by Marc Seifer
At the upper dais sat a gaggle of Tesla adversaries. Aside from the new president, there was Professor Pupin, now financially tied to Marconi; Elihu Thomson, who claimed priority on the invention of the AC motor and Tesla coil; Carl Hering, who had backed Dobrowolski in priority discussions of the inventor of long-distance AC transmission; William Stanley, who had pirated the Tesla/Westinghouse induction motor and was now producing them legally for GE; Frank Sprague, who gained his reputation in part as the inventor of the electric railroad when, in fact, it was all part of Tesla’s AC polyphase system; T. C. Martin, who was still angry about past moneys owed for sale of the inventor’s collected works; and, of course, Guglielmo Marconi, the chap who had beaten him to the punch. Tesla’s decision not to attend created an excellent atmosphere for gaiety—and for perpetuating Steinmetz’s published position of relegating the pioneer to the category of nonperson.
Others present at the infamous upper dais included Alexander Graham Bell and general counsels from Great Britain and Italy, and around the hall were Josh Wetzler, D. McFarlan Moore, many of the men’s wives, and Mrs. Thomas Alva Edison, who was representing her husband.
Martin presided over the occasion, opening up the period for lectures with readings of telegrams from those not in attendance. He began with a letter from the mayor and then read a communiqué from the Wizard of Menlo Park.
To T. C. Martin:
I am sorry that I am prevented from attending your annual dinner to-night, expecially as I would like to pay my respects to Marconi, the young man who had the monumental audacity to attempt, and succeed in, jumping an electric wave clear across the Atlantic. Thomas A. Edison9
Martin did not announce that at Christmas Marconi had sent Edison a “cheerful telegram” reiterating his success and offering to display personally to the master his transatlantic equipment or that Marconi was already tendering Edison offers for his early wireless patents.10
The New York Times reported “cheers when the toastmaster came to a letter from Nikola Tesla who said that he ‘could not rise to the occasion.’”11 No doubt, they masked the jeers. Grinning through his oversized mustache, Martin waited for the clamor to subside before continuing with the rest of the letter:
I regret not being able to contribute to the pleasure of the evening, but I wish to join the members in heartily congratulating Mr. Marconi on his brilliant results. He is a splendid worker, full of rare and subtle energies. May he prove to be one of those whose powers increase and whose mind feelers reach out farther with advancing years for the good of the world and honor of his country.
Prof. Elihu Thomson followed. “I had received the news of Marconi’s great feat from over the telephone from a reporter, who wished to know whether I believed that signals had actually been received across the Atlantic.” Riding on the accolades of the audience, Thomson related his response: “As I told the reporter, if Marconi says that he received the signals, I believe they were received.” And then the hero took the pulpit. Waiting gratiously for the applause to subside, he began.
Signor Marconi explained his syntonic wireless system and pointed out that “he had built very largely on the work of others and mentioned Clerk Maxwell, Lord Kelvin, Professor Henry and Professor Hertz.” At this time, its most important use was for communication between ships. The Italian was pleased to announce that “over 70 ships now carried his wireless system, 37 for the British navy, 12 for the Italian navy, and the remainder on large liners, such as the Cunard Line, the North German Lloyd and the Beaver Line. There were also over 20 stations in operation…with more on construction.” Marconi addressed the problem of selective tuning and suggested that he had such a system created so that “messages transmitted [from one ship] can in no way be received by any other, except that attuned to receive the message.”12 Stated as bravado, Marconi was bluffing, as he had no system for creating separate channels.
“It is my hope,” Signor Marconi concluded, “that at no great distant date, I shall bring my system to the point of perfection of allowing friends and relatives to communicate with each other across the ocean at a small expense.”
Professor Pupin concluded. “Referring to claims made that previous to Marconi wireless signals had been transmitted over short distances,” Pupin said, glancing back to the upper dais, “any schoolboy by means of an Hertzian oscillator could transmit such signals over a short distance…but it required the engineer to make [such] work of avail to the world.” In attempting to allay fears that Marconi’s system would make obsolete Atlantic cables, Dr. Pupin shrewdly “pointed out, as an illustration, how the completion of electric lighting has aided the gas industry and enhanced rather than decreased the value of [their] investments.”13
On January 9, Tesla dispatched a letter to Morgan explaining that the patents of the “Marconi-Fleming syndicate” do not accurately reflect their actual apparatus but are covered “by my patents of 1896 [and] 1897.” The balance of the letter describes the precursor to what became, a half century later, the major television networks:
I need not tell you that I have worked as hard as I have dared without collapsing…Hav[ing] examined and rejected hundreds of experiments…with the capital at command, I am glad to say that by slow and steady advances, I have managed to continue a machine…[which shall produce] an electrical disturbance of sufficient intensity to be perceptible over the whole of the earth…[When] I throw the switch, I shall send a greeting to the whole world and for this great triumph I shall ever be grateful to you…
[This system] will do away not only with the cables but with the newspapers also, for how can journals as the present [stay in business] when every [customer] can have a cheap machine printing its own world news?
[The] beautiful invention which I am now developing, will enable me to spread our name into [every] home, and it will be [able] everywhere to [hear] the tune of my voice.14
This would be the inventor’s last communiqué to the financier for fully nine months. He set himself the difficult task of completing construction of the eighteen-story transmission tower, knowing full well that he did not have sufficient funds. From bank records dating back to 1896, it is apparent that Tesla had nearly $50,000, some of which had been converted into land assets.15 The last of Morgan’s money had probably been received, so it was at this time, in the midst of 1902, that the trailblazer began to tap his personal reserves to keep the project going. Work would continue at a steady pace throughout the year.
OTHER COMPETITORS
Having received his doctorate in electrical engineering in 1899, Lee De Forest had tried once again to gain entrée into his idol’s laboratory, but for a third time Tesla refused him. De Forest decided, therefore, to set out on his own. In 1901 he succeeded in sending wireless messages across the Hudson River over a distance of one or two miles and shortly thereafter sent impulses from State Street, in downtown New York, to Staten Island, seven miles away. By using “self-restoring detectors with telephone receivers instead of Morse inkers or sounders,” De Forest succeeded in increasing substantially the speed of transmission. Now his apparatus threatened Western Union’s local telegraph lines. Working with D. McFarlan Moore, who had “studied Tesla’s monumental early volume,” De Forest was able to decrease the problems of static interference. By 1903 he was reporting yacht races at a speed of twenty-five to thirty words per minute, or about as fast as a Morse-code operator could send them. By 1904 he could transmit messages “180 miles over land, between Buffalo and Cleveland,” and by 1908 his signaling device was jumping continents.16
Perhaps it was because of Tesla’s regard for the Yale graduate or because of the canniness of his patents that Tesla did not try to prevent De Forest from using his oscillators and general scheme. The same, however, could not be said for Reginald Fessenden, whom he sued for patent infringement in April 1902.
Fessenden, who had worked for both Edison and Westinghouse as far back as the early 1880s, is generally credited with having invented the means of sending v
oice over the airwaves. Although Marconi was using the electromagnetic frequencies to mimic the impulse patterns of the Morse code, “it occurred to Fessenden to send out a continuous signal with the amplitude of the waves varied (or ‘modulated’) to make the variation follow the irregularities of sound waves. At the receiving station, these variations could be sorted out and reconverted into sound. In 1906 the first such message was sent out from the Massachusetts coast, and wireless receivers could actually pick up the music. In this way radio, as we know it, was born.”17 A year later, using his patented audion, which was, in essence, a modification of Tesla’s ‘brush tube,’ De Forest succeeded in transmitting the voice of Enrico Caruso, who was singing at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York.18
Interested for reasons of priority in obtaining Edison’s grasshopper wireless patent (dating from the 1880s), Fessenden sought a job with GE in 1902 to inaugurate construction of a wireless transmitting station at Brant Rock, Massachusetts. Although he stayed friendly with Edison and looked after his wayward son, Tom Junior, who had been caught passing bad checks, Fessenden was unsuccessful in obtaining Edison’s key wireless patent; the Menlo Park wizard had sold it to Marconi for $60,000.19
Legal entanglements were expensive, but Tesla felt that he had no choice but to protect as many fundamental aspects of his system as he was able to. How else could he prove to Morgan that his work in the field really was the basis of the systems that were succeeding?
In June 1900, Reginald Fessenden had applied for a patent on tuned circuits. The following month, Tesla filed for one as well. It was a matter of public record that Fessenden’s application preceded Tesla’s. What was at issue was whether or not Fessenden had compiled his invention from Tesla’s earlier experiments. Although Fessenden claimed that he had conceived the idea in 1898, Tesla pointed out that Fessenden was (1) unable to provide documentation of this earlier date; (2) he did not create a working model of his apparatus; and (3) the machine had not been used commercially.
Whereas Fessenden’s application was rudimentary, Tesla’s delineated clearly a multiplicity of goals, for example, (1) operating distant apparatus; (2) controlling signals by using two or more idiosyncratic electrical frequencies; (3) producing a plurality of distinctive impulses onto a receiving apparatus comprising a manifold number of circuits; and (4) creating a combination transmitter-receiver arrangement set up to respond to a succession of impulses released in a given order. Whereas Fessenden could date his theoretical conceptualizations to, perhaps, 1898, Tesla dated the onset of his work to 1889 and provided his numerous publications as evidence. With specific reference to the operation of “tuned circuits,” the inventor displayed his fully working telautomaton, which he introduced to the world in 1898. Without Tesla’s AC oscillators, Fessenden’s machinery could not operate. Unless he had lived in a hermitage, it would have been impossible for Fessenden to have conceived his invention without utilizing Tesla’s attainments. Parker W. Page questioned his client for hours; Tesla’s testimony would run seventy-two typewritten pages.
Throughout mid-April the testimony continued, and after Tesla was finished, his twenty-nine-year-old manager, George Scherff, took the stand. Scherff, who was living at Wardenclyffe by this time, was able to substantiate that Tesla’s tuned circuits and long-distance wireless experiments were first conducted in his presence in 1895, when he began working for Tesla at his laboratory at 33-35 South Fifth Avenue (before it burned to the ground). Scherff remembered the inventor transmitting wireless impulses from the Houston Street lab to the roof of the Hotel Gerlach, which was one or two miles away.20
Fritz Lowenstein, just a year younger than Scherff, followed. Having returned from Europe in February and newly married, Lowenstein had gained reemployment with Tesla at Wardenclyffe. In a heavy German accent, Lowenstein thoroughly described the nature of the confidential experiments at Colorado Springs. “Mr. Tesla explained to me,” Lowenstein stated, “that the chief feature of a practical wireless telegraph system was the secrecy, immunity and selectivity; at the same time he explained to me how two oscillations are secured from one oscillating apparatus…When I came to Mr. Tesla,” the college-educated engineer revealed, “I didn’t understand anything at all about it, but he soon showed me the great value [of] tuned circuits, and then I understood what tuning was.”21
Dear Mr.Scherff,
Mr. Page has just told me that my opponent’s attorney has admitted my priority…[Mr. Fessenden] must be disappointed of course, and I am sorry for him although you know he has written some articles which are not very nice…My honor as the originator of the principle is assured.22
Tesla may have won the case, but he was not about to celebrate. Foremost among his priorities was his wish to keep the details of the litigation secret. The last thing he wanted was publicity, for the transcripts of the trial revealed many technicalities that would aid his competition in numerous ways. In the short run, the inventor succeeded in protecting important aspects of his wireless scheme; but in the long run the testimony became an important source text for Fessenden, who now had a legal basis for fashioning a plethora of second-order patents. By the time of his death, Fessenden had compiled an astounding five hundred patents, which was nearly as many as Tom Edison. Obviously, this work also aided Lowenstein, who became a wireless expert valuable to different members of the new crop of engineers who were rapidly emerging.
33
WARDENCLYFFE (1902-1903)
While the tower itself is very picturesque, it is the wonders hidden underneath it that excite the curiosity of the little [hamlet]. In the centre of [the] base, there is a wooden affair very much like the companionway on an ocean steamer. Carefully guarded, no one except Mr. Tesla’s own men have been allowed as much as the briefest peep…
Mr. Scherff…told an inquirer that the [shaft entrance] led to a small drainage passage built for the purpose of keeping the ground about the tower dry; [but] the villagers tell a different story.
They declare that it leads to a well-like excavation as deep as the tower is high, with walls of masonwork and a circular stairway leading to the bottom. From there, they say. the entire ground below has been honeycombed with subterranean [tunnels that extend in all directions].
They tell with awe how Mr. Tesla, on his weekly visits…spends as much time in the underground passages as he does on the tower or in the handsome laboratory where the power plant for the world telegraph has been installed.
NEW YORK TIMES1
Just as Tesla had created a notebook for his experiments in Colorado, he also compiled a daily log of activities at Wardenclyffe. His records for 1902 reveal little activity for the first third of the year except for the month of March. Extended note taking really began again in May and continued uninterruptedly until July 1903. Each week, Tesla watched the tower attain a new height as he experimented by measuring the capacitance of his apparatus and constructing a prototype planet to calculate “his theory of current propagation through the Earth.” On this sizable metal sphere, the inventor would transmit varying frequencies to measure the voltage, wavelength, and velocity of the transmitted energy and also assess various nodal points, such as along the equator and at the pole opposite the point of generation.2
In February 1902, along with Stanford White, Tesla entertained Prince Henry of Prussia who had come to New York to retrieve a royal yacht that had been built in America. The brother of Kaiser Wilhelm, it had been Prince Henry who had assisted in the performance of the inventor’s famous experiments under Tesla’s name in Berlin six years earlier. The yacht was being christened by Alice Roosevelt, daughter of the president.3 In June out at Wardenclyffe, “two grey-haired East Hampton pilgrims drop[ped] in on their way to a Spring retreat.”4 Kate’s eyes glowed as she broke off from Robert and Nikola to approach the tower and feel it with her own hands. A radiant warmth flowed through her being as she watched the lanky engineer converse with her husband.
By September, the transmitter had reached its full e
levation of 180 feet. Exhausted of funds, with still the dome to place on top, the inventor had no choice but to wind down activities and lay off most of the workers. Tesla had sold his last major asset, a $35,000 land holding, but even that could not keep the operation fully afloat. Nevertheless, with this new source of revenue, he procured enough funds to keep a skeleton crew, cover Scherff’s and his own lodging, and pay for a chef from the Waldorf to come out at regular intervals. Tesla also took this time to photograph the interior operations of his entire plant. These pictures not only included reproductions of all his machinery but also contained a representative sample of the myriad different types of radio tubes that the inventor had designed. They numbered nearly a thousand.5
The Port Jefferson Echo reported “War between Marconi and Tesla” in their headlines in 1902. According to the paper, the United States Marconi Company had purchased land west of Bridgehampton and was planning on constructing its own competing 185-foot tower, with New York City connections to Western Union. “It should become the most important wireless center in the country.” Whereas Marconi was going to send his signals through the air, the paper said, Tesla plans, through his “500-foot deep” shaft, to send messages through the earth as well. Though the hollow was 120 feet, the gist of the report was accurate.