On the autumn evening when he arrived at the Johnson home to hear the strains of Mozart drifting from the door, he recognized the pianist as Marguerite Merington, one of his perennial favorites as a dinner partner. The admiration and affection he felt for her appeared to be as much as he was ever to feel for any woman.
He was taken by Johnson to meet a tall, serious girl wearing an expensive French gown, modishly cinched in at the waist, with lace and a flower at the neckline. As she turned, her tawny eyes startled him. He was sure he had not met her, yet he had seen those eyes. An actress, perhaps?
“Miss Anne Morgan,” said Johnson. “Mr. Tesla.” Then he left them.
She nodded and returned her attention to the music. Tesla was amused. Of course. Her eyes had the same bold intelligence as her father’s. He could almost visualize her lighting up a black cigar. Johnson had said the girl was in love with him. If so, she seemed determined not to betray it. Her poise, cultivated at so-called dames’ schools, impressed him. So rich and yet so lovely.
What a pity, though, that the girl wore pearl earrings; they almost set his teeth on edge. He would have enjoyed talking with her, but the pearls made it impossible. Perhaps Robert would be kind enough to drop her a hint for the future. According to Elisabeth Marbury, Anne had been so overprotected as to be almost pathetically childlike. But if Tesla was any judge, the self-possessed creature before him would very soon be shedding her cocoon. Her metamorphosis would be interesting to watch.
The Johnsons, as he realized, were bound to tease him if he did not promptly display an interest in marrying the daughter of J. Pierpont Morgan. For an ambitious inventor in need of capital, he recognized the pitfalls in the situation. He could not decently encourage the young woman in her infatuation, but he must be extremely diplomatic to avoid hurting her feelings.
When the music ended, others claimed his attention. At parties these days he was always quickly surrounded. People longed to hang upon the words of the gifted spellbinder. The wealthy tended not to be scientifically critical, and Tesla relieved their boredom. He in turn enjoyed letting his fancies fly.
On the evening in question he made an excuse and sought out Marguerite whose candor he appreciated. Complimenting her on her performance, he asked somewhat tactlessly, “Tell me, Miss. Why do you not wear diamonds and jewelry like the others?”
“It is not a matter of choice with me,” she said. “But if I had enough money to load myself with diamonds, I could think of better ways of spending it.”
“What would you do with money if you had it?” he asked with interest.
“I would prefer to purchase a home in the country, except that I would not enjoy commuting from the suburbs.”13
Tesla beamed. Fancy a charming and talented woman who rejected jewels. He himself never wore even a tiepin or a watch chain.
“Ah, Miss Merington, when I start getting my millions,” he said, “I will solve that problem. I will buy a square block here in New York and build a villa for you in the center and plant trees all around it. Then you will have your country home and will not have to leave the city.”14
She laughed, briefly wondering, perhaps, if this were some kind of proposition. But it is unlikely she could have concluded that Tesla’s words were anything but banter.
According to one of the inventor’s close friends, Marguerite later claimed to be the only woman who ever touched Tesla. The friend discounted it. No record of intimacy linking her or any other woman to the inventor has ever been discovered.
The same confidante said that Anne Morgan “threw herself” at Tesla. Again there is nothing to support the belief that they were more than friends. They were to enjoy parallel careers, Anne becoming a most vital and important woman in her own right. Although her name would be linked with a succession of famous men, she would never marry.
Periodically to repay his social debts Tesla gave elaborate banquets at the Waldorf for members of the “400” and lesser mortals. Invitations were jealously sought for these splendid affairs. He personally selected the choicest foods and liquors, supervised their preparation, hovered over the sauces, and anguished over the vintage wines. No cost was spared, and no plebeians were invited.
After such affairs the guests were titillated by visits to his laboratory for private “showings,” and many a prophetic announcement appeared in the next day’s papers about his exciting inventions. He could not have chosen a more telling way to torment those of his scientific contemporaries who were excluded from such performances.
But still his relative indifference to women continued to be a subject of international gossip. One night as he sat in the Café de la Paix in Paris with a French scientist, a theater party passed that included the divine Sarah Bernhardt. The actress coyly dropped her handkerchief. He sprang to his feet and returned it to her without so much as raising his eyes and at once, to the dismay of the Frenchman, resumed his discussion of electricity.
Even the Electrical Review of London (August 14, 1896) devoted a lengthy editorial to chiding him: “Of course Mr. Tesla may be quite invulnerable to Cupid’s shafts, but somehow or other we doubt it. We are great admirers of him and his work, and we give him credit for good hard sense…. We have faith enough in women to believe that his fate will come, and that some one will be found who is not only a match for his intensity in all respects, but who will tax his inventive genius to the utmost: for example, in trying to explain where he was at 2 o’clock some night…. Whatever may be the cause of the abnormal condition in which this distinguished scientist finds himself, we hope that it will soon be removed, for we are certain that science in general, and Mr. Tesla in particular, will be all the richer when he gets married.”
The absurd quidnunc who wrote this editorial would never, of course, live to see his prophecy fulfilled. But neither would he be disappointed in Tesla’s future scientific and technical achievements, for the inventor was shortly to embark on one of the most extraordinary phases of his altogether extraordinary career.
The event that signaled this new turn in Tesla’s fortunes was another long-distance telephone call from George Westinghouse. It was wonderful, astonishing news. The inventor quickly packed his bags and boarded a train for Niagara Falls.
9. HIGH ROAD, LOW ROAD
It seemed almost too much success in such a short period. The Niagara Falls Commission, which for years had been swayed by the direful arguments of Edison and Lord Kelvin about the dangers of alternating current, announced in October 1893—just as Westinghouse had predicted—that it was awarding to his firm the contract to build the first two generators at Niagara.
The War of the Currents that had divided American industry so long and rancorously was to be settled with a victory for Tesla’s system of AC and Westinghouse’s perseverance.1 No doubt this had resulted in large part from the unassailable visual testimony of their exhibitions at the Chicago World’s Fair.
The war was to end with a compromise: General Electric was given the contract for building transmission and distribution lines from Niagara Falls to Buffalo. Both firms had submitted a proposal to install a Tesla polyphase generating system, for GE had obtained a license to use the Tesla patents and proposed to install a three-phase system. The Westinghouse proposal was for two-phase.
In 1895 the powerhouse was completed by Westinghouse and ready to deliver 15,000 horsepower of electricity, a truly phenomenal achievement for the times. The following year GE completed the transmission and distribution lines, enabling power to surge across twenty-six miles to run the lights and streetcars of Buffalo.
The harnessing of Niagara Falls proceeded on schedule. People spoke reverently of it as one of the official wonders of the world. Westinghouse built seven more generating units, which raised the production of electricity to 50,000 horsepower. General Electric constructed a second powerhouse that also used alternating current and built eleven more generators.
Another historic first soon followed. AC was delivered to one of its earliest an
d most significant customers, the Pittsburgh Reduction Company, which later became the Aluminum Company of America, or Alcoa.2 The new metallurgical industry had been waiting for the high voltages that AC alone could supply. As Tesla had predicted, aluminum manufacture would soon permit the development of an aircraft industry.
An astounding aspect of the War of the Currents is that, like an ancient religious feud, it is still being waged. Anyone reading the national advertising campaign launched by General Electric in the late 1970s would have erroneously concluded that GE alone harnessed Niagara Falls and that Tesla was merely an also-ran among inventors.
Gardner H. Dales of the Niagara Mohawk Power Corporation, addressing the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE) on April 5, 1956, recollected more accurately:
“If there ever was a man who created so much and whose praises were sung so little—it was Nikola Tesla. It was his invention, the polyphase system, and its first use by the Niagara Falls Power Company that laid the foundation for the power system used in this country and throughout the entire world today….”
Actually, however, Tesla’s praises were well sung at this period and only later would it become convenient for the beneficiaries of his genius to grow forgetful. In the 1890s his name and achievements were almost constantly in headlines.
Newspapers and engineering journals alike saluted him. The New York Times declared that he owned the “undisputed honor” of making the Niagara enterprise possible, a sentiment echoed by George Forbes in Electricity (October 2, 1895). The achievement was covered widely in the world press. The Prince of Montenegro conferred upon him the Order of the Eagle. The coveted Elliott-Cresson Medal was awarded to him by the AIEE for his researches in high-frequency phenomena. And Lord Kelvin, now generous in his praise, declared that the inventor had “contributed more to electrical science than any man up to his time.”
Soon alternating-current power systems were being built in New York City for the elevated and street railways, for steam-railway electrification, and were even being extended to the Edison substations.
Nevertheless the inventor and Westinghouse continued to be torn and worried by sore losers. The company defended its alternating-current patents in some twenty court actions—including the one alluded to earlier that was determined by the U.S. Supreme Court—in each of which Westinghouse won a decisive victory. It filed actions against General Electric and others, and these too were successful. But as mentioned earlier, so much litigation created public confusion and left unhappy men. Some of these who had once praised Tesla now did their best to damage him.
B. A. Behrend, later vice-president of the AIEE and an acute observer of the contemporary scene, wrote: “It is a peculiar trait of ignorant men to go always from one extreme to another, and those who were once the blind admirers of Mr. Tesla, exalting him to an extent which can be likened only to the infatuated praise bestowed on victims of popular admiration, are now eagerly engaged in his derision.”
Behrend found this deeply melancholy.
“I can never think of Nikola Tesla,” he added, “without warming up to my subject and condemning the injustice and ingratitude which he has received alike at the hands of the public and of the engineering profession.”3
Weary of the bickering and backbiting, the inventor returned to New York, more determined than ever to protect his time, aching to follow up half a dozen lines of research.
He began to achieve effects with high-voltage equipment that opened an infinity of possibilities. By learning to create artificial lightning he hoped not only to discover how to control the world’s weather but also how to transmit energy without wires. And this in turn meshed with research that he hoped would enable him to build the first worldwide broadcasting system.
Gratifying results came when he achieved tensions of about one million volts using a conical coil. Instinctively he felt that instead of going to larger and larger apparatus for high voltages, he might accomplish the same thing with the proper design of a comparatively small and compact transformer.4 This problem obsessed him, but not exclusively.
If some spectacular experiment seemed to defy the most elemental laws of electricity, Tesla cheerfully followed wherever it led. Sometimes it led in strange directions.
The radio tube, which involves the conduction of current through a vacuum, is, practically speaking, the original electronic device. Its accidental ancestor was a vacuum lamp invented by Edison in 1883. He was puzzled by what came to be known as the Edison Effect but saw no value in it; other scientists such as Sir William Preece, J. A. Fleming, Tesla, Elihu Thomson, and J. J. Thomson, however, were most interested. J. J. Thomson figured out that the observed phenomenon was caused by the emission of negative electricity, or electrons, passing from the hot element to the cold electrode. Edison, still puzzled and disappointed at not having found a good lamp, reported that the effect seemed to “impress some of the bulge-headed fraternity of the Savanic World.” He himself moved on to more pressing concerns.
Tesla had begun developing vacuum tubes in the early 1890s, fully expecting them to be suitable for detecting the transmission of radio signals. Later he engaged a full-time glass blower and invented thousands of versions which he used both in radio research and for the production of light.
It was Fleming who, after studying the work of Edison and Preece, successfully applied the Edison Effect to the detection of radio signals, achieving increased sensitivity over the crystal detectors then used. In 1907 Lee De Forest would add the grid or control element to the Fleming diode, calling it the Audion, and the science of modern electronics would be fairly launched.
Yet long before this, Tesla was describing his work with vacuum bulbs and high-frequency currents, sharing his own fascination and puzzlement with his lecture audiences. Thus one day he placed a long glass tube, partially evacuated, within a longer copper tube with a closed end. A slit was cut in the copper tube to disclose the glass within. When he connected the copper to a high-frequency terminal, he found the air in the inner tube brilliantly lighted although no current seemed to be flowing through the short-circuiting copper shell. The electricity, it seemed, preferred to flow through the glass by induction and pass through the low-pressure air rather than traversing the metal path of the outer tube.
In this the inventor saw a way of transmitting electric impulses, of any frequency in gases. “Could the frequency be brought high enough,” he speculated, “then a queer system of distribution, which would be likely to interest gas companies, might be realized; metal pipes filled with gas—the metal being the insulator and the gas the conductor—supplying phosphorescent bulbs, or perhaps devices not yet invented.”
In fact, what he was describing was the ancestor of the wave guide for microwave transmission.
Tesla was led by this line of exploration to one of his most grandiose conceptions, the “terrestrial night light”—a way of lighting the whole Earth and its surrounding atmosphere, as though it were but a single illumination. He theorized that the gases in the atmosphere at high altitudes were in the same condition as the air in his partially evacuated tubes and hence would serve as excellent conductors of high-frequency currents. The concept intrigued him for many years. He saw it as a means of making shipping lanes and airports safer at night, or as a way of illuminating whole cities without the use of street lights. One had only to transmit sufficient high-frequency currents in the right form to the upper air, at an altitude of 35,000 feet or even lower. When asked how he proposed to conduct his currents to the upper air, he merely replied that it did not present any practical difficulties. It was his habit never to disclose methods until he had tested them in practice, and this was one of his ideas that was to be put aside for lack of research capital.
Journalists continued to question him and to speculate. Some suggested that he planned to use one of his molecular bombardment tubes to project a powerful beam of ultraviolet rays into the atmosphere, ionizing the air through great distances and making it
a good conductor of electricity of all kinds at high voltages. This, they theorized, would provide a conducting path to any desired height through which he could send high-frequency currents.5 Later, when his great (and ill-fated) world-broadcasting tower was built on Long Island, the upper platform was designed to receive a bank of powerful ultraviolet lamps. Their purpose was never revealed.
At other times, Tesla talked of a plan for using both Earth and upper air as conductors of electricity and the stratum of air between as an insulator. This combination would form a kind of gigantic condenser, a means of storing and discharging electricity. If the Earth were electrically excited, the upper air would be charged by induction. The globe would be transformed into a Leyden jar, charging and discharging. A current flowing both in the ground and in the upper air would create a luminous upper stratum that would light the world. Was this how Tesla proposed to get his currents into the upper air? We do not know.
In his London lectures of 1892 he had lingered fondly over the description of a most peculiar and sensitive vacuum tube he had invented. Under the influence of a high-frequency current it would shoot off a ray that behaved with strange sensitivity to electrostatic and magnetic influences. With this tube he could make curious experiments.
When the bulb hung straight down from a wire and all objects were remote from it, Tesla could by approaching it cause the ray to fly to the opposite side of the bulb; and if he walked around the bulb the ray would always be on the opposite side of it. Sometimes the ray would begin to spin wildly around the bulb. With a small permanent magnet he could slow down or accelerate the spinning according to the position of the magnet. When most sensitive to the magnet, however, it was less sensitive to electrostatic influence. He could not make even the slightest motion such as stiffening the muscles of his hand, without causing visible reaction in the ray.
Tesla believed it was formed by an irregularity in the glass that prevented it from passing equally on all sides. Fascinated, he believed such a tool would be a valuable aid to investigating the nature of force fields.
Tesla: Man Out of Time Page 13