“Bankroll? With whose money?”
“As an investment.”
“Mm. How much of my money, then?”
“Well. I’m not a businessman, but enough for him to do the work. I’ll be there to see that the experiments are continuing; somebody else will keep in touch with you.”
“What? Who’s going to keep in touch with me? I’ve only spoken to you.”
“So that’s it for tonight. You have ten days to get the financial connections put together.”
“All right… all right. But I should stay out of it myself, correct?”
“It’s late. Good night, Mr. Morgan. I’ll show myself out.”
“Just a moment! Now then, in return for my cooperation — which I am happy to provide, but nevertheless we are at a delicate stage right now. May I safely assume that Washington is willing to guarantee that it will not involve itself with my business concerns?”
The man from Washington smiled the gratified smile of a petty bureaucrat who has just humbled an industrial giant.
“Yep. The whole town.”
“Now see here just one minute!”
“We’ll be in touch! Toodle-ooo!” the man from Washington openly sneered while he walked out and shut the door.
Morgan sat staring at the closed office door with outrage flashing in his eyes. He did not move or speak a word. For several silent moments, all he could do was breathe.
* * *
Nearly a week passed before the poisoned arrow found its mark. Nikola was halfway through a relaxed dinner in the dining room of the Waldorf Astoria hotel, seated at his customary isolated table for two. For some reason, he had pulled the chair across from him slightly out from the table and appeared to be concentrating on his plate while he idly played with his food.
From time to time, he glanced up at the empty spot across the table. Each time he looked back down, the corners of his lips twitched with a barely concealed smile.
“Mr. Tesla, I believe?”
Nikola looked up to see an expensively tailored man who appeared to be about Nikola’s age. “Yes?”
The gentleman extended his hand. “John Jacob Astor, at your service.”
Nikola quickly stood and did a slight bow instead of grasping Astor’s hand. “How do you do, Mr. Astor. I know of you, of course.”
Astor withdrew his hand and smiled. “Well, only because I was lucky enough to be born into my father’s fortune. But sir, I see you are alone and wonder if you might allow me a few minutes of your time?” Astor grabbed the empty chair across from Nikola and plopped himself down in it without waiting for an answer.
“I have a most interesting business proposition, Mr. Tesla. Please, sit! Are you all right?”
Nikola clenched his muscles and squinted, then stood up straight and smiled. “I’m fine, thank you.” He took his seat.
Astor’s eyes gleamed with excitement while he began to speak in confidential, urgent tones. “I am not here representing the Astor family’s interests, sir. I have a private source of funding—confidential source, you understand—and I would like to use it to sponsor your experiments with the worldwide power system, just as you’ve described it for the press.”
Nikola laughed. “I see you do business in the same fashion as George Westinghouse.”
“Excuse me?”
“Bluntness. Very American. I like it. Saves time.”
“Well. Thank you.” He leaned close and again adopted the confidential tone. “The plain truth is that I’m thrilled to be able to make you an offer like this; I’ve been following your articles for years now, and this grasp that you have—of the very fundamental nature of energy, as I understand it—well, it’s just extremely interesting to anybody at all who cares to ask himself what the future is going to look like in this country. And by that I mean the near future, Mr. Tesla. Say another decade or so.”
“I suppose the frank answer to that is that electrical science will transform every level of motive power, both commercial and industrial. It will affect every single member of our society.”
“Without a doubt! I could not agree more!” He dropped his voice to a secretive murmur. “Mr. Tesla, I will advance you thirty thousand dollars to begin this research now! My bank can honor a draft tomorrow morning.”
“Sir, if you have read my articles, then you know that I have determined that to do such experimentation, the work must be done in Colorado, on the eastern face of the Rocky Mountains.”
“Well yes, I read that, but I thought you might not have to actually—”
“It’s a combination of the high altitude the very high ore content within that mountain range. There is an ideal situation for encouraging an electrical charge to pass from the earth to the sky.”
Astor slapped his palm down on the table and beamed. “Colorado it is, then! You will have what you need to do this work. Just allow me to represent your financial partners, and you will retain half ownership of every dollar of profits!”
An excited flush filled Nikola’s face while he considered the possibilities. “Mr. Astor, you have overwhelmed me with this, this wonderful…” Nikola reeled, suddenly dizzy.
“No need to rush, sir. Take your time.”
“But I do! I do need to rush. Time is one thing in which I will always be poor. The strangest thing here is simply that someone I know told me to expect something like this, but I would not believe… this person.”
Astor grinned and winked. “Well whoever she is, she’s got herself a crystal ball, Mr. Tesla! Because I tell you, I only got approval for the funding this afternoon. I’m so excited that I couldn’t even wait for tomorrow’s business day to begin!” He shrugged. “As you can see.”
Nikola’s eyes flicked up to a point above and behind Astor’s right shoulder. The same curious tug twitched at the corners of his mouth. He nodded to himself.
“Mr. Astor, the sum of money you mentioned is certainly enough so that I could take my crew to Colorado, build the laboratory and begin the process. But within a few months we would need more to complete the work.”
“Of course!” Astor beamed, smelling success. “Of course! The results you achieve with the first round of funding will determine how much the second round will be!” He extended his hand, ready to shake on the deal. “Fair enough?”
Nikola stared at the extended hand for a moment. Finally he smiled in gratitude and reached out to return Astor’s handshake. He remained sitting while they finished their goodbyes so that he could wipe his hand under the table with a fresh napkin and drop it to the floor while Astor walked away.
Chapter Thirty-One
1899
The New Tesla Lab
Colorado Springs
It was late evening when a rolling pack of thunder heads boiled over the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains and collapsed into furious storm activity while they approached the town of Colorado Springs. The strip of mountains overlooking the town, capped by Pike’s Peak at more than fourteen thousand feet, left the thin mountain air to swirl over the ore-laden peaks until it became so highly charged that brilliant lightning streamers fizzed through the sky.
Rain was not falling yet, but the ozone produced by electrical discharges gave the night air its familiar pre-rain smell. The patch of sky farthest from the mountains was still clear enough to allow a few stars to shine in the silent pause before the storm took over.
The break in the sky hovered over Nikola’s new laboratory on the southeastern outskirts of town. The approaching discharges revealed dreamlike glimpses of a strangely shaped two-story wooden building in the middle of a field at the intersection of two dirt roads. A tall fence surrounded the property, with each fencepost bearing the same sign, “Keep Away—Great Danger!”
The new structure’s freshly cut timbers still oozed pine sap, helping to seal the new joints against the coming rainfall well enough to effectively keep out every forbidden drop of water. The roof above the second story
was topped by a level platform that looked like a large raft balanced on the peak of the slanted roof. The platform was as long and wide as the building itself, and braced with strong timbers. A one hundred and forty-foot mast extended up from the ground, through the platform and into the sky, tipped by a hollow copper ball several feet in diameter.
Nikola was with his crew gathered on the second floor to celebrate their first night in the newly completed laboratory. The tone of the meeting was strange from the outset. George Scherff and half a dozen local hired helpers joined three others from the New York lab, standing on the far side of the room and maintaining a respectful if somewhat embarrassed silence. Nikola lay on a sofa next to an open window and stared out into the approaching storm, conversing with the lightning displays as if they were treasured pets.
“Come on now, my friends! We need the best you can throw at us, tonight! We want to know how much power this place can push into the air!” As if to answer him, an unusually large lightning bolt fired off in the distance and sent Nikola into a gale of delighted laughter. The new men winced at this behavior but took their cue from the experienced ones, who had seen it all before and made no other reaction.
“There! You are getting close. More! Show us!”
At that point another gigantic bolt fired off above the mountain range and fanned its way to the ground nearly three miles away. This one was far bigger than anything the men had seen there.
“Yes!” Nikola shouted. “That’s the one!” He pulled out his pocket watch, quickly checked it and turned to the other men. “Duck! We have about thirteen seconds!”
He hopped off the sofa and hurried over to a spot behind a massive, half-assembled generator. “Five seconds!” he happily called to the men, who still had not moved. George needed no further encouragement. He hustled over to Nikola, then turned to glare at the other men.
They finally broke and stampeded behind the dynamo, arriving just as Nikola bellowed, “Now!”
A rumbling blast rolled across the plain delivering a shock wave with such force that it rattled the glass in the windows and shook the building. When the rumbling subsided and Nikola leaped to his feet, he was the only one to rise.
He laughed in triumph and shouted to the others, “There, you see? Our first night in the completed laboratory and we have already witnessed the truth that the ore in these mountains resonates with the storm clouds and produces lightning which can be many times its normal strength!”
The workers remained squatting behind the dynamo for another moment, spooked and ready to bolt. But George stood and patted a couple of them on the shoulder, pulling them to their feet while Nikola prattled on, “And gentlemen, tomorrow night—tomorrow night the lightning will be created here!”
Sunset arrived the following evening in a clear sky. Nikola stood outside with a direct view up to the tower mast and its copper ball. It seemed to glow against the reddening sky.
“George! He called out. “Is everyone in place?”
“All set inside, sir!” George hollered back from his position on the ground floor. He stood just inside the door at a large iron switch wired to a huge copper coil, and the coil was made of thick wire wrapped around a circular wooden fence fifty feet in diameter and ten feet high. In the center of the coil stood the bottom end of the tall mast, anchored deep into the ground.
Half a dozen of the other men worked at various checkpoints around the large coil, while several others stood by to observe a series of smaller coils inside the lab. These coils were not wired to anything. But Nikola had calculated that the size ratios of the smaller coils should allow them to “attune” to the output of the giant coil, so they would receive energy from it and throw it off in the form of electrical discharges. The exercise itself tested the men’s loyalty, since it was apparent to anyone with a working knowledge of science that free-standing electrical coils could never receive a “charge” from any source, unless they were connected by wires.
Some of the workers stayed at their posts out of a blind belief in Nikola’s ability, even if he was experimenting with equipment that everyone else expected to fail. The more critical among them were already convinced that the experiment was an expensive exercise in madness. A few only did their jobs out of curiosity, wondering just how spectacular tonight’s disaster was going to be.
Under those watchful eyes, Nikola called to George Scherff, who was inside the building standing by the control switch, “Open power to the coil!”
George slammed the big switch forward, releasing the flow of electricity from the town’s municipal generators. The city had granted full cooperation to the strange experiments that were being conducted in their town by this world renowned inventor. The municipal utility had even closed off power to other customers so that Nikola’s lab would have all the current that it needed during the few minutes that the experiment was expected to take.
Now a deep and powerful hum began to rise from the giant coil. It resonated with every object, living or inanimate, throughout the building. It grew louder and more powerful until the four-by-eight beams of the foundation itself began to vibrate in response.
Nikola stood holding his breath and watching the big copper ball at the top of the mast, waiting for any sign of electrical discharge. Seconds passed. There was nothing but noise and powerful electrical vibration until finally, it began…
A halo of sparks formed on the surface of the copper ball, discharging excess electricity into the open air. The halo steadily expanded in size until the sparks were long enough to give the ball a coating of fiery hair.
“Yes! George, yes! It’s working! Keep the power on!”
Nikola could barely hear George’s “Yes sir!” over the snapping of the sparks, which were still continuing to grow. Suddenly they were an English foot in length … then five feet… ten feet… and soon sparks twenty feet long began leaping from the surface of the hollow copper ball atop the hundred and forty foot wooden mast.
“There it is, George! The energy we are pumping into the ground is reverberating back!”
But no one could hear him. By that point the sounds of the giant discharges exploded like cannon fire.
Back inside, the frightened workers found sparks several inches long jumping from their fingertips to the nearby coils. George tried to close the big switch, but the shock of the touch was too strong and he recoiled away.
Nikola leaped and twirled beneath the tall mast like a child on Christmas morning. Now the din of the discharges was deafening, and an artificial lightning bolt over a hundred feet long snapped out of the copper ball and crackled in the sky. It hung in the air, lasting several long seconds.
“It works!” Nikola screamed. “The planet is bouncing the energy back to us! It works! It wooorks!”
Meanwhile George frantically bellowed, “Sir, the coil is overloading! I can’t shut it down!”
The smaller coils that were sitting around the shop and not yet connected to anything at all began to resonate with the charge of the master coil, so that they now also spewed showers of sparks by pulling power from the air. The men staggered from their posts in terror.
Nikola gave no sign that he heard Scherff’s warning while he stared in fascination at the aerial display. Now lightning bolts of more than a hundred feet were snapping into the sky one after another, arriving so fast that they overlapped while they fanned the air.
He threw his arms high and bellowed with glee. “You see? Do you see? There’s no limit to the power! This force can carry humanity’s labor! It will take us to the staaarrrs!”
The tower shorted out with a huge bang and two brief fizzles. A second later, it fizzled a third time, billowing smoke from the superheated copper.
Then everything fell silent…
After a moment, George Scherff staggered to the door. Little wisps of smoke rose from his frazzled suit.
“George!” Nikola yelled. “What have you done? I never gave the signal to shut down!�
��
“It wasn’t me, Mr. Tesla. I wasn’t able to shut it down! It’s the supply. The city power has been shut off. Nothing’s coming in at all.”
At that moment the other men appeared at the door behind George, wide-eyed and silent. George glanced at them and then back to Nikola. “Also, another inch of rubber under our boots would be good, I should think.”
The largest of the men leaned in toward George and whispered, “A good inch, Mr. Scherff.”
George turned and repeated out loud to Nikola, “A good inch.”
Fifteen minutes later the door to the Colorado Springs Municipal Power Company flew open and Nikola rushed inside.
“Who cut power to my lab?” he demanded. “Our experiment was not finished! Why would you…” He stopped cold and took in the scene.
A small crowd of disgusted municipal workers turned to glare at him, faces black with soot. Huge wrenches dangled from their hands.
Both of the two giant municipal generators were dead silent, nothing more now than blackened hunks of smoldering metal. Nikola’s mind raced.
“Ahhh. But! You see? If my tower pulled so much power that it overloaded two large commercial dynamos, then that proves that the coil was resonating with the earth itself! Fed by it! Where else would it get the power? Fed by the planet’s own charge!”
He ran over to one of the dynamos for a closer look. “See? If these dynamos had not melted down, the power could have built up to an infinite degree. Starting from only a very small current! Tiny!”
He paused, noting their expressions. “Why, the possibilities…” he weakly finished.
The grimy workers only stared back at him.
“And! Gentlemen! Of course it goes without saying that I will bring my entire team over and we will repair these, uh, these—” He gestured to the generators. “Both of them. Immediately! Like new! Better than new!”
In the Matter of Nikola Tesla Page 26