Unfortunately a lack of conclusive data makes it impossible to do more than speculate.
24. TRANSITIONS
Katharine Johnson fell ill. Tesla showed his concern by prescribing for her a special diet, but the deeper illness from which she suffered, the sense that in the midst of life everything worthwhile had somehow slipped from her, deprived her of the will to recover. She lay in the house at 327 Lexington Avenue with the blinds drawn, remembering the parties, the celebrities, the gossip and reflected glory, the street crowded with arriving and departing hansom cabs and autos, the wonderful banquets presided over by Tesla at the Waldorf-Astoria, the thrill of his galvanic presence at her table, and how hard they had all worked to entrap wealthy patrons for him. She remembered the scintillating gatherings at his laboratory, the demonstrations, the excitement of his triumphal tours abroad. Her entire being seemed to have dissolved into a blur of memories. The life lived had not been hers; she did not know whose it had been. Her life had been a reflection only, of the risks and acts and triumphs of others. Now she felt a stranger to herself, stripped equally of hope and anger. She felt deluded, cheated, and infinitely weary.
During the time when she languished Tesla was brashly inspired to think about writing one of his more curious prophecies—on the future of women. It was a subject on which he gyrated and fussed and yet seemingly could not leave alone. The year before she was stricken, he had given an interview to a Detroit Free Press reporter on the “problem” of women.1 With the glibness of any other male, he bemoaned their descent from the pedestals so thoughtfully built by men for their entrapment. He had worshipped women all his life, he said—out of special deference, from afar. But now that they were matching their minds against men’s, venturing into open competition with God’s naturally appointed, was not “civilization itself in jeopardy”? The answer was a question that presumably went unasked by most Sunday supplement readers of the 1920s: Whose civilization?
Now, with Katharine’s illness preying on his thoughts, he turned the matter over relentlessly in his mind and finally gave another interview, this time to Collier’s.2 The article was threateningly entitled, “When Woman Is Boss,” and described a new sex order in which the female would emerge as intellectually superior. On the one hand he appeared to be all for it, but on the other, filled with trepidation. Had he understood the real waste of Katharine’s life? Whatever his motivation, he ended up ambivalently prophesying men and women into human beehives in a disturbingly mechanistic view of the Utopian “rational” society.
It was clear to any trained observer, he said, that a new attitude toward sexual equality had come over the world, receiving an abrupt stimulus just before the First World War. Naturally he could not foresee that in the wake of the Second World War women would again backslide and relinquish much social and economic gain in a compulsion to procreate.
Few feminists would have quarreled with the first part of Tesla’s premise: “The struggle of the human female toward sex equality will end in a new sex order, with the female as superior. The modern woman, who anticipates in merely superficial phenomena the advancement of her sex, is but a surface symptom of something deeper and more potent fermenting in the bosom of the race.
“It is not in the shallow physical imitation of men that women will assert first their equality and later their superiority, but in the awakening of the intellect of women.
“Through countless generations, from the very beginning, the social subservience of women resulted naturally in the partial atrophy or at least the hereditary suspension of mental qualities which we now know the female sex to be endowed with no less than men.
“But the female mind has demonstrated a capacity for all the mental acquirements and achievements of men, and as generations ensue that capacity will be expanded; the average woman will be as well educated as the average man, and then better educated, for the dormant faculties of her brain will be stimulated to an activity that will be all the more intense and powerful because of centuries of repose. Women will ignore precedent and startle civilization with their progress.”
But the ideal society that Tesla went on to describe, modeled on that of the hive—with “desexualized armies of workers whose sole aim and happiness in life is hard work”—could not have failed to chill his fellow men and thinking women.
“The acquisition of new fields of endeavor by women, their gradual usurpation of leadership,” he said, “will dull and finally dissipate feminine sensibilities, will choke the maternal instinct, so that marriage and motherhood may become abhorrent and human civilization draw closer and closer to the perfect civilization of the bee….”3
The perfect communal life of the bee was radical chic for the times, promising “socialized cooperative life wherein all things, including the young, are the property and concern of all.”
But in the same freewheeling interview Tesla made uncannily farsighted technological predictions: “It is more than probable that the household’s daily newspaper will be printed ‘wirelessly’ in the home during the night. The problem of parking automobiles and furnishing separate roads for commercial and pleasure traffic will be solved. Belted parking towers will arise in our large cities, and the roads will be multiplied through sheer necessity, or finally rendered unnecessary when civilization exchanges wheels for wings.
“The world’s internal reservoirs of heat . . . will be tapped for industrial purposes.” Solar heat would partially supply the needs of the home; wireless energy would supply the remainder; and small vest-pocket instruments, “amazingly simple compared with our present telephone,” would be used. “We shall be able to witness and hear events—the inauguration of a President, the playing of a World Series game, the havoc of an earthquake or the terror of a battle—just as though we were present.”
Katharine died in 1925. Not forgetting Tesla even at death, she charged Robert to keep in close touch with him always.
Johnson and his daughter Agnes (the future Agnes Holden) tried thereafter to celebrate traditional family holidays. Tesla was always invited. They invited him on Katharine’s birthday, Robert writing, “We will have music, the kind of occasion she would have desired. She cherished your friendship. She charged me not to lose sight of you. Without you it will not be her day.”4
But soon Robert was again asking for financial help—to pay taxes and a bank loan. Tesla, scraping along on a few royalties and consulting fees, was able to lend small sums. Although he had been ill again, he sent a cheerful note with his check: “Do not let those small troubles worry you. Just a little longer and you will be able to indulge in flights on your Pegasus.”5
Johnson thanked him and announced that he and Agnes were sailing for Europe for two months. On this trip he met a teenaged actress who was to gladden for a time his final years.6
In April of the following year Tesla sent Johnson an unsolicited $500 with a note: “Please do not let this remind you of vulgar creditors, but have a little celebration.”7 Johnson replied that he was having a wall erected at Kate’s grave with half of it. He reported that the “lovely Marguerite [Churchill]” was keeping him young and that he was eager for the inventor to meet her.
Shortly afterward Johnson was hospitalized and from his bed wrote Tesla: “You must come and dine with Mrs. Churchill and Marguerite when I return.” He raved about the young actress, whom he now hoped to accompany to Europe, “with her mother, of course.”8 They would visit the homes and haunts of Tennyson, Keats, Shakespeare, Wordsworth. Instead, however, he went back to Europe with Agnes the following year and again in 1928, on both occasions with the aid of checks from the hard-pressed Tesla.
Francis A. Fitzgerald, who had been a personal friend of Tesla’s since the development of Niagara Falls and who was with the Niagara Power Commission at Buffalo, tried to assist the inventor with one of his most cherished scientific concepts in 1927. He interceded with the Canadian Power Commission to finance a project to transmit power without wires. The venture was not carried
out, but it planted in the minds of some Canadians a seed that regenerates itself every few years down to the present writing in efforts to transmit hydroelectric power wirelessly and inexpensively through the Earth.
For years it had been rumored that Tesla had invented a powerful beam, a death ray, but he had been strangely uncommunicative on the subject. In early 1924 a flurry of news reports from Europe claimed that a death ray had been invented there—first by an Englishman, then by a German, and then a Russian. Almost at once an American scientist, Dr. T. F. Wall, applied for a patent on a death ray which he claimed would stop airplanes and cars. Then a newspaper in Colorado proudly retorted that Tesla had invented the first invisible death ray capable of stopping aircraft in flight while he had been experimenting there in 1899.9 The inventor was unusually noncommittal on the matter.
In 1929 when Scherff again filled out tax returns for the Nikola Tesla Company he told Tesla: “Unfortunately the Company had no tax to pay.” In this respect he was at least in tune with the times, for now the Great Depression had begun.
Tesla wrote another cheerful note to raise the spirits of his old friend Johnson, while yet admitting to his own “little financial fainting spells.” He said, “Of course I am not communicative with other friends. My prospects are better… another very fine and valuable new invention.” If he were one of the new inventors who employed press agents, he said, “the whole world would be talking about it.”10
In fact, however, his patent filings had at long last almost dwindled to a stop. He had filed a series of new patents in 1922 in fluid mechanics, which were not processed to completion. Thus they entered the common domain. One among them is believed to have particular significance. Filed March 22, 1922, it was entitled “Improvements in Methods of and Apparatus for the Production of High Vacua.”* Years later, when both the United States and Russia entered the race to perfect modern death/disintegrator ray weapons, it would be one of his ideas studied with special interest.
This was the first group of patents that he had filed since 1916. But if anyone were to have taken this as evidence that Tesla’s creative life was drawing to a close, he would have been much mistaken.
25. THE BIRTHDAY PARTIES
Born at midnight, never sure which date to celebrate, Tesla usually had not observed his birthdays at all. They had simply slipped by, and as long as he felt well, their passage had gone unnoticed.
He took pride in the fact that his weight had not changed since college days. Legends were told about his catlike fitness. Walking down Fifth Avenue one icy winter day, he had lost his footing, hurled himself into a flying somersault, landed on his feet, and kept on walking. Bug-eyed pedestrians swore that they had never seen anything like it outside of a circus.
But in old age he began to make up for the missed birthdays. Each anniversary became the occasion for a celebration with reporters and photographers. At these parties, to the delight of his young friends, he announced fantastic inventions and indulged in prophesy to his heart’s content. Only sober Mr. Kaempffert, with the dignity of the Times to uphold, found such sessions grating. How they hung on the guru’s every word as he spun his visionary nonsense. And worst of all, how they pretended to understand!1
A very special birthday party was arranged by Swezey for Tesla’s seventy-fifth anniversary. This shy young science writer was a person of few words—one who knew him remembers that he spoke almost cryptically—yet he was extraordinarily gifted in his ability to make science understandable to lay audiences by translating abstractions into graphic images. He made party games of science and thought up puzzles and simple kitchen-table experiments that captivated children. He wrote a book, After-Dinner Science, that enjoyed a popular success, especially with the parents of school-aged children. He also wrote advanced articles for scientific magazines.
Tesla was a hero to him. Swezey was, of course, more capable than the average person of appreciating the inventor’s importance in the perspective of the history of science, and like Behrend, he was troubled by the public’s short-mindedness. He resolved to do something about it.
And so, for the inventor’s seventy-fifth birthday party in 1931, he asked famous scientists and engineers the world over to send some thing, and a flood of congratulatory letters and tributes to Tesla poured in. Among the authors were several Nobel laureates who acknowledged, with respect and gratitude, his inspiration to their own careers.2
Robert Millikan wrote of attending a Tesla lecture at the age of twenty-five, one of the first demonstrations of the Tesla coil. “Since then,” he wrote, “I have done no small fraction of my research work with the aid of the principles I learned that night so that it is not merely my congratulations that I am sending you but with them also my gratitude and my respect in overflowing measure.”
Arthur H. Compton declared: “To men like yourself who have learned first hand the secrets of nature and who have shown us how her laws may be applied by solving our everyday problems, we of the younger generation owe a debt that cannot be paid….”
All the past presidents of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers sent tributes along with many leaders in the burgeoning field of modern radio.
Lee De Forest wrote of his deep personal obligation to Tesla as scientist and inventor: “For no one so excited my youthful imagination, stimulated my inventive ambition or served as an outstanding example of brilliant achievement in the field I was eager to enter, as did yourself…. Not only for the physical achievement of your researches on high frequencies which laid the basic foundations of the great industry of radio transmission in which I have labored, but for the incessant inspiration of your early writings and your example, do I owe you an especial debt of gratitude.”
Dr. Behrend spoke of “the world’s usual ingratitude toward its benefactors.
“To those of us who have lived through the anxious and fascinating period of development of alternating-current power transmission,” he said, “there is not a scintilla of doubt that the name of Tesla is as great here as the name of Faraday is in the discovery of the phenomena underlying all electrical work.”
Einstein, who seemed unaware of Tesla’s prodigious range of achievement, sent his felicitations but congratulated him only on his contributions to the field of high-frequency current.
Among Europeans who sent accolades were Dr. W. H. Bragg, co-winner of the controversial 1915 Nobel Prize in physics. From the Royal Society in London he wrote, alluding to the demonstrations made by Tesla in his lectures forty years earlier:
“I shall never forget the effect of your experiments which came first to dazzle and amaze us with their beauty and interest.”
Count von Arco, the German radio pioneer who with Prof. Adolf Slaby had developed the Slaby-Arco system wrote: “If one reads your works today—at a time when radio . . . has attained such a world significance—particularly your patents (practically all of which belong to the past century), one is again astonished at how many of your suggestions, often under another’s name, have later been realized….”
Swezey, the catalyzer of this outpouring of tributes, added his own most eloquently. Tesla’s genius, he said, had given startling impetus to the work of Roentgen and J. J. Thomson and those who followed them in the age of the electron. “Standing alone,” said the science writer, “he plunged into the unknown. He was an arch conspirator against the established order of things.”
If these encomia seem immoderate, they pale beside the comments of famed science editor and publisher Hugo Gernsback: “If you mean the man who really invented, in other words, originated and discovered—not merely improved what had already been invented by others— then without a shade of doubt Nikola Tesla is the world’s greatest inventor not only at present but in all history…. His basic as well as revolutionary discoveries, for sheer audacity, have no equal in the annals of the intellectual world.”
Alerted by Swezey to the birthday tributes, newspapers and magazines all over the world carried articles on Tesla.
Time magazine’s cover story reported that its writers had some difficulty tracking the elusive inventor (“a tall . . . eagle-headed man”) to his most recent aerie at the Hotel Governor Clinton. Interviewers regretted they could not see him as he used to be seen in his Colorado laboratory, wrote Time, “strolling or sitting like a calm Mephistopheles amid blazing, thundering cascades of sparks ….”3
What they found instead was a Tesla emaciated and almost ghostlike but still alert. His hair was slate gray, his overhanging eyebrows almost black. But the sparkle of his blue eyes and the shrillness of his voice indicated his psychic tension.4
When Swezey presented the inventor with the bound memorial volume, he found him surprised but scarcely overwhelmed. Although he merely said that he did not care for compliments from people who all his life had opposed him, the young science writer felt that secretly Tesla was pleased by the many tributes. Indeed, later when Swezey tried to borrow them briefly (copies were sent to the new Tesla Institute at Belgrade), the old man was most reluctant to part with them.
To interviewers Tesla had disclosed the ideas that currently preoccupied his thoughts. He was working on two things: one, conclusions that tended to disprove the Einstein Theory of General Relativity. His explanations, Tesla said, were less involved than Einstein’s, and when he was ready to make a full announcement, it would be seen that he had proved his conclusions.
Secondly, he was working to develop a new source of power. “When I say a new source, I mean that I have turned for power to a source [to] which no previous scientist has turned, to the best of my knowledge. The conception, the idea when it first burst upon me was a tremendous shock.”5
He said of this new source of power that it would throw light upon many puzzling phenomena of the cosmos. And in another enigmatic comment that puzzles Tesla scholars down to the present day, he said it might prove of great industrial value “particularly in creating a new and virtually unlimited market for steel.”6
Tesla: Man Out of Time Page 31