In Colorado he had achieved voltages of ten to twelve million volts on the antenna sphere of his magnifying transmitter, although he believed that 100 million volts were feasible. On his return to New York he applied for another group of patents of which the most important was an “Apparatus for Transmitting Electrical Energy,” related to the Wardenclyffe project, being No. 1,119,732 filed in 1902 but not issued until 1914.* In fact it was filed only weeks after Marconi’s transatlantic wireless success.
The problems of getting investment capital for unfinished Warden-clyffe were compounded in the fall of 1903, when the so-called Rich Man’s Panic struck. Now, the chances of wooing Morgan back into the fold seemed more remote than ever.
Aided by his loyal friends, Tesla redoubled his efforts to raise money. Lieutenant Hobson pulled all his strings trying to interest the Navy in robotry. Having seen Tesla’s radio-controlled boats and torpedoes in 1898, he urged him to display them in a naval exhibit at Buffalo and set it up so that the inventor would not have “the usual difficulties of formalities.” But in vain.
The naval hero reported that there had been a fight within the Navy about Tesla’s wireless exhibits—a feud not directly related to his inventions, he said, but rather something ongoing between two high officers, resulting in the rejection of Tesla’s entry.13 It is possible that Hobson was skewing the situation to avoid hurting his friend’s feelings.
Tesla then went to Thomas Fortune Ryan and succeeded in raising a little supplemental funding. But it all went into paying off existing creditors, whose bills were beginning to tower like Wardenclyffe itself. He did not need patient, observant George Scherff to tell him where the trouble lay. “My enemies have been so successful in representing me as a poet and visionary,” he said, “that it is absolutely imperative for me to put out something commercial without delay.”
In the years ahead he would repeatedly stagger forth from avalanches of debt to strike out anew on some practical scheme for commercializing his inventions. Whether he was less fortunate as an independent than his old foe Edison, it would have been hard to say, but certainly their lives were following different paths.
Edison in his late fifties was wealthy but ill with a variety of afflictions, including mysterious lumps in his stomach that had appeared during his X-ray research (they finally vanished). Disappointed in his ore ventures, increasingly deaf, he had withdrawn from emotional contact with family and friends. He had gone into semiretirement, was old before his time, and not only could afford, but felt obliged, to hire a full-time bodyguard for himself and his household. Such were the stigmata of success.
There was a growing interest in the medical profession in Tesla’s therapeutic oscillator, a small Tesla coil. Doctors and professors phoned from all over the country, saying they were constantly receiving inquiries for such high-frequency apparatus. Scherff told Tesla he could easily start a thriving business in medical apparatus, with a crew of thirty men and an investment of $25,000. He predicted a rapid profit of $125,000, almost as much as Morgan’s total investment in Wardenclyffe.
The inventor told him to go ahead with such work at Wardenclyffe but did not himself seem much interested. Instead he issued two handsome brochures, one describing the world system of communication and another, expensively printed on vellum, that announced his entry into the field of consulting engineering.
The main work crew were kept busy fabricating and assembling novel devices, blowing glass vacuum tubes, and doing the routine work of firing up the steam generator. The latter job was spasmodic: by mid-July of 1903 the paying of coal bills had become a problem. Periodically the crew was laid off.
When coal for the Wardenclyffe generator could be afforded, the inventor wired Scherff to stoke up for a weekend of tests and took a train to Long Island. “The troubles and dangers are at their height,” he wrote Scherff on one occasion. “Coal problem still awaits solution. The Wardenclyffe specters are hounding me day and night. . . . When will it end?”14
Scherff, now moonlighting as a bookkeeper for other firms, lent small sums of money when he could. Dorothy F. Skerritt later verified a report that he probably lent the inventor a total of $40,000 over the years.15 “Tesla seemed to have Mr. Scherff hypnotized,” she observed.
In an earlier and better time, as the inventor told her, he had been able to get money from Morgan just by asking for it. On one occasion the financier signed a blank check and told Tesla to fill in what he needed. Tesla said that the amount was $30,000. But now Morgan’s disenchantment with Wardenclyffe was final. Tesla, equally firm in his determination to forge on, sent more letters—at first persuasive and beseeching, then angry, accusing, and bitter. They pursued the banker by special messenger everywhere, even to the pier as he embarked on yet another grand tour of the Continent.
Inevitably rumors spread that Morgan had acquired Tesla’s radio patents just to prevent their development; but there was no proof. When bad news whispered along Wall Street, it gained strength from itself. Word that Morgan was dropping out of the world system venture—he actually had been only a lender—convinced other potential backers that it must be a soap bubble.
Tesla knew such rumors were killing him; but there was little he could do except live each day trying to dodge bill collectors, pleading with other bankers and rich acquaintances, working out scientific problems of the project, seeking to market other inventions, and bidding for consultancies.
The multiplier effect of his hard luck knew no geographic limits. He was sued for nonpayment of electricity furnished to the experiment station at Colorado Springs, and this was odd, considering that Leonard Curtis, one of the owners of the City Power Company, had assured him that electricity would be free. The city of Colorado Springs also sued him, for water bills. Finally the caretaker of his old experiment station brought an action for unpaid balance of wages due him.
Tesla’s response to the city was Teslian. Inasmuch as he had graced it with his presence and had erected his famous station there, he wrote, he believed it should feel privileged to pay for the water.
He ordered the old lumber from the station sold and the money therefrom paid to the power company. And finally he returned to Colorado Springs to appear in court with his attorney to answer the caretaker’s suit. The plaintiff was awarded a judgment of about $1,000. A sheriff’s sale of laboratory fixtures paid some of it. The rest Tesla was to pay in $30 increments dragged out over half-a-dozen years.
Then for a time it seemed as if his luck was turning. Money began trickling in from the sale of medical coils, which were now being manufactured on an assembly line at Wardenclyffe for hospitals and research laboratories. And he managed to invent a new turbine of revolutionary design, which he felt sure would restore his fortune and reputation.
Although partying with his friends continued, there was a new frenetic quality about it, as if the celebrants had begun to sense the tragedies ahead and were determined to lose no opportunity for laughter.
Katharine sent invitations to come and meet the usual parade of celebrities, and reproaches when he failed to do so. One note ended typically: “We shall soon be far away but then you would never know it. You do not need anybody, inhuman that you are. How strange it is that we cannot do without you.”16
She and Robert were preparing for another sojourn in Europe. Robert’s dilettantism was unflagging. “Mrs. Johnson tells me you are going to dine with the Countess of Warwick,” he wrote Tesla. “Will you be good enough to ask her grace if the Warwick vase could have been the original of Keats’ ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’?”17
Significantly, Johnson had begun to worry about whether his holding of stock in the Nikola Tesla Company might be misconstrued by his employers, in view of the several articles and consultations Tesla had been asked to provide to Century magazine. He suggested to the inventor that the money he had invested ought better to be construed as a loan, with the stock as security. Such concern about conflict of interest implied that Tesla’s stock as a scientist
was slipping and that his name no longer carried the old cachet.
Many in the business world appear to have believed that Tesla was still receiving “princely” royalties from Westinghouse on his alternating-current patents, not realizing that he had been bought out at bargain rates in 1896. This was made clear by an article in the Brooklyn Eagle of May 15, 1905, calling attention to the “expiration” of Tesla’s valuable patents. The newspaper reported that “a great stir” had been created among electricians by announcement that the patents had expired: “There will be a grand scramble everywhere to make the Tesla motor now universally used without paying any more royalty to Tesla. The Westinghouses announced they have a number of subsidiary patents, and will fight.”
For it to have become known that Tesla was receiving nothing at all would have cast him in a strange light, not to his credit in the world of nonpoets.
Late on the night of July 18, 1905, he wrote to Scherff, anxious at not having heard from him. “The last few days and nights have been simply horrible,” he confided, referring to an unnamed illness. “I wish I were at Wardenclyffe in a patch of onions and radishes. Troubles are at their height. As soon as things are ready I will come out. We must get much better results.”
Only days later he wrote of worries about materials and of taking measures to prevent “the kind of accidents we have had before.
“I will tell you frankly that it looks blue for this week unless L. carries out his promise…. I have several chances and many hopes but I have been deceived so often that I am a pessimist.”
He had been experimenting—for what purpose is unknown—with extremely high-pressure jets of water, of about 10,000 pounds per square inch. A tiny jet, if struck by an iron bar, would deflect it exactly as if another bar had hit it. Such streams of liquid power had destructive effects on any metal with which they came in contact. One day the cast-iron cap of the pressure cylinder broke, and a large fragment shot past Tesla’s face to tear a hole in the roof.
On another day Scherff had his face seared while pouring hot lead into screw holes in the flooring. The lead struck water that had been used earlier to swab the floor and exploded upward. Tesla, a few feet away, was only slightly injured but Scherff was seriously burned. For a while it was feared that he would lose his vision.
Considering the dangerous equipment with which the men worked daily, however, the accidents were remarkably few.
Hobson, now a busy young naval recruiting officer, traveling all over the country yet sandwiching in campaigns for political office as well, never failed to call on Tesla when in Manhattan. He fretted about the inventor damaging his health with strain and overwork, tried to lure him to football games at the Naval Academy, and wrote encouragingly from his parents’ home in Greensboro, Alabama. “My father and mother say they would rather meet you than any man in the world and that you must come down and visit us and rest up from your herculean tasks….”
He wrote from Texas, from trains, from hotels all over the country, and often from the Army & Navy Club in New York. He spoke of the disappointments of his political candidacy; but in 1903 he finally resigned from the Navy to make a successful career of politics.
Then on May 1, 1905, “the hero” wrote Tesla of “the greatest happiness that has come to me”—his forthcoming marriage to Miss Grizelda Houston Hull of Tuxedo Park, New York.
“Do you know, my dear Tesla,” he wrote, “you are the very first person, outside of my family, that I thought of. . . . I wish to feel you present, standing close to me, on this occasion so full of meaning in my life…. You occupy one of the deepest chambers of my heart….”18
Two years later Hobson succeeded in winning election to Congress from his home state of Alabama and would serve there until 1915. He would distinguish himself—to Tesla’s dismay—by becoming a leader of the prohibition movement. The inventor considered alcohol in reasonable amounts an ambrosia, although his devotion to the naval hero would survive such ideological differences.
Mark Twain, seventy years of age and relishing his fame, returned to America. He and Tesla sought each other’s company as often as their work and other demands permitted, meeting usually at the Players’.
Katharine, distressed by Tesla’s commuting to Long Island, scarcely knew from one day to the next where to send her invitations. “I will be here this evening,” she wrote, “but suppose you are throughout the week at your country residence in the remote wilds of Long Island. However, if you happen to be rusticating at your favorite resort, the Waldorf, send me a line when you receive this and let me know when I may expect you…. I want to see if you have grown younger, more fashionable, more proud. But whatever you may be you will always find me the same.”19
This invitation was unusual in its use of the singular pronoun; Robert apparently was traveling, or he was otherwise unable to entertain. Almost certainly Tesla did not accept.
But the early winter brought them all together for a holiday celebration on Thanksgiving eve. Tesla’s thank-you note to Katharine urged her not to despise millionaires since he was still hard at work trying to become one. “My stocks have gone up considerably today,” he wrote. “If it continues for a few weeks like this, the globe will be girdled soon.”20
Katharine sent another appeal urging him “to come for my sake as I need cheer and who is all potent as you. . . .” He put her off.
Christmas he normally spent with the Filipovs. She wrote five days before the Yule to remind him, adding, “You must come here tomorrow evening as I want to see you for many reasons, to know how you are. But why try to enumerate them? You know them all except one. I have something to tell you by way of Germany…. When I wrote you last Sunday morning I sent you my first thoughts out of sleep. I knew that you were depressed but did not know why. Please let me have a word dear Mr. Tesla that I may have something to count on, something to expect….”21
The winter passed with his anxieties over Wardenclyffe mounting daily until it seemed there would be no end to his trials.
The long steaming summer returned to New York, with Tesla’s routine seldom varying. To Scherff he wrote again of money problems: “Troubles and troubles, but they do just seem to track me. The Port Jefferson Bank will have to get along with interest, assuming that I can scratch it together.”
Soon afterward, however, he hastened to send exciting news. He had had a meeting with Mr. Frick, the industrialist and nouveau-riche art collector. Since becoming manager of the Carnegie Steel Company trust in the 1890s, he had managed to double the size of the plant through the assiduous use of exploited labor and cheap materials. Now, enjoying the rewards of his prescience, he was casting about for new investments. The inventor’s note to Scherff exuded optimism: “Troubles are many but progress is encouraging. Had a very promising session with Mr. Frick and am full of hope he will advance capital still necessary.”22
At about this time Tesla and Johnson had an editorial exchange over Hertzian waves. Tesla had sent the latter an article for Century that puzzled Johnson because of his assertion that such waves were not employed in wireless telegraphy.
“There is Hertzian telegraphy in theory only,” Tesla explained, “since these waves diminish very rapidly with distance.” Hertz and Crookes, he said, did not apply sources of power since they used the Ruhmkorff coil and a simple spark gap. Tesla claimed that he had made no progress in the field until he was inspired to invent his oscillation transformer, with which he obtained greatly magnified intensity. He believed, after experimenting with different forms of aerials, that the signals picked up by the instruments were actually induced by earth currents instead of being etheric space waves.
Kenneth Swezey, however, later wrote, “Tesla understood well the nature of Hertzian waves and constantly used them. His obstinacy in refusing to admit that these waves played a significant part in the operation of his wireless power equipment . . . merely helped confuse judges and lose cases for him throughout his lifetime.”23
After his “very p
romising” session with Frick, the inventor was again forced to send bad news to Scherff: the negotations had come to nothing.
The year 1906 threatened to be, if possible, worse than its predecessor. Even his friend Westinghouse seemed to be avoiding him. Tesla’s need for Westinghouse machinery at Wardenclyffe remained almost as urgent as his need for capital. Thus he wrote to the industrialist asking, “Has anything happened to mar the cordiality of our relations? I would be very sorry, not only because of my admiration for you but for other serious reasons.
“The transmission of power without wires will very soon create an industrial revolution and such as the world has never seen before. Who is to be more helpful in this great development, and who will derive from it greater benefits than yourself?”24 Westinghouse, although knowing that without Tesla’s AC patents his firm could not have become the lusty adolescent that it was, replied in effect thanks but no thanks.
The harrowing routine continued. Scherff wrote that a promised carload of coal had not yet been delivered and that scheduled tests must be delayed. He also mentioned tactfully his extra job for two days a month keeping books for a sulfur manufacturing firm. This was a bad omen for Tesla, for Scherff would soon become a full-time employee of this company.
Worse news lay ahead. On June 26, 1906, the newspapers were filled with sensational accounts of the murder of Stanford White. The architect had been shot three times by a Pittsburgh financier, Harry K. Thaw, the night before on the roof of Madison Square Garden, while numerous members of the New York “400” looked on. White was believed by the killer to have been involved with his wife, Evelyn Nesbit, in a love triangle. Later Thaw was committed to the Matteawan Hospital for the Criminally Insane.
But the architect who had given New Yorkers such splendid edifices as Madison Square Presbyterian Church, the Garden City Hotel, the Hall of Fame at New York University, and the Astor Mansion at Rhinebeck, was gone—leaving the tower on Long Island as his final monument.
Tesla: Man Out of Time Page 23