Wizard

by Marc Seifer

  17

  MARTIAN FEVER (1895-96)

  If there are intelligent inhabitants of Mars or any other planet, it seems to me that we can do something to attract their attention…I have had this scheme under consideration for five or six years.

  NIKOLA TESLA1

  John Jacob Astor III graduated from Harvard University at the age of twenty-two in 1888. He was one of the wealthiest men on the planet, with assets in the neighborhood of $100 million. By comparison, J. Pierpont Morgan’s wealth was perhaps $30 million. As a youth, Astor had been an inventor, having patented a bicycle brake and a pneumatic walkway which won a prize at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Other inventions included a storage battery, an internal-combustion engine, and a flying machine.2

  During his college years, when he was known by the unfortunate nickname of “Jack Ass,” Astor, who now sported long, tapered sideburns and a waxed mustache, had undertaken courses with the inimitable astronomy professor William Pickering. One of Astor’s pet projects was to find a way to create rain by “pumping warm, moist air from the earth’s surface into the upper atomosphere,” but the U.S. Patent Office had turned him down.3 Thus, when Pickering mentioned that the seasons were due to the inclination of the earth’s axis off of the ecliptic, Astor became intrigued. If the earth were not tilted away from the sun, Pickering suggested, it would probably have one uniform, moderate climate even at the extreme north and south latitudes.

  As part of the curriculum, Astor was introduced to the Harvard Observatory. There, along with such up and comers as Perceival Lowell, brother of the president of the university, Astor could peer through the great telescope and view such wonders as the craters on the moon, the satellites of Jupiter, and Saturn’s spectacular rings.

  In April 1890, Professor Pickering made headlines when he photographed what he said was a snowstorm on the planet Mars. He calculated that the area covered was almost equal to that of the United States.4 Two years later, during a celebrated trip to Harvard’s observatory in Arequipa, Peru, the bushily bearded professor announced another major discovery: “lakes in great numbers on Mars. The canals,” Pickering proclaimed, “have dark as well as bright regions. We also observed clouds, and the melting of snows, and this confirmed Herschel’s hypothesis that there was vegetation around the regions of water.”5

  The idea of attempting to signal “Marsians,” as they were then called, was a familiar ambition of the day, and Astor, like Tesla, was caught in the fancy of it. In 1894, Perceival Lowell announced in Nature his description of the canals of Mars. At the same time, Astor, just thirty years old, completed a science fiction novel about space travel. Entitled A Journey in Other Worlds, his book offered a futuristic vision of what takes place one century into the future. A few months after publication, in February 1895, the financier presented a copy to the great inventor.

  Although Tesla did not appear to be particularly impressed by the work, the inventor promised Astor to keep it “as an interesting and pleasant memento of our acquaintance.”6

  Adorned with ethereal outer-space illustrations by Dan Beard, Astor’s tale begins in the year 2000, with a meeting at Delmonico’s restaurant of the Terrestrial Axis Straightening Company, whose task it is to create fair weather throughout the planet.

  Astor envisions for “the close of the 20th Century” a picture telephone, an airplane with the ability to fly to Europe in one day, an electric automobile, hidden phonographs by the police to record conversations of criminals, color photography, a rain-making device, the idea of colonizing the solar system, and the understanding that the earth would appear like a crescent moon when seen from outer space.

  Perhaps Astor’s most impressive prediction is the path that his “spaceship” Callisto takes on its journey to Jupiter. Astor hypothesizes that just as magnetism has a repelling force, gravity should as well. This energy, which he called apergy, is simply the opposite of gravity. By harnessing apergy, the astronauts in the story aim their ship first toward the sun, then “change their course to something like a tangent to the earth, and [receive] their final right direction [back out toward Jupiter] in swinging near the moon…to bring apergy into play.”7 Exactly a century after this book appeared, NASA actually did send a spacecraft, named the Galileo, on a voyage along a remarkably similar trajectory, using Venus instead of the moon as the pivot for the swing-back out toward Jupiter. Whereas this modern trip will take a few years, Astor’s weary travelers cover the distance in a matter of days. Jupiter is abundant with life. Flowers greet them by “sing[ing] with the volume of a cathedral organ.” The red spot, they find out, was caused by a forest changing color due to a cold snap.8 Armed, the astronauts are able to hunt down animals resembling mastodons which they kill for food. Fortunately, they also have the wherewithall to hop back onto the Callisto so that they can return to Earth.

  Fueled by a competitive spirit, the newspapers and magazines continued to promulgate the idea that Mars was inhabited by beings possibly more intelligent than we. As Tesla made headlines in the New York dailies and electrical journals for his bold prediction that he would “signal the stars” and Astor made the bookstores with his space traveling “romance of the future,” other luminaries were also capitalizing on the extraterrestrial fervor.

  In 1895, George Lathrop, son-in-law of novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, had earthlings battle warriors from the Red Planet on the pages of the New York Journal. Their weapons were disintegrating death rays invented by the Wizard of Menlo Park, Thomas Edison. The following year, George duMaurier, grandfather of Daphne, wrote the novel The Martian, in which he describes telepathic winged beings “that descend from no monkey” but are able to adorn marble statues and irrigate the entire planet.9 And the year after, H. G. Wells gained notoriety with his serialized Person’s magazine horror story War of the Worlds, in which ghastly octupus-like Martians storm Earth in their egg-shaped spaceships and take over.

  Although fictional, these stories were based on prognostications put forward by supposedly sober scientists. The major culprit was the French astronomer and psychic researcher Camille Flammarion. In Stories of Infinity: Lumen—History of a Comet in Infinity, published in 1873, Flammarion interviewed “Lumen,” a sagacious returning comet, on such topics as the speed of light, time travel, and life on other planets. Lumen: “Ah, if you knew the organisms that vibrate on Jupiter or Uranus…you would know that some living beings can understand without eyes, ears or smell; that there are other faculties of an unascertainable number in nature essentially different than yours.”10

  This idea, called the plurality of worlds hypothesis, is an antediluvian concept which, through the ages, has counted numerous scientists among its adherents. Early astronomers such as Kepler, Newton, Laplace, and Herschel took this position, along with such modern astrophysicists as Carl Sagan.

  Human beings, grasping the immensity of the cosmos, know that life is not necessarily unique to Earth. Roman and Greek mythology, which concerned the lives and responsibilities of specific deities and included a god for each of the known planets, probably served as a psychological template for astronomers’ speculations and corresponding religious beliefs.

  Carl Jung has linked such mythological thinking to the belief in UFOs, the search for meaning, and the search for God. Identifying God with the unknowable, the unconscious, and the wisdom revealed in dream interpretation, Jung says that the myth arises through attempts by the conscious to understand the unconscious.11 Thus, the mysteries of outer space are connected with those of inner space. Primordial instincts, archetypes, would therefore be the mechanism evolved through attempts to explain celestial natural phenomena. Over time, these were transformed into the myths of our forefathers.

  This belief in ancient sky gods and extraterrestrial existence stems from a common motif, that is, that humans cannot be the highest beings in the cosmos and, furthermore, that there is a supreme creator. Because the idea strikes a deep chord, through the centuries numerous scientists, artists, and authors
have been seized by this notion.

  In 1835, Richard Adams Locke of the New York Sun created a series of front-page articles on astronomer Sir John Herschel, discoverer of Uranus and alleged discoverer of advanced life-forms on the moon. Locke’s hoax, which spread around the world before it was exposed, was made possible by the fact that Herschel was in South Africa at the time and therefore out of contact with the press. Herschel’s supposed discoveries of unicorn-like animals and winged humanoids were made via a marvelous (and fictitious) telescope that was 150 feet long and could magnify the heavens forty-two thousand times.12 Thirty years later, Jules Verne journeyed his readers to the moon, but by the late 1870s the destination had shifted to Mars.

  The first attempt to create a map of Mars and delineate the features seen on it can be traced back to Bernard de Fontana and Christian Huygens in the mid-1600s. More detailed drawings were sketched by Herschel in 1830 and by numerous other scientists in the 1860s and 1870s, such as Camille Flammarion,13 and in the 1880s by Giovanni Schiaparelli, who named these channels canali.

  In two scientific treatises, The Plurality of Worlds and Mars and Its Inhabitants, Flammarion stated his belief that Mars not only housed life but also intelligent beings. Dwarfed in stature, positioned next to his fifteenfoot-tall telescope, the bearded French astronomer described in detail the mountains, valleys, craters, lakes, and oceans of Mars in North American Review in 1896. “It is obvious,” Flammarion concluded, “the world of Mars is…vigorously alive.” Perhaps unconsciously influenced by the 1835 New York Sun hoax, or du Maurier’s story, Flammarion suggested that due to the lightness of the atmosphere, “the inhabitants…may have received the privilege of flight…May they not rather be like dragon-flies fluttering in the air above the lakes and the canals?”14

  Whereas Flammarion only set out to describe the Martians, Tesla actually made plans to contact them. The most influential American proponent, however, was undoubtedly the erudite Perceival Lowell, descendant of the famous Massachusetts Lowell family. Influenced by Flammarion, Lowell would capture the front page of the newspapers on many occasions with “Mars inhabited” headlines. He would also come to author a number of scholarly accounts covered in such prestigious journals as Nature and Scientific American,15 all culminating in his weighty text The Canals of Mars, disseminated by the distinguished Macmillan Publishing Company.16

  Unlike the warlike humans of Earth, Martians dwelled in a coordinated world, Lowell speculated. They had outgrown their savage instincts and “consciously practice peace.” These Martians were “sagacious builders” who conserved their precious water and learned to live in a civilized global society.

  Mars was an older and thus more experienced planet. Its people had lived through the technological revolution aeons ago, so they had learned to harvest and cultivate their planet from a global perspective.

  With humanity at the dawn of a new technological society, it was comforting to think that we would not have to face this rapidly advancing condition alone. As one of a community of intelligent planets, we had neighbors to whom we could turn for guidance.

  By the late 1890s, Lowell had completed construction of his own gargantuan telescope at Flagstaff, Arizona, where it is still, today, one of the finest in the world. There he would report each new discovery, including the cataloging of galaxies, which at the time were called “island universes.”

  It is hard to overestimate Lowell’s impact on contemporary thinking. For instance, the vegetation hypothesis was echoed by Wernher von Braun, Willy Ley, and P. Bonestell, who cowrote in their 1956 text The Exploration of Mars: “And this is the picture of Mars at mid-century: a small planet which ¾ths is cold desert, with the rest covered with a sort of plant life [most likely lichen]…Mars is not the dead planet…but neither can it be inhabited by the kind of intelligent beings that many people dreamed of in 1900.”17

  A society’s beliefs determines its reality. But society is made up of individuals, and in the case of the idea that Mars was inhabited, these individuals often embellished their supposed objective scientific findings. Supported vigorously by the press, the most important proponents of the “life on Mars” scenario were the astronomers, but the position was also championed by the inventors.

  Elihu Thomson, a longtime stargazer and friend of Professor Pickering’s, was so enthusiastic that he often took his telescope to his factories so that workers could see the Martian canal system with their own eyes.18 Other eminent scientists included Lord Kelvin, who, upon his arrival in America in September 1897, announced to the press his idea to flash a signal at night from the glittering metropolis of New York City to Mars to let them know we are here. No doubt he discussed this plan with Tesla when he visited his laboratory during the journey.19 Edison, too, was caught up in esoteric causes, but his wish was to invent a telephone-like device to contact departed spirits rather than living Martians.

  “The possibility of beckoning Martians was the extreme application of [my] principle of propagation of electric waves,” Mr. Tesla told the interviewers in 1896 in the article “Is Tesla to Signal the Stars?” “The same principle may be employed with good effects for the transmission of news to all parts of the earth…Every city on the globe could be on an immense circuit. [Thus] a message sent from New York would be in England, Africa and Australia in an instant. What a grand thing it would be.”20

  18

  HIGH SOCIETY (1894-97)

  Nikola Tesla is one of the great geniuses and most remarkable men who have ever had anything to do with electricity…It is as much of an honor to propose him for membership as his membership would be an addition to the club.

  LETTER TO THE PLAYERS’ CLUB BY STANFORD WHITE1

  Commuting to New Jersey was only a temporary solution, and within a few weeks, Tesla returned to New York, where he secured a laboratory just below Greenwich Village, near Chinatown, at 46 and 48 Houston Street. Nervous and perpetually on the brink of exhaustion, Tesla began to experiment with the healing properties of his oscillators as reports began to filter in from around the country about its remarkable curative properties. These high-frequency “vitality boosters” would generate a “universal healing agent” that, when applied, would enable the body to “throw off all diseases,” said Dr. F. Finch Strong. “Effects obtained [included]…increase of strength, appetite and weight, induction of natural sleep, and elimination.”2 Other doctors reported the ability to cure tuberculosis.

  “Tesla believes that electricity is the greatest of all doctors and says that when his laboratory was burned, nothing but regular daily applications of electricity kept him from sinking into a state of melancholia.”3 “My high frequencies,” he would say, “produce an anti-germicidal action.” Thus, as part of his routine for a day at the lab, the inventor would disrobe, step upon his apparatus, and turn on the juice. A prickly corona would envelop his body and restore it to a more pristine condition.

  Electricity had become the new panacea; it could cure the sick, eradicate the criminals, and even eliminate recalcitrant undergrowth that “interfere[d] with the running of trains…Weeding has always been considered very hard work, but with the aid of the electrical weeder, a man has only to touch a button and the weeds vanish.”4

  In May 1895, Tesla and the Johnsons attended the dedication ceremony for the new arch, situated as the gateway, looking south, to Greenwich Village at Washington Square Park and looking north to the beginning of Fifth Avenue. Designed by Stanford White, “the dashing man with the red moustache,” the lofty edifice stood taller and wider than any comparable one erected by the mighty ancient Romans or Greeks. Johnson had recited one of his poems in honor of the original wooden one which had been built in 1889.

  This was but one more connection between Tesla and the celebrated Stanford White, whose many other monuments and buildings were rapidly reshaping the city into a regal testament to the great and vibrant gay era. Tesla would often run into White at the offices of the Century, where the artist would be commissioned to
illustrate their covers, and at meetings involving the Niagara Falls enterprise at Delmonico’s, the Waldorf, and the theater or the Madison Square Garden roof restaurant. Having designed the Players’ Club in Manhattan in 1887, the Tennis Club in Newport, churches, and numerous mansions, White was also an interior decorator. It was said that he knew the color of the boudoir of every woman of note in the city. A trendsetter and sensualist, White became one of the leading choreographers of the ambience of the percolating metropolis. Good friends with the inventor, White often talked with Tesla about their shared vision of the future.

  Tesla had met White in 1891 when the piano virtuoso Ignace Paderewski played the Garden for five breathtaking performances. Edward Dean Adams was in the midst of courting both men, Tesla for his inventions and White for his architectural prowess, and he wanted to get the two together to discuss the best way to place Westinghouse’s behemoth electric generators in the upcoming powerhouse.

  “My dear Mr. Adams,” White wrote, “I duly received the information of the Cataract Construction Company and will pitch in [as soon as possible]…With McKim in Chicago and Mead in Canada I am here alone in a sort of maelstrom of work…If it were not for the Roof Garden and the ballet girls to cheer me up, I should have been dead long ago.”5 By the end of the year, White had sent Adams designs for the proposed buildings. Adams reciprocated by sending White a magnificent text on precious stones and a “stunning gift” (most likely a ruby or emerald).6

  In 1893, Tesla and White crossed paths again, as both were cardinal participants in the Chicago World’s Fair. The following year, White, then forty, urged the inventor to become a member of the Players’ Club. “Will you not let me put you up for membership?” he inquired. “It is an inexpensive club and the character of men I think you would like, and I know it would give me the greatest pleasure to meet you there now and then.”7 Tesla requested that Johnson be included for membership, and White agreed.