“By his writings on the problem of signaling without wires, he fascinated and inspired some of the early workers in the field, Marconi perhaps himself included,” wrote this protégé of Pupin who was now himself a famous inventor in radio.
“However . . . he failed to conceive or to experimentally discover that vital idea uncovered by Marconi which brought practical wireless signaling into being. I have pointed out if he had gone ahead on the basis of his erroneous theory, he would have been very likely to have discovered the principle that Marconi did uncover and so would have become known as the inventor of wireless telegraphy. But this he failed to do and so the credit quite properly goes to Marconi.”11
Tesla’s fame, Armstrong went on, was “secure on the basis of his accomplishments in the power field, and as a prophet of the possibility of wireless, and of wireless-controlled engines of war.”
Armstrong almost appeared to be saying that because Tesla was famous as an explorer of one continent of science or two, it was unimportant that he be given due credit in a major third field. Perhaps in part this curious view reflected the growing academic commitment to specialization: generalists were out of style, hence the existence of any lurking Leonardo ought to be denied.
Armstrong offered to confide to Anderson the “vital secret” that made Marconi’s work a success and Tesla’s a failure. In January 1954 Anderson asked for this. He was distressed shortly afterward to learn of Major Armstrong’s unexpected death. But later, he said, two scientists who knew Armstrong and of his “unswerving championing of Marconi” told him that Armstrong was referring to the ground connection in a transmission-reception system. Anderson was stunned.
“Every one of Tesla’s patents for either communication or power transmission showed the ground connection,” he wrote me. “In fact, the matter of ground conduction was the cornerstone of Tesla’s concept. Nonetheless, and despite the fact that the Marconi patent was declared invalid by the Supreme Court, Armstrong stuck to his position. I guess that’s what confounded me so much—Armstrong’s overlooking an essential point already so clearly in evidence.”12
Haraden Pratt, fellow of the Institute of Radio Engineers* and past chairman of the IRE History Committee, has written that Tesla’s radio ideas and the apparatus he produced were left for others to pick up and embody for less ambitious but more practical purposes.
“For this reason,” he noted, “Tesla’s influence on the development of radio was known to but a limited number of people. A few eminent persons who attended or read his lectures during the 1890 decade were inspired by his revelations and some others, who later delved into the background of the art, became aware of the pioneering import of his contributions.
“Far ahead of his time, mistaken as a dreamer by his contemporaries, Tesla stands out as not only a great inventor but, particularly in the field of radio, as the great teacher. His early uncanny insight into alternating-current phenomena enabled him, perhaps more than any other, to create by his widespread lectures and demonstrations an intelligent understanding of them, and inspired others not yet acquainted with this almost unknown field of learning, exciting their interest in making improvements and practical applications.”13
In sum, it is easier to see in retrospect than during Tesla’s time how the truth came to be obscured.
Ample rewards went to those scientists, inventors, and engineers who successfully got in on the ground floor of commercial radio. Tesla, spending more time in his ivory tower than on ground floors, was to be smiled on fitfully by fame and in the long run ignored by fortune.
In his later years an incident occurred that revealed the true depths of his feelings about the great radio controversy. On a day in January 1927 a young Yugoslav named Dragislav L. Petković, visiting America, arranged to call upon him. He then lived on the fifteenth floor of the Pennsylvania Hotel at 34th and Broadway. Times were hard and he had grown reclusive. Petković was invited to have lunch in his rooms and treated to a spread of California fruits and vegetables, fish, and honey.
After conversing for a time, Petković tried to learn the secret of the animosity between Tesla and Pupin. Once he had asked Dr. Pupin about this matter. The latter had burst out, “How long will our people celebrate only mysterious persons, instead of what’s clear to everyone to understand?”
Now, when he put the same question to Tesla, the inventor frowned and raised his hand as if to protect himself from something very unpleasant. After a pause, he explained to Petković that in the early days in America, when he and Pupin were both struggling to survive, the latter had asked him for help with the English language. According to Tesla, he was having difficulty holding a job with the telephone company. Tesla helped Pupin but later somewhat tactlessly reminded him of the favor. Pupin angrily said that he himself had been quite able to do the work and that Tesla “did not do anything for him.” Tesla was hurt but forgot the matter.
Later, however, when he lectured at Columbia College, demonstrating his transformer and his theories of radio and electrical-power transmission, “Mr. Pupin and his friends interrupted my lecture by whistling, and I had difficulty quieting down the misled audience.” But this was not the worst.
“During the lawsuit which I’ve instituted against Mr. Marconi for stealing my apparatus and drawings from the Patent Office,” Tesla allegedly continued, “Mr. Pupin, called to testify on my behalf as a countryman, went on the side of Mr. Marconi, who, after three years of legal battle was forced to admit under oath that the transmission of power to long distances is my invention.”
Tesla paused, then added, “Let the future tell the truth and evaluate each one according to his work and accomplishments. The present is theirs, the future, for which I really worked, is mine.”
With tears in his eyes but with a smile, he resumed his meal. He and the visitor quietly attacked their cantaloupe. Then the visitor asked another question.
“Can you tell me something about Mr. Marconi?”
It was one of the few recorded occasions when Tesla ever lapsed from courtesy. He laid down his spoon.
“Mr. Marconi,” he said, “is a donkey.”14
18. MIDSTREAM PERILS
The inventor, now aged fifty, his reputation as a scientist under serious attack, had seldom looked more debonair. He was still slim, smooth-faced, and young-looking, his hair as thick and black as ever. He still dressed like a fashion plate, had a wide circle of friends, and clung however tenuously to his cherished residence at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.
Indeed, Tesla’s relationship with the hotel may have come as close to a marriage as anything he ever experienced. A life not lived regally seemed to him scarcely worthwhile. Always one to confront disappointment with panache, he seemed to have a special talent for floating elegantly through the worst of times. It was not that he never worried about debts but simply that his mind, preoccupied with ideas, could screen them out over long periods. Thus he could chide less fortunate worriers like Scherff and Johnson for alleged faintheartedness in the face of financial adversity. Yet the psychic importance of money to the inventor, apart from his real need for it, seemed to grow in contrast to its declining accessibility, as his many letters to Johnson, Scherff, and others made clear.
Although in appearance and in mode of life Tesla was to go on much as before, inwardly he had begun to change. His bitter disappointments in the early years of the century exerted a corrosive and lasting effect upon his personality. He wrote revealingly to George Westinghouse on the latter’s latest enforced corporate reorganization to say, “the strength of a man shows itself in adversity.” Unfortunately, adversity also tends to reveal weaknesses.
Tesla became an inveterate writer of self-serving letters to newspapers. Where in palmier years he had been generous in praising the achievements of both his predecessors and his contemporaries, and had seldom troubled to reply to personal critics, he now became prickly and shrill in self-defense. He was quick to put down competitors, the weak as well as the powerful,
and to claim priority of discovery on his own behalf. Cheated too often, he grew even more secretive in the protection of his patents. The psychic damage to him had been real and deep.
Tesla was fortunate in the early years of the century to attract two loyal, intelligent women to his staff as secretaries, both of whom went on in later years to important careers of their own. Both, needless to say, had trim figures.
Muriel Arbus was a charming blonde who assisted Tesla with patent claims and, after his death, went on to distinguish herself as the head of Arbus Machine Tool Sales in New York—the only woman in America at the time to have created her own firm as a buyer of large machine tools. She was extremely successful.
Dorothy Skerritt joined Tesla in 1912, witnessed many demonstrations at his laboratory at 8 West 40th Street, and often went across the street to the New York Public Library to do research for the inventor. A person who met both women observed that Skerritt “seemed to be more aware of the underlying motivations of individuals and sensed the implications of adverse circumstances, yet said little. Arbus, on the other hand, took things at face value and seemed to enjoy talking about them.”
Skerritt had worked for a patent-attorney group before joining Tesla and remained with him until 1922. Arbus spent World War II working for the Office of Production Management, the War Production Board, and later for the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, after which she began her own unusual business.
As for their mutual employer, more and more in the years ahead Tesla would advance scientific claims recklessly, discussing them with reporters fresh from the moment of inspiration without subjecting his ideas either to experimental verification or even much reflection. At times he would seem almost megalomaniacal. Some journalists, interested only in headlines and bylines, quoted him without question, but those who cared for him, like O’Neill and Swezey, sought to save him when necessary from his own announcements.
Edison had merely reflected the sniping of the professors when he had taunted, “Tesla is a man who is always going to do something.” But presumably such a charge could have been made against Edison himself by anyone choosing to overlook the sweep of his solid achievement in favor of his unrealized aspirations. He too courted reporters, inveterately promising more than he could deliver.
Professor Joseph S. Ames of the Johns Hopkins University had written an early attack on Tesla all too typical of the view from academe, a comparison of the works of Marconi, Pupin, and Tesla in which the latter came off a miserable third: “The Tesla motor, so called, and the electrical machines which are modifications of it, are known to the world, and so is the ‘Tesla coil,’ which is a simple improvement of one of Henry’s instruments; but as yet no discovery bears his [Tesla’s] name….”1
This attack, like others of its ilk, was, of course, simply wrong-headed. By the late 1920s $50 billion would be invested in Tesla’s nineteenth-century induction motors and systems of power transmission throughout the world. He was “the father of radio” and of automation. Most universities, including Johns Hopkins, already relied on Tesla coils in their research laboratories. And a whole series of other original inventions had been patented, many of them before 1900, by the man of whom Ames could write “no discovery bears his name.”
But it was also true that Tesla was more often an originator of broad concepts than of discrete innovations. His lectures radiated ideas that many others took in hand, applied practically and subsequently patented. Indeed, this was one of the reasons why he was now beginning to play his cards so much closer to his chest.
If at the same time he seemed to sensationalize his new projects and theories, it was because, acting as his own entrepreneur, seeking financial backing from investors and the wealthy, he resorted to methods that would appeal to them. The shows staged in his laboratories were intended to dazzle the money people who, he realized, would not be technically able to “steal” his ideas. Fellow scientists, jealous but not deceived, were naturally unhappy.
Despite the fact that his cornucopia of ideas flowed almost as richly as ever, he had reached an age when he could no longer ignore his own mortality. Friends and acquaintances began to fall away. Mark Twain died in 1910, and the loss affected Tesla deeply. Three years later Morgan also died, as great a pivotal figure in national affairs as he had been in Tesla’s own career.
Tesla’s psyche had always been a festival of neuroses, but now his behavior seemed to become, if anything, stranger still. No one knew when the inventor began gathering up the sick and wounded pigeons and carrying them back to his hotel. Usually, however, it was a mission that he carried out late in the day.
His whole routine was that of a night person. It was also that of a prince of the blood. To hotel servants he could be cavalier and cutting one moment, generously rewarding with tips the next.
As a night person he arrived at his office promptly at noon; as a prince of the blood he required that Miss Arbus or Miss Skerritt be standing just inside the door to take his hat, cane, and gloves. Then all window shades would be drawn to simulate the darkness in which he worked most productively. In fact, the only time when the shades were raised was when a lightning storm was flashing over the rooftops of the city. Then he would lie upon a black mohair couch to watch the northern or the western sky. His employees said that he had always talked to himself, but that during these lightning storms, when he insisted on being alone, they could hear him through the door and that he became positively eloquent.
But despite all the stresses and anomalous symptoms, Tesla’s creative genius remained unimpaired. In 1906, the year of his fiftieth birthday, in the wake of many trials, he built the first model of his marvelous turbine. Possibly it had been inspired by his childhood efforts to build a vacuum motor and by his plans, during the year he spent living in the mountains, for shooting mail through a tube beneath the ocean. Possibly the idea for the bladeless turbine went back even further—to his earliest memory of invention, when he had built a tiny waterwheel that had no blades but spun all the same.
Whatever its provenance, the model weighed less than ten pounds and developed thirty horsepower. He later built much larger ones that developed 200 horsepower. “What I have done,” Tesla explained, “is to discard entirely the idea that there must be a solid wall in front of the steam and to apply in a practical way, for the first time, two properties which every physicist knows to be common to all fluids but which have not been utilized. These are adhesion and viscosity.”2
Julius C. Czito, the son of Tesla’s long-time machinist Kolman Czito, built several versions of the turbine in his machine shop at Astoria, Long Island. The rotor of the so-called “derby hat powerhouse” consisted of a stack of very thin disks of German silver, mounted on the center of a shaft. They were enclosed in a casing provided with ports. “When deriving energy from any kind of fluid,” Tesla elaborated, “it is admitted at the periphery and escapes at the center; when, on the contrary, the fluid is to be energized, it enters in the center and is expelled at the periphery. In either case it traverses the interstices between the disks in a spiral path, power being derived from or imparted to it, by purely molecular action. In this novel manner the heat energy of steam or explosive mixtures can be transformed with high economy….”3
He saw no limits to its uses. With gasoline fuel it could power automobiles and airplanes. It could drive ocean liners across the Atlantic in three days. It could be used for trains, trucks, refrigeration, hydraulic gearing (motion transfer), agriculture, irrigation, and mining—and it would run on steam as well as gasoline. He was even designing a futuristic automobile that he planned to power with it. Above all, he believed that the turbine would be inexpensive to manufacture compared to traditional models.
His spirits were greatly bolstered when the Tesla turbine began to be widely acclaimed—in concept. Even the War Department officers declared it to be “something new in the world,” and said they were “greatly impressed with it.” It seemed reasonable to expect that a fortune was
to be made by the man who had designed a better rotary engine.
Tesla began to emerge from the endless trauma of humiliation and debt. The scalding nightmares were occurring less often in which the death of his brother Daniel so long ago, his mother’s death, and the destruction of Wardenclyffe seemed all mixed up. All he needed now was capital, and the turbine would put him back on top. He began ticking off in his mind the names of possible investors.
19. THE NOBEL AFFAIR
The many mourners who crowded into the funeral for J. Pierpont Morgan at St. George’s Church in Manhattan on April 14, 1913, were attending a theatrical closing, the end of a long run of history. Tesla had been sent tickets for the gallery, with apologies that better seats were not available.
After the rites the inventor thoughtfully set his calendar ahead exactly one month. On May 14 he asked for an appointment with J. P. Morgan, the scion of the House of Morgan.
The younger banker and the inventor met and talked mainly about the commercial potential of the Tesla turbine. Six days later the inventor received a loan of $15,000 from the J. P. Morgan Company with interest at 6 percent, for nine months.1
Tesla followed up their meeting with a letter describing in forceful and fluent words the uniqueness of his latest invention. “Knowing this as I do,” he wrote, “not merely as an expert but as a seer, you may judge how anxious I am, for the sake of the world, to connect myself with men of your integrity and power….”2
Unfortunately he did not stop there. He could not refrain from reminding Morgan junior that Morgan senior had lent him $ 150,000 for Wardenclyffe. Others had let him down in this venture, he said; otherwise the first world broadcasting system would by then have been flourishing. Accordingly, he proposed the formation of two new companies, one for the development of radio broadcasting and the other for turbine manufacture, offering “to turn over to you my entire interest in both,” leaving it to Morgan to accord to him such a part as he might choose.
Tesla: Man Out of Time Page 25