“If there is any motion which is measurable going on in space,” he said, “such a brush ought to reveal it. It is, so to speak, a beam of light, frictionless, devoid of inertia.
“I think that it may find practical applications in telegraphy. With such a brush it would be possible to send dispatches across the Atlantic, for instance, with any speed, since its sensitiveness may be so great that the slightest changes will affect it. If it were possible to make the stream more intense and very narrow, its deflections could be easily photographed.”
He had closed his lecture with the comment: “The wonder is that, with the present state of knowledge and the experiences gained, no attempt is being made to disturb the electrostatic or magnetic condition of the Earth, and transmit, if nothing else, intelligence….”6
The little vacuum tube, however, was not to figure usefully in his plans as a detector of electrical disturbances or radio signals from a distance. It remained a curiosity item. When used by Tesla as a detector it was so difficult to adjust that it was unsuitable except for laboratory research.
But today, now that science has begun to take an interest in little-understood biological phenomena, Tesla’s strange vacuum tube may hold new interest. It could, for example, have application in the control of autonomic functions of the body through biofeedback techniques. Or perhaps it might help us to understand the mysterious Kirlian effect. Kirlian photography, used in conjunction with high-frequency voltages of a Tesla coil, has created scientific interest in the human aura by disclosing to ordinary vision what may always have been apparent to psychics. Tesla’s 1890s research showed that high-frequency currents move on or near the surface of conducting materials, similarly to the phenomenon of superconductivity. It has been speculated that coronas appearing in Kirlian photographs may be the modulation of some kind of “carrier field” surrounding life forms. (Acupuncture points also may be related to such force fields.) It is thus possible to entertain the suggestion of a contemporary electrical engineer that Tesla’s hypersensitive vacuum tube might make an excellent detector not only of Kirlian auras but of other so-called paranormal phenomena, including the entities commonly called ghosts.
Since his return to New York, Tesla had lived almost a hermit’s existence. Only on the most tempting social occasions were the inventor’s friends any longer able to lure him from his laboratory. The late night fun and games had stopped. Robert and Katharine Johnson worried about him, warning him that all work and no play could bring on another breakdown.
Katharine found the winter of 1893 passing slowly without his frequent company. In icy January she sent flowers to him in appreciation of some gesture. He found time to send her an article by Professor Crookes and a Crookes radiometer, a little heat-powered windmill that spun in an evacuated bulb, and which he considered (or said he did) “the most beautiful invention made.” These small windmills, embodying in their simplicity Tesla’s ideal of an elegant solution, may still be seen, in the windows of novelty shops, their blades silently “fanned” by the sun.
Although science was not her favorite subject, Katharine felt flattered and pleased. On a stormy afternoon in February she and Robert sat before an open fire, she feeling bored and restless. On the spur of the moment she wrote a note to Tesla and sent it off by messenger: “What are you doing these stormy days? We . . . are wondering if anybody is coming in this evening to cheer us up, say about 9, or at 7 for dinner. We are very dull and very very comfortable before an open fire, but two is too small a number. For congeniality there must be three, especially when it snows ‘in my country.’ Is that wonderful machine in order again and are you ready for the photographers and the thunderbolts and Juno and all the lesser gods and goddesses tomorrow? Come and tell us. We shall look for you, at 7 or 9.”7 But the machine was not in order, and the Johnsons were disappointed, Robert as much as Katharine.
Later in the spring of 1894, however, his experiments were far enough along for Tesla to invite Johnson, Joseph Jefferson, Marion Crawford, and Twain to the laboratory to “take high-voltage sparks through their bodies” and to pose for the first photographs ever taken by gaseous tube lights.
Despite his absorption in science, it was characteristic of Tesla that he found time in May to write an article for Johnson’s Century magazine on Zmaj Jovanovich, the chief Serbian poet. And the following spring he would be back in the pages of that journal with an article on his favorite hero, Luka Filipov.
Later on in the year he would give John Foord of The New York Times a major article (September 30, 1894) in which, in addition to describing his theory of light, matter, ether, and the universe, he claimed that 90 percent of the energy in electric lights was wasted and that in the future there would be no need to transmit power at all, not even wire-lessly. “I expect to live to be able to set a machine in the middle of this room,” he said, “and move it by no other agency than the energy of the medium in motion around us.”
In this most productive period of his life, it is likely that he was at his happiest. No intimation of approaching disaster marred his days. He was still living restively at the staid Gerlach Hotel, and on its letterhead, in his most gracious style, he wrote to Katharine, accepting at last an invitation to dinner:
“Even dining at Delmonico’s is too much of a high life for me and I fear that if I depart very often from my simple habits I shall come to grief. I had formed the firm resolve not to accept any invitations, however tempting; but in this moment I remember that the pleasure of your company will soon be denied to me (as I am unable to follow you to East Hampton where you intend camping out this summer)—an irresistible desire takes hold of me to become a participant of that dinner, a desire which no amount of reasoning and consciousness of impending peril can overcome. In the anticipation of the joys and of probable subsequent sorrows, I remain….”8
In June 1894, a coy message came from Katharine in East Hampton, chiding him for ‘ “sending disappointing and cold-blooded telegrams to kind expectant friends.” She added: “‘In my country’ one is never so cruel, especially after high honors when friends are longing to felicitate one. But on such occasions one is so genial and happy one cannot say no to a friend but must wish his friend as happy as himself. This is a friend ‘in my country.’”9 The honors to which she alluded were the LL.D. from Columbia College and the Order of St. Sava from the King of Serbia.
Shortly afterward she tried a variation on her usual routine, inviting Tesla and one of his gentleman friends to dinner. But he was firm (and perhaps wary), replying that he would attend provided there was a woman for every man, and said he would be pleased if she asked Miss Merington.
The summer passed and part of another winter with his friends almost never seeing him. He was intensely busy and apparently quite content, although perhaps sometimes during this period when his research seemed to lead in every direction at once, Tesla might have remembered with a smile Lord Rayleigh’s well-meant advice about specializing.
Then, suddenly disaster struck. At 2:30 in the morning of March 13, 1895, his laboratory at 33–35 South Fifth Avenue caught fire. The six-story building in which it was located was destroyed, the cost to him being incalculable. All the expensive research apparatus that he and Kolman Czito had so laboriously built crashed right through from the fourth floor to the second where it came to rest, a mass of molten, reeking metal.10
Nothing was insured. But even had it been, it could not have covered his losses. Indeed, a million dollars, as he later said, could not have compensated for the resulting setbacks in his research. Stunned, sickened, he turned away from the ruins in the cold early morning and wandered through the streets in a trance, paying no attention to where he was or to the passing of time. The Johnsons frantically searched for him in his familiar haunts.
Newspapers all over the world reported the tragedy: “Work of half a lifetime gone.” “Fruits of Genius Swept Away.” In London the Electrical World reported that the greatest loss was the physical collapse of the
inventor.11 Charles A. Dana of the New York Sun paid him the highest tribute: “The destruction of Nikola Tesla’s workshop, with its wonderful contents, is something more than a private calamity. It is a misfortune to the whole world. It is not in any degree an exaggeration to say that the men living at this time who are more important to the human race than this young gentleman can be counted on the fingers of one hand; perhaps on the thumb of one hand.”12
Only his closest assistants knew the dazzling scope of his advanced researches in radio, wireless transmission of energy, and guided vehicles, or that he was achieving effects with what the world would soon know as X rays, and also nearing a breakthrough in the potentially lucrative industrial discovery of a means of producing liquid oxygen. It may have been the latter volatile substance that caused the blaze—apparently started from a gas jet on the first floor near oil-soaked rags—to explode so rapidly through the entire building.
An emotional letter from Katharine, written the day after the fire, finally reached him. She told of their search and the hope of consoling him in his “irreparable loss.”
“It seemed as if you too must have dissipated into thin air…. Do let us see you again in the flesh that this awful thought may vanish,” she implored. “Today with the deepening realization of the meaning of this disaster and consequently with increasing anxiety for you, my dear friend, I am even poorer except in tears, and they cannot be sent in letters. Why will you not come to us now—perhaps we might help you, we have so much to give in sympathy….”13
The degree to which this strangely unresponsive man had begun to affect her life and happiness was no longer a question in her mind.
10. AN ERROR OF JUDGMENT
At this crucial point in his life Tesla, for all his worldwide fame, was close to being broke. The destroyed laboratory of the Tesla Electric Company was owned in part by A. K. Brown and another associate. There were no longer any royalties from his alternating-current patents in America, nor any salary from Westinghouse. He had invested everything he owned in equipment for research. His only current resources were royalties from German patents on his polyphase motors and dynamos, which were a drop in the bucket compared to what he would need to rebuild and refurnish a laboratory.
He was not downcast for long, however, consoling himself with the fact that his ongoing research was still vivid in his mind and that the loss was merely a setback.
To the rescue came Edward Dean Adams, the financier who had organized the International Niagara Commission when competing technologies were being examined for the harnessing of Niagara Falls. He was also president of the Morgan-backed Cataract Construction Company which, holding the charter for development of power at the Falls, had chosen Tesla’s polyphase system. Hence he was well acquainted with the inventor’s record and impressed by his genius.
Adams proposed not only to form a new company for his continued research, with a capitalization of $500,000, but he himself offered to subscribe to $100,000 in stock. For starters he gave Tesla $40,000.
The inventor at once began combing New York City for a new laboratory and soon found a location at 46 East Houston Street. He had a telephone installed (Spring 299) and began firing off a barrage of oral and written SOS’s to Westinghouse for replacement machinery.
To Albert Schmid, general superintendent of the Pittsburgh headquarters, he wrote: “You will greatly oblige me if you will do what is in your power to ship what is required with the least possible delay.” And again: “Let me know immediately . . . what is the smallest size rotating two-phase transformer you have in stock….”1
Only days later he asked that the machinery be sent by costly express rather than as freight, being in an agony to get on with interrupted research, especially in wireless, or radio, where the international race had already begun.
Both Edison and William H. Preece, head of the British Postal Telegraph System, had been working with primitive “wireless” that used an inductive effect. That is to say, Edison had sent a message from a moving train via a telegraph wire strung on poles along the track, bridging the intervening feet by induction. But such systems could work only over short distances, and Edison had characteristically lost interest.
More to the point, Sir Oliver Lodge just the previous year had transmitted Morse signals between two buildings at Oxford University, a distance of several hundred feet. He had built a transmitter and receiver by putting a Hertz spark gap in a copper cylinder open at one end, thereby producing a beam of ultra-short-wave oscillations.
Tesla explained to the Westinghouse superintendent that the machinery he was ordering was to be used in connection with his oscillators and a high efficiency was important. “Please,” he pleaded, “do not spare any pains of expense. I shall rely as to the price entirely on the fairness of the Westinghouse Company. I believe that there are gentlemen in that company who believe in a hereafter.”2
Assurances came from the vice-president and general manager that the equipment was being shipped and that the price would be as low as possible. After all, as Tesla occasionally reminded them, they benefited from valuable promotion when he used their equipment for his demonstrations.
To Schmid he wrote again, exhorting him to make the rotary transformer excellent in every way. To C. F. Scott, chief electrician at Pittsburgh, he urged that the schedule for building the transformer be advanced: “My work has been suddenly interrupted just as I was at the most interesting stage of the development of certain ideas, and I need very much my apparatus to begin work anew.”
Only weeks later Scott received another message in the same vein of urgency: “This kind of work is almost essential to my health, and I hope that its resumption will have a good effect upon me.”
Even while buying equipment Tesla was mulling over the tempting offer of Edward Dean Adams to join forces in a new company that would mean the powerful financial backing of the House of Morgan. But he was very leery of it, having seen the Morgan takeover of both the Thomson-Houston Company and the Edison Electric Company to form General Electric. And he remembered well how they had coveted and threatened the autonomy of Westinghouse. So he made one of his many errors of judgment in finance, accepting the $40,000 from Adams but rejecting the larger alliance.
His good friend Johnson was only one of those who thought him mistaken for cutting himself off from the security represented by the House of Morgan. Tesla sighed, spread his long hands expressively, and spoke of protecting his precious freedom. Undoubtedly he believed that with the $40,000 he could bring to commercial stage at least some of the inventions on which he was currently nearing success. As usual, however, he underestimated the time and the costs involved.
“No other discovery within my lifetime,” Michael Pupin wrote, “had ever aroused the interest of the world as did the discovery of the X rays. Every physicist dropped his own research problems and rushed headlong into the research….”3
Roentgen announced his discovery in December 1895. Edison, mired in a perennial and ultimately disastrous effort to mine ores magnetically, quickly sent a wire to a former associate, urging him to drop everything and join a group to experiment on “Rotgens” (sic) new radiations. “We could do a lot before others get their second wind,” he said.
The opportunity to see the internal structure of the human body captivated everyone, and it was obvious to scientists and engineers that some sort of fluoroscopic screen would be needed to register the rays after their passage through the body.
The ways in which Edison, Pupin, and Tesla severally proceeded with their X-ray research were characteristic of their different personalities.4Edison, seeing where the commercial potential lay, began at once to test various chemicals and quickly reported that calcium tungstate crystals gave a good fluorescence on a screen. Then he rushed to the Patent Office.
Pupin noted in his diary that American physicists had paid little attention to vacuum-tube discharges and that, to the best of his knowledge, he was the only American physicist with any exper
ience. Hence when Roentgen’s discovery had been announced, “I was, it seems, better prepared than anybody else in this country to repeat his experiments and succeeded, therefore, sooner than anybody else on this side of the Atlantic.”5 He claimed to have obtained the first X ray in the United States on January 2, 1896, two weeks after the discovery was announced by Roentgen in Germany.
This was curious in view of Tesla’s pioneer love affair with vacuum tubes, which he had demonstrated in his series of lectures in 1891, 1892, and 1893. Although Tesla always gave full priority to Roentgen, he had spoken then of both “visible and invisible” rays when demonstrating his molecular-bombardment lamp and other gaseous lamps, and he was using uranium glass and a variety of phosphorescent and fluorescent substances for detecting radiation. During experiments he carried on in the fall of 1894 with the assistance of the Manhattan photographers Tonnelé & Company on the radiant power of phosphorescent bodies, “a great number of plates showed curious marks and defects.” It was just as he was beginning to explore the nature of these phenomena that his laboratory burned down.6
When Professor Roentgen announced his discovery of X rays in December of that year, Tesla immediately forwarded shadowgraph pictures to the German, who replied: “The pictures are very interesting. If you would only be so kind as to disclose the manner in which you obtained them.”
The Pupin claim to have been the first in the United States experimenting with vacuum-tube discharges would have been unlikely even if Tesla had not preceded him. Apparently they were being investigated in numerous laboratories in America and Europe, and after Roentgen’s announcement a dozen claims were made to “firsts” in X ray. Tesla never made any such claim in his own behalf. The first clinical radiograph in North America is said by some to have been made in the basement of Reid Hall at Dartmouth College on February 4, 1896,7 by a laboratory assistant.
Tesla: Man Out of Time Page 14