere trifle, for I can run on a wire sufficient for one incandescent lamp more than a thousand of my own lamps, giving fully five thousand times as much light.

On the strength of this, Tesla's friend John Jacob Astor invested $100,000 in the Tesla Electric Company and Tesla moved into the Waldorf-Astoria.

Chapter 8 – In Colorado Springs

 

Nikola Tesla, the Serbian scientist, whose electrical discoveries are not of one nation, but the pride of the world, has taken up his abode in Colorado Springs … On East Pike's Peak avenue, with limitless plains stretching to the eastward, and a panorama of mighty mountains sweeping away north and south, to the west – Tesla has caused to be constructed a [wireless] station for scientific research
.

Desire Stanton, Colorado Springs, 1899

 

With Tesla's coils now generating up to 4 million volts with sparks jumping from the walls to the ceilings, Tesla's Houston Street laboratory was becoming a fire hazard. Nor was it secure against the snooping of Edison's spies. And Tesla had experiments that he wanted to conduct, he said, in secret.

He had been out to Pike's Peak outside Colorado Springs in 1896 at the invitation of Westinghouse patent attorney Leonard E. Curtis. For his new experiments, he needed huge amounts of power, but he would be working mostly late at night when the load would be least and Curtis arranged for him to get free power from the local utility, the El Paso Power Company.

After stopping to show off his Telautomaton in Chicago, he arrived in Colorado Springs on 18 May 1899 and immediately breached his own secrecy. When a reporter asked him what his plans were, he said: ‘I propose to send a message from Pike's Peak to Paris, France. I see no reason why I should keep the thing a secret any longer.' He was welcomed with a banquet. Mining camps in the area had adopted his AC system, so he was already a celebrity out West.

With a local carpenter named Joseph Dozier, he built an experimental station on an empty field known as Knob Hill, which had a view over Pike's Peak to the west and rolling plains to the east. It was essentially a wooden barn measuring 60 ft by 70 ft (18 m by 21 m). It consisted of one large room with a roof that opened, two small offices at the front and a balcony.

Again intent on keeping the exact nature of his experiments secret, Tesla had the only window that Dozier had provided, boarded up. A fence ringed the station with numerous signs on it saying:
KEEP OUT, GREAT DANGER
. Above the door was a phrase from Dante's
Inferno
said to be the inscription above the entrance to Hell:
Abandon hope, all ye who enter here
.

 

The Magnifying Transmitter

Colorado Springs was 6,000 ft (1,800 m) above sea level and Tesla planned to tap into the rarefied air 5,000 ft (1,500 m) above the Earth. He soon discovered that the 10 ft (3 m) helium balloons he had bought from Germany could not lift the hundreds of feet of wire, so he devised a telescopic mast that raised a copper ball to a height of 142 ft (43 m). To steady the mast, Tesla built a 25 ft (8 m) tower on the roof of his laboratory.

Under it, he built a ‘magnifying transmitter', which was essentially a huge Tesla Coil. On top of a 6 ft (1.8 m) wall, he laid two turns of thick cable. This was fed 500 volts from the end of a streetcar line that stopped just short of Knob Hill. Current was passed though a 50-kilowatt Westinghouse transformer, stepping the voltage up to 20,000 or 40,000 volts.

In the centre of the room, was a secondary coil comprising hundreds of turns of finer wire. One end was connected to a round terminal inside the laboratory or the copper ball on top of the mast. The other end was earthed. The apparatus was completed by a bank of capacitors that could be discharged by a motorized brake-wheel, while other large coils moved in and out of the magnetic field.

Tesla began experimenting with wireless telephones, reporting to Astor: ‘There is nothing novel about telephoning without wires to a distance of 5 or 6 miles [8 or 9 km], since this has been done often before … In this connection, I have obtained two patents.'

 

Taking the Pulse of the Planet

Tesla also experimented sending electrical signals through the earth. Then on 4 July 1899 a huge electrical storm arrived. He recorded ‘no less than 10,000 to 12,000 discharges being witnessed inside of 2 hours. The flashing was almost continuous and, even later in the night, when the storm had abated, some 15 to 20 discharges per minute were witnessed. Some of the discharges were of a wonderful brilliancy and showed often ten or twice as many branches.'

He could track these discharges with his sensitive detecting equipment and he noted that they registered, periodically, even when the storm had moved out of sight. They seemed to start and stop every half an hour. Tesla concluded that the lightning strikes had created electromagnetic waves in the earth's crust which, reflected back on themselves, set up stationary waves. These moved past the receiver as the storm receded.

While Marconi could send radio waves across the English Channel, Tesla believed that by harnessing these waves ‘not only would it be practicable to send telegraphic messages to any distance without wires, but also to impress upon the entire globe the faint modulations of the human voice, far more still, to transmit power, in unlimited amounts, to any terrestrial distance without loss'.

‘With these stupendous possibilities in sight,' wrote Tesla, ‘I attacked vigorously the development of my magnifying transmitter, now, however, not so much with the original intention of producing one of great power, as with the object of learning how to construct the best one.'

 

Mars on the Horizon

Improving his instruments, Tesla found he could detect electrical disturbances 1,100 miles (1,770 km) away. The detector was a ‘coherer' – a glass tube filled with iron fillings – connected via a capacitor to the ground. This was placed within the secondary coil of the magnifying transmitter. When a signal was applied to the electrode, the iron fillings would align, allowing current in a secondary circuit to pass though it.

Tesla connected a telephone receiver across the coherer which would beep each time a signal was detected. Alone in the laboratory one night, he was surprised to hear regular beeps – first one, then two, then three.

‘My first observations positively terrified me,' said Tesla, ‘as there was present in them something mysterious, not to say supernatural … I felt as though I were present at the birth of a new knowledge or the revelation of a greater truth.'

He quickly discounted that a signal with ‘such a clear suggestion of number and order' could have come from disturbances in the Sun, the aurora borealis or currents in the Earth. They could not be entirely accidental and the thought flashed through his mind that they might be under intelligent control. He could not decipher them, but over the next year ‘the feeling was constantly growing on me that I have been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another'.

At Christmas 1900, the local Red Cross Society asked him what the greatest achievement of the next hundred years would be. In his answer, he said: ‘Brethren! We have a message from another world, unknown and remote. It reads: one… two… three…'

In interviews, Tesla maintained only that the signals were of an extraterrestrial origin, but journalists quickly concluded they were from Mars. Thanks to Percival Lowell, everyone thought that Mars was inhabited. In his book
Mars
(1895), Lowell concluded that there had been a drought on Mars and the Martians had built canals to carry water from the polar ice caps.

Biographer Marc Seifer concluded that Tesla had picked up signals from the tests Marconi was doing with the British and French fleets. But, at that time, the transmitters Marconi was using would not have had the power to transmit a signal half way round the world. Moreover, Marconi was using the high frequencies needed to carry radio waves through the air, while Tesla's equipment was tuned to the very low frequencies that he believed were transmitted better through the Earth's crust.

Another theory was advanced by Kenneth and James Corum who pointed out that Io, a moon of Jupiter, emits a signal in the 10 kHz range used by Tesla. In 1996, they built a Tesla receiver and recorded a series of bleeps like those Tesla described in 1899. Studying astronomical charts they also discovered that both Jupiter and Mars would have been in the night sky over Colorado in the summer of 1899. What's more, on several nights in July, the signal from Io would have broken off just as Mars was setting. If Tesla had walked out of his lab when the beeping stopped, he would have seen Mars disappearing over the horizon.

The press began to speculate how Tesla would reply to the Martians, while others dismissed Tesla as a man who would do anything to attract self-publicity.

 

Wonderful White Lightning

Tesla continued experimenting with his magnifying transmitter, boosting the voltage until it produced streams of artificial lightning 16 ft (5 m) long which set fire to the building more than once. Tesla was continually finding himself close to danger.

For handling the heavy currents, I had a special switch. It was hard to pull, and I had a spring arranged so that I could just touch the handle and it would snap in. I sent one of my assistants down town and was experimenting alone. I threw up the switch and went behind the coil to examine something. While I was there the switch snapped in, when suddenly the whole room was filled with streamers, and I had no way of getting out. I tried to break through the window but in vain as I had no tools, and there was nothing else to do than to throw myself on my stomach and pass under. The primary carried 500,000 volts, and I had to crawl through the narrow place … with the streamers going. The nitrous acid was so strong I could hardly breathe. These streamers rapidly oxidize nitrogen because of their enormous surface, which makes up for what they lack in intensity. When I came to the narrow space they closed on my back. I got away and barely managed to open the switch when the building began to burn. I grabbed a fire extinguisher and succeeded in smothering the fire.

Frightening though this experience was, Tesla was thrilled. ‘I have had wonderful experiences here,' he wrote, ‘among other things, I tamed a wild cat and am nothing but a mass of bleeding scratches. But in the scratches, there lies a mind.'

Although the famous pictures of Tesla show him surrounded by lightning, they were not discharged during the normal running of the machine. They would have been a waste of energy. When the magnifying transmitter was run at night, a blue beam would be seen rising straight up over the station into the night sky, caused by a corona of fine streamers surrounding the mast and sphere.

‘At night,' Tesla said, ‘this antenna, when I turned on to the full current, was marvellous sight.'

 

Missing the Boat with the Navy

While in Colorado, Tesla was contacted by the US Lighthouse Board who wanted to install a wireless on board the Nantucket Lightship so that it could give advanced warning of incoming ships to New York and other east-coast ports. Tesla initially agreed to supply some experimental equipment to test on the lightship. But his relations with the Lighthouse Board quickly soured when he discovered that his equipment was going to be tested against Marconi's. The Lighthouse Board then said that they would prefer ‘home to foreign talent'. Tesla was furious, insisting that he was the pioneer who had laid down the principles of wireless telegraphy and was not prepared to compete with the upstart Marconi.

But Marconi was arriving in New York for the America's Cup in September 1899 and something must be done quickly. Tesla was adamant. He had important work to do in Colorado and would not break off unless the board put in an order for at least 12 wireless sets. They refused. So Tesla missed an opportunity to demonstrate the effectiveness of his equipment and, when the US Navy bought its first wireless equipment, it was ordered from French and German companies.

 

Turning Up the Juice

As Tesla continued to increase the power of his magnifying transmitter, he became a danger to all around him. In the article ‘Can Radio Ignite Balloons?' he said:

Referring to electrical or radio wave action at a distance, I know from experience that if proper precautions are not taken, fires of all kinds and explosions can be produced by wireless transmitters. In my experiments in Colorado, when the plant was powerfully excited, the lightning arresters for 12 miles around were bridged with continuous arcs, much stronger and more persistent than those which ordinarily took place during an electric storm. I have excited loops (coil aerials) and lighted incandescent lamps at a considerable distance from the laboratory without even using more than 5 or 10 per cent of the capacity of the transmitter. When the oscillator was excited to about 4 million volts and an incandescent lamp was held in the hand about 50 or 60 feet from the laboratory, the filament was often broken by the vibration set up, giving some idea of the magnitude of the electromotive forces generated in the space. The accompanying illustration shows one of my experiments in which I lighted several lamps at a distance of 100 feet [30 m] from the laboratory, purely by wireless energy. Such induced currents might easily fire a gas balloon under the proper conditions.

Arriving for work one day in mid-autumn, his assistant, Kolman Czito, found Tesla the inventor watering the ground around the metal plate he had buried near the lab as an earth. ‘If I could only insulate these wires with liquid oxygen,' he said, ‘I could reduce losses another magnitude.'

He gave Czito a pair of rubber soled shoes and put on a pair himself. ‘All the way today, sir?' asked Czito. ‘To the limit, my friend,' said Tesla. ‘Now remember, keep one hand behind your back at all times.' This was to prevent a circuit being created between his two arms that would send a lethal current through the heart.

‘When I give you the signal I want you to close the switch and leave it closed until I give you the signal to open it,' said Tesla. Usually, he told Czito to close the switch for a second, no longer. Then Tesla tottered out of the lab on his high shoes, past the testing equipment and cold lamps planted in the ground at various places, and positioned himself on a knoll about a mile away where he could see the top of the mast. Even though insulated, sparks jumped from the ground to his feet as he crunched along the path.