by Marc Seifer
NIKOLA TESLA1
Tesla went to Colorado in part for reasons of secrecy. His allimportant transmitting oscillators and general design had already been pirated, and he would shortly be involved in a variety of priority battles. Looking at the Colorado project from the technical point of view, the inventor was in a virgin field and needed to experiment in order to determine a workable plan for distributing light, information, and power by means of wireless. The measuring of standing waveforms from the electrical storms throughout July confirmed what he had suspected, namely, that the earth had a resonant frequency and could therefore be used as a carrier wave to transmit his signals.
Letters between Scherff and Tesla continued on an almost daily basis throughout the summer. In August, Tesla received an “invitation to attend the banquet honoring the birthday of the Emperor Francis Joseph.”2 Correspondence also came in from Austria, India, Australia, and Scandinavia. “The [last] one,” Scherff wrote, “is a proposition to become agent or manufacturer of your new light for Sweden, Norway and Denmark.”3 To the numerous business inquiries, Tesla wrote, “[Tell them] that I am on a scientific expedition, and will return in a few weeks.”4 There was also correspondence with William Rankine, E. D. Adams, Mr. Coaney (a stockholder), and Alfred Brown.
Bills were forwarded, and the inventor, in turn, would periodically mail off funds to cover these expenses. Wages for the crew ran about ninety dollars a pay period. The New York laboratory, in turn, prepared new equipment to be shipped west, as Scherff continued to send details about their construction.
September 6, 1899
Dear Mr. Scherff,
Can you write about something more interesting than the
pump. There are many things happening in a great city…[Try]
and make your correspondence more interesting…[such as in sending] press clippings.
Sincerely,
N. Tesla5
As was his custom, the inventor lived in the future, writing to Scherff in late August that he expected to return to New York in a few weeks. It would be more like four months. At the same time, Lowenstein requested permission to take leave, as he wanted to return to Germany for some family matter. Tesla feared that he might be an industrial spy, but he was only going home to get married. Koleman Czito was called on to replace him.
“Czito has just arrived,” Tesla wrote, “and I [am] glad to see a familiar face again. He looks a little too fat for the work I expect of him.”6 He would come just in time to take part in some of the most spectacular electrical experiments ever performed. A hearty and trustworthy companion, Czito would stay at Tesla’s call until he was an old man. By that time, he had trained his son Julius to take over. Julius would eventually come to aid Tesla in some of his more clandestine earth-lunar experiments as well as in dayto-day responsibilities.7
Throughout September, Tesla designed a large number of electronic tubes for his glassblower in New York to fashion, and for Scherff to ship, as he continued to document his work with a local photographer. Electrical energy generated exceeded 3 million volts. Tesla reported, “I drew 1-inch sparks between my body and an iron pipe buried in the ground about 100 feet from the laboratory.”8
On the twenty-ninth, time-lapse pictures were mailed to John Jacob Astor, sugar refinery king, H. D. Havemeyer, his wife and their daughter, Mrs. E. F. Winslow, Stanford White, socialite Mary Mapes Dodge, and the Johnsons. He also shipped copies to Lord Kelvin, Sir William Crookes, Sir James Dewar, William Roentgen, Philip Lenard, and Adolph Slaby.9 “Look them over carefully before delivery,” the inventor instructed his liaison, “and do not allow the workers, other than yourself and Mr. Ulman to see them.”10
Throughout the autumn, the inventor continued to change the height of the ball at the top of the antenna to measure the change in capacity and relationship to generated wavelengths in order to tune the equipment to the earth’s frequency and “bring the oscillator into resonance with th[e] circuit.”11 Made out of wood, the ball was coated with metal. He also studied the strange phenomena of fireballs, which, when created by natural means, can appear like tumbleweeds of lightning that can roll down a street and smash into a tree or house. They are rarely seen, though there are documented sightings. Although Tesla himself had not witnessed any natural fireballs, he was able to create smaller ones in his lab. “Sometimes it apeared [sic] as if a ball would form above the coil, but this may have been only an optical effect caused by many streamers passing from various points in different directions…At [other] times, a big cluster of them would form and spatter irregularly in all directions.”12 “He produced them quite by accident and saw them, more than once, explode and shatter his tall mast and also destroy apparatus within his laboratory. The destructive action accompanying the disintegration of a fire ball, he declared, takes place with inconceivable violence.”13
In one instance, he pushed the experiments too far, and a fire started. Trapped by streamers that could maim or kill, the inventor had to roll to safety to save his life. To Johnson he wrote, “I have had wonderful experiences here, among other things, tamed a wild cat and am nothing but a mass of bleeding scratches. But in the scratches, Luka, there lies a mind. MIND.”14
A few weeks later, while a photographer was present, Tesla set the roof in flames but was able to extinguish it before much damage was done. “The display was wonderful in spite of this,” he wrote in his diary.15
Having studied the phenomena, Tesla attributed the generation of fireballs to “the interaction of two frequencies, a stray higher frequency wave imposed on the lower frequency free oscillation of the main circuit.” They could also be produced when “stray high frequency charges from random earth currents” interacted with charges from his oscillator.16
The following week, he extended the ball to a height of 142 feet and began “propagating waves through the ground.”17
Referring to electrical or radio wave action at a distance, I know from experience that if proper precautions are not taken, fires of all kinds and explosions can be produced by wireless transmitters. In my experiments in Colorado, when the plant was powerfully excited, the lightning arresters for twelve miles around were bridged with continuous arcs, much stronger and more persistent than those which ordinarily took place during an electric storm. I have excited loops (coil aerials) and lighted incandescent lamps at considerable distance from the laboratory without even using more than five or ten per cent of the capacity of the transmitter. When the oscillator was excited to about 4,000,000 volts and an incandescent lamp was held in the hand about fifty or sixty feet from the laboratory, [emphasis added] the filament was often broken by the vibration set up, giving some idea of the magnitude of the electromotive forces generated in the space.18
Tesla had calculated that the earth pulsated at varying frequencies, especially twelve cycles per second.19 With his coils wound with lengths of wire in harmonic relationships to the required wavelengths needed to “girdle the globe,” he wrote in his diary, the length of the coil was calculated based on the equation:
wavelength/4 = harmonic of total wavelength (or) required length of coil
Taking into account the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second and the circumference of the earth, it was determined that coils would have to be “roughly” a mile in length, or some harmonic of this figure, to be in a resonant terrestrial frequency.20 Other components included the thickness of the wire itself and horsepower generated. By increasing the frequency between pulsations, the inventor claimed to be able to boost horsepower to a few hundred thousand, although this amount of produced energy would last only a fraction of a second.21
Czito arrived for work one day in mid-autumn to find the inventor vigorously watering the ground around the metal plate which he had buried near the lab. “If I could only insulate these wires with liquid oxygen, I could reduce losses another magnitude,” the inventor said. “Here, put these on.” He gave Czito a pair of rubber-soled shoes as he laced up a pair for himself.
“All the way today, sir?” Czito inquired.
“To the limit, my friend. Now remember,” the inventor cautioned, “keep one hand behind your back at all times.”
Czito responded with a nod of his head. He had no plans to risk electrocution by creating a circuit through his heart.
“Throw the switch when you see my signal.”
“We had better use these, sir.” Czito handed his boss two cotton balls and took two for himself, and they plugged them into their ears.
The lanky Serb lumbered from his lab in his high shoes, past the mud, to place testing equipment and cold lamps at various locations in the earth, and positioned himself on a knoll about a mile away, near Prospect Lake. Even though insulated, sparks jumped from the ground to his feet as he crunched along the path.22
The sun was low on the horizon as Colorado Springs began to turn on streetlights and electric lamps in preparation for the night. “Now,” Tesla waved as Czito fired up the equipment.
The sound began as a low rumble and built to a “roar [that] was so strong that it could be plainly heard ten miles away.” The ground trembled with the noise as the inventor gazed over to a nearby corral to watch a half-dozen horses rear on their hind legs and gallop frantically away. “Butterflies were carried around in…circle[s] as in a [whirlpool] and could not get out, no matter how hard they tried,”23 as the flume of streamers stormed up the shaft high above the roof of the lab and blustered out from the apex, splitting lightning bolts fully 135 feet in length. Kaboom! Zip! Zap! Kaboom! Looking to the sky, the wizard held his wireless torches up in triumph as they flickered in his thunder.
The end came abruptly, the Springs plunged into darkness. He had shorted out the town.
Fortunately “the powerhouse had a second, standby generator which was started up soon after. Tesla was insistent that he be supplied with current from this reserve machine as soon as it was running, but his demand was refused.” Forced by El Paso Electric to fix the damaged generator himself, the inventor was back on line in a day or two. “In the future, he was told, he would be supplied with current from a dynamo operated independently from the one supplying the [El Paso Electric] company’s regular customers.”24
By the end of 1899, Tesla was ready to return to New York. He wanted to get home for the holidays, to spend them with the Johnsons, but it would take him a little longer to wind things down. In December, he sent for his photographer, Dickenson Alley, to capture his work in the best possible light. By using multiple exposures, Alley would create what is perhaps Tesla’s most famous photograph: that of the inventor sitting calmly reading a book, dwarfed by myriad tongues of explosive lightning. (This picture is a multiple exposure. Tesla, of course, was not sitting there at the time the oscillator was fired up; the electricity would have killed him.)
December 22, 1899
Dear Mr. Tesla,
We will keep your memory green Christmas day…How lovely it would be if you should suddenly appear in our midst…to spend it with us…
I sometimes wonder if you could make me glad again, just to see you, it is so long since gladness has been in my days. Everything that once was has disappeared. It is as if one had gone to sleep in soft moonlight and had anchored out of place and out of time to find himself in the stone age, himself a stone.
What does it all mean?…
Sometimes I have a little sign of you through Robert by way of the office. I am hoping the New Year may bring you what you most desire and that it may bring to us my dear friend.
Faithfully yours,
Katharine Johnson25
28
THE HERO’S RETURN (1900)
Common people must have rest like machinery but the great old Nick—the Busy One—see him go 150 hours without food or drink. Why he can invent with his hands tied behind his back! He can do anything, in short, he is superior to all laws of hygiene and human energy. He is a vegetarian that doesn’t know how to vegetate…
ROBERT UNDERWOOD JOHNSON1
On January 7, 1900, Tesla left Colorado Springs with every intention of returning. Engaging C. J. Duffner and another watchman to look after the laboratory, the inventor departed with inexplicit promises for future payment. His funds exhausted, he also left without covering outstanding bills he had incurred with the local power company.2
The Johnsons were thrilled with the wizard’s return, and they celebrated in grand style by dining out. With Gilder’s approval, Robert suggested that Tesla compose a discourse on his recent endeavors.
Coincidentally, Marconi was in Manhattan seeking investors and planning on lecturing on his progress in wireless.3 “When I sent electrical waves from my laboratory in Colorado, around the world,” Tesla reported, “Mr. Marconi was experimenting with my apparatus unsuccessfully at sea. Afterward, Mr. Marconi came to America to lecture on this subject, stating that it was he who sent those signals around the Globe. I went to hear him, and when he learned that I was present he became sick, postponed the lecture, and up to the present time has not delivered it.”4
Although fearful of Tesla, Marconi was also desirous of obtaining a greater understanding of the master’s equipment. With Michael Pupin as intermediary, Marconi was introduced to Tesla at the New York Science Club.5 Pupin was in exceptionally high spirits, as John S. Seymour, commissioner of patents had finally retired. After six years of submissions, in his attempts to try and prove that his understanding of resonance and harmonics in the field of AC transmission superseded Tesla’s, he had finally won. In December 1899 he applied once again for his patent, “The Art of Reducing Attenuation of Electrical Waves,” and the new commissioner, Walter Johnson, sanctioned it.6 Apparently just one month later, the trio left after dinner to visit Tesla’s lab. George Scherff was working late and greeted them at the door.
“I remember [Marconi] when he was coming to me asking me to explain the function of my transformer for transmission of power to great distances,” Tesla recalled. Although the inventor obviously had mixed feelings about the meeting, he nevertheless obliged with a discourse on the difference between Hertzian radiations and Tesla currents. “Mr. Marconi said, after all my explanations of the application of my principle, that it is impossible.”
“Time will tell, Mr. Marconi,” Tesla shot back.7 Pupin was able to usher Marconi to the door before discussions became more heated.
“I understand completely what you are doing, Mr. Marconi,” Pupin began as he walked the young Italian back to his hotel. “I would like very much to act as a consultant in your operation.”
“That would be an honor,” Marconi said as he discussed with Pupin a way to “persuade Signor Edison to come aboard.” Marconi’s reason, in particular, was to obtain Edison’s grasshopper patent, which described a wireless way for jumping messages from train stations to moving trains and which Edison patented in the 1880s.
Pupin was elated. Not only was he becoming professionally involved in an exciting international wireless enterprise; he had also begun to cash in on his new AC patent. In June, Pupin received a $3,000 advance for selling the rights to John E. Hudson, president of AT&T, and a few months later he negotiated for yearly payments of $15,000 per year, for an amount totaling $200,000 for the invention Commissioner Seymour called “tautological” and “no more…than a multiplication of Tesla’s circuit [that utilized principles] well understood in the art.”8 In either case, the patent enabled AT&T to perfect long-distance telephone transmissions and provided Pupin with a handsome income for many years to come. It also vindicated his position that he had understood Tesla’s invention better than Tesla did.
Tesla tried again to interest the submarine designer John Holland in telautomatics; he also worked to fashion “dirigible wireless torpedoes” or small airships which could be controlled from the ground. “Everybody who saw them,” he revealed a few years later, “was amazed at their performance.”9
After putting together a prospectus and conferring with his lawyers, the inventor packed his bags for Washington to
speak in person with Admiral Higginson of the Light House Board and Secretary John D. Long of the navy. He planned not only to offer his “devil telautomata” but also a scheme for “establish[ing] wireless telegraphic communication across the Pacific.” Met with ridicule and skepticism, the inventor was shuffled into what Mark Twain called “the circumlocution office.” “My ideas,” Tesla said, “were thrown in the naval waste basket…Had only a few ‘telautomatic’ torpedoes been constructed and adopted by our navy, the mere moral influence of this would have been powerfully and most beneficially felt in the present Eastern complication [the Japanese war with Russia].”10
Tesla had hoped at least that the U.S. Coast Guard or Navy would come through on a smaller scale by financing the construction of modest-sized transmitters for their lighthouses and ships, but the agencies dodged any serious commitment and continued to hide behind a bureaucratic quagmire involving the need for congressional approval.11
“I’ve circumscribed the globe with electrical impulses,” he told Scherff upon his return. “Let them have the Hertzian dabblers. They’ll come back around my way soon enough.”
“What will you do with Professor Pupin, stealing your work in alternating current?”
“He’s involved in sending voice over wires,” the inventor replied. “Who can be bothered.”
It was at this time that Tesla commissioned an agent in Britain to locate an appropriate place for constructing a receiving station,12 as he continued to rework blueprints for his transoceanic broadcasting system. Using his English royalties as collateral, he asked George Westinghouse for a loan of a few thousand dollars; he also tried to interest him in the wireless enterprise.13