Wizard

by Marc Seifer

  From a technical and economic point of view, Morgan could not understand how free information and/or power could yield returns. And whether it was Baruch or not who warned Morgan, Tesla himself had voiced the opinion boldly, a decade earlier in the Sunday World, that by providing a reservoir of electrical energy throughout the earth through his apparatus, “all monopolies” that depend on conventional means of energy distribution—that is, through wires, “will come to a sudden end.”29

  As the ultimate capitalist, Morgan’s existence was greatly defined by controlling the price and distribution of energy and maintaining a working class to support the giant corporate monopolies (called “public” utilities). Thus, he simply could not support a system where wireless information and power could be tapped by anyone with a receiving instrument and machines would replace the work force. Reorganizing existing power, lighting, and telephone industries to please the vision of a somewhat eccentric inventor was certainly an unlikely undertaking for the cautious Wall Street financier. “All those businesses who would [no longer] need loans [would] then [no longer] deposit the[ir] profits in his bank.”30 Tesla, as the quintessential iconoclast, had struck a bargain with the wrong king.31

  In 1903, Bernard Baruch, just thirty-three years old and one of the wealthiest men on Wall Street, retired from the firm he had worked for, for over a decade, to set up his own office. One of his first major clients were the Guggenheim brothers. Their interest lay in metals, so Baruch met with the miners Darius Ogden Mills and John Hays Hammond Sr. to seek advice and gain investments. Mills suggested that Baruch go west and purchase mines himself, and Hammond was hired by the Guggenheims to act as an adviser and acquire silver mines in Mexico. One of Baruch’s first acquisitions was the Utah Copper Company, for “he knew that there would always be a need for copper in the world.”32 Tesla’s wireless enterprise clearly threatened the Baruch-Guggenheim investment that Morgan was trying to involve himself in.

  By 1905 the Utah Copper Company was producing copper and other metals at a rate in excess of $100 million per year, and this was a pace which maintained itself for another twenty-five years!33 In later years, John Hays Hammond would claim that “the development of the electrical and automotive industries were possible…‘only with assured large supply of copper.’”34 Unfortunately for Tesla, his ultimate world plan was perceived as a threat on quite a number of key fronts.

  Tesla waited through the first weeks of December for a positive sign from the meeting between Ryan and Morgan, but none came. With no choice left, he was forced to confront the financial potentate eyeball to eyeball. He decided to take a pragmatic approach. “Will you permit me to call this or any other evening,” Tesla wrote, “[I wish] to bring a small instrument along to show you one or two experiments with my ‘daylight’?…The shark who will come after me will get the contract for lighting your home.”35

  Timing his visit to coincide with the holiday, Tesla purposefully chose this opportune occasion to try and pierce the financier’s stalwart exterior. But at the same time, he used the symbol of the shark in his letter, as this was an animal which ate big fish. Anne Morgan was one of his allies. She met him at the door. Having recently become “a founder of the Colony Club, the first American ladies’ [society], patterned after a British gentlemen’s club” and designed by Stanford White, Anne had entered into the midst of an androgenous theater crowd with ties to the infamous homosexual author Oscar Wilde. With Tesla’s sexual orientation perpetually an enigma and Anne about to dabble in a lesbian fling,36 their bond transcended the surface amenities. Before meeting with her father, Anne was able to corral the avowed celibate and discuss with him the emerging view of the new women.

  “Mr. Tesla, I believe that it is absurd that in this day of enlightenment, women do not yet have the right to vote.”

  “I concur wholeheartedly, Anne. I also believe that this struggle of the human female toward sex equality will end up in a new sex order, with the females superior.”

  “Indeed?” Anne responded, the pupils of her eyes widening into large black pools. “I would have considered the sexes equal,” she said as her hand reached out to touch the inventor.

  “The modern woman, who anticipates in merely superficial phenomenon the advancement of her sex, is but a surface symptom of something deeper and more potent fomenting 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. As generations ensue, 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 into an activity that will be all the more intense because of centuries of repose.”37

  “Mr. Morgan will see you now,” the butler interrupted.

  “Mr. Tesla.”

  “Mr. Morgan, thank you for seeing me. My enemies have been so successful in representing me as a poet and visionary that it is absolutely imperative for me to put out something commercial without delay. If you will only help me to do this you will preserve a property of immense value.”

  “I am sorry, Mr. Tesla, as I said before…”

  “Won’t you enable me to complete the work and show you that you have not made a mistake in giving me a checkbook to draw on your honored house. If you will imagine that I have found the stone of the philosophers you will be not far from the truth. My invention will cause a revolution so great that almost all values and all human relations will be profoundly modified.”

  “Had you simply achieved what I had asked, you would not be in this predicament.”

  “Mr. Morgan, I beg to call again to your attention that my patents control absolutely all essential features and that my work is in such a shape that whenever you tell me to go ahead, I shall girdle the globe in three months as surely as my name is Tesla. I have promised to the St. Louis people to open the door of the Exposition with power transmitted from here. It is a great opportunity, Mr. Morgan. I can easily do it, but if you do not aid me soon, it will be too late. Please think for a moment what this means for me. What I have told you long ago has happened. My competitors have collapsed, since their wholesale attempts [at practicable wireless transmission] has not succeeded. Now is the time to aid me. You know this better than anyone else.”

  “I have done my part. There are many other businessmen out there with the capital to complete your project.”

  “But you, sir, are the controlling partner. Should I obtain a commitment from another, will you consider a renegotiation.”

  “I will think it over.”38

  Having met with Morgan in December, Tesla not only came away empty-handed; he also came away with the distinct feeling that his partner was not going to facilitate finding new investors. Avoiding Katharine at Christmastime was one way to telegraph the bad news. Using a full range of her feminine charms, the coquettish Mrs. Filipov issued one more of her provocative missives.

  December 20, 1903

  Dear Mr. Tesla,

  You are most unkind…dear friend! Why do you not come to see ME instead of always dropping into The Century to see Robert.39 I must have done something to offend you, but what?

  How can you be indifferent to such devotion?…If you are unhappy and disappointed and down on your luck, then all the more reason why you should seek the companionship and support of your loyal friends.

  Indeed, if the whole world were against you, the more firmly would they cling to you.

  Faithfully yours,

  Katharine Johnson40

  Aware of Morgan’s trepidation concerning the potential for his equipment to usurp the need for existing electrical power companies, the inventor wrote explicitly in attempts to allay these fears:

  January 13, 1904

  Dear Mr. Morgan,

  The Canadian Niagara Company will agree in writing to furnish me 10,000 H.P. for 20 years without charge, if I put a plant there to transmit this power without wires to other parts of the wo
rld…As I outlined [earlier] I would use the energy not for industrial purposes, but for operating clocks, stock tickers and other apparatus which there are millions now in use, requir[ing on average] not more than 1/10 of the H.P. for each instrument…

  Will you help me on any terms you choose and enable me to insure and develop a great property which will ultimately yield hundredfold returns. Please do not do me an injustice in believing me incapable simply because a certain sum of money was not sufficient to carry out my undetaking…You may see that my work remains uncompleted because of a lack of funds, but you will never see that machinery which I construct does not fulfill the purposes for which it was designed.

  Tesla ended the letter with “hearty wishes for the new year.”41 How could he know that Morgan did not doubt that Tesla could succeed. He feared it.

  January 13, 1904

  My dear Sir,

  In reply to your note I regret to say that I should not be willing to advance any further amounts of money as I have already told you. Of course I wish you every success in your undertaking.

  Yours truly,

  J. Pierpont Morgan

  Close to making deals with other investors but hampered by his relationship to Morgan, Tesla was particularly upuset that his partner replied on the same day his own letter was sent. Surmising that Morgan was not even considering the situation, Tesla became enraged. For the first time he dropped all pretense and told Morgan what he really thought of him.

  January 14, 1904

  Dear Mr. Morgan,

  You wish me success! It is in your hands, how can you wish it?

  We start on a proposition, everything duly calculated; it is financially frail. You engage in impossible operations, you make me pay double, yes, make me wait 10 months for machinery. On top of that you produce a panic. When, after putting in all I could scrape together, I come to show you that I have done the best that could be done, you fire me out like an office boy and roar so that you are heard six blocks away: Not a cent; it is spread all over town. I am discredited, the laughing stock of my enemies.

  It is just 14 months that the construction work on my plant was stopped…Three months more with a good force of men would have completed it and now it would be paying $10,000 a day. More than this, I would have secured contracts from governments for a number of similar plants…

  Now, when I have practically removed all obstacles skillfully put in my way and need only a little more to save a great property, which would pay you 10 million dollars as surely as one cent, you refuse to help in a trouble brought on by your own doings.

  Tesla suggests in the balance of the letter that a subscription of $25,000 would enable him to start up operations of the production of oscillators and the fluorescent light and that eventually, “in a slow and painful way,” he would be able to obtain the necessary funds to complete the tower.

  I am anxious to succeed on your account as mine. What a dreadful thing it would be to have the papers come with your name in red letters [A MORGAN DEAL DEFAULTS]. It would be telegraphed all over the globe. You may not care for it Mr. Morgan. Men are like flies to you. But I would have to work 5 years to repair the damage, if repairable at all. I have told you all. Please do not write to refuse. I am pained enough as it is.

  Yours sorrowfully,

  N. Tesla42

  Having received no response, Tesla shot off another letter the following week:

  January 22, 1904

  …Are you going to leave me in a hole?!!

  I have made a thousand powerful enemies on your account, because I have told them that I value one of your shoestrings more than all of them…

  In a hundred years from now, this country would give much for the first honors of transmitting power without wires. It must be done by my methods and apparatus and I should be aided to do it first myself.

  April 1, 1904

  …Will you aid me to complete this great work?

  April 2, 1904

  Have you ever read the book of Job? If you will put my mind in place of his body you will find my suffering accurately described. I have put all the money I could scrape together in this plant. With $50,000 more it is completed, and I have an immortal crown and an immense fortune.

  Unable to understand why the Ryan deal went sour, Tesla nevertheless deduced that it had been Morgan’s doing. Retaliating in any overt way would have been suicide. And although Tesla had self-destructive tendencies, breaching a contract with J. Pierpont Morgan being one example, the inventor wanted desperately to succeed. His goal was not so much to line his own pockets, although surely he sought to get rich from the invention, but rather to help society. Tesla was well aware of his potential role in reshaping the course of human events.

  Seeing no other choice, he brashly decided, in early 1904, not to hide the Morgan connection anymore but rather to publicize it and to maintain the front that everything was okay. To one of his worried investors, William Rankine of the Niagara Falls project, he wrote on April 10, “Doubt the light of the sun, doubt the brightness of the stars, but do not doubt the existence of the Nikola Tesla Company.”43 Landing Morgan in the first instance had been a feather in his cap. Now the bon vivant decided to exploit the connection and also brazenly rebel against a man who seemed bent on sinking his ship. In quintessential Teslaic fashion, he published a spectacular article simultaneously in Scientific American and Electrical World & Engineer. In it he outlined his work to date and plans for the future, adorning the piece with breathtaking photographs of his transmission stations in Colorado Springs and Wardenclyffe.

  The results attained by me have made my scheme of “World Telegraphy” easily realizable. It constitutes a radical and fruitful departure from what has been done heretofore. It involve[s] the employment of a number of plants each of [which] will be preferably located near some important center of civilization and the news it receives through any channel will be flashed to all points of the globe. A cheap and simple [pocket-sized] device, may then be set up somewhere on sea or land, and it will record the world’s news or such special messages as may be intended for it. Thus the entire earth will be converted into a huge brain, as it were, capable of response in every one of its parts. Since a single plant of but one hundred horse-power can operate hundreds of millions of instruments, the system will have a virtually infinite working capacity…

  The first of these central plants would have been already completed had it not been for unforseen delays which, fortunately, have nothing to do with its purely technical features. [This delay may prove] after all to be blessing in disguise…

  For the work done so far I am indebted to the noble generosity of Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan, which was all the more welcome as it was extended at a time when those, who have since promised most, were the greatest of doubters. I have also to thank my friend, Stanford White, for much unselfish assistance. This work is now far advanced, and though the results may be tardy, they are sure to come.44

  35

  DISSOLUTION (1904-1906)

  I have observed in the House of Morgan a largeness, nobility and firmness of character the like of which is very scarce indeed. I can only smile when I read of the attempts to find something discreditable in the transactions of J. P. Morgan & Co. Not a hundred of such investigations will ever uncover anything which an unprejudiced judge would not consider honorable, fair, decent and in every way conforming to the high ideals and ethical standards of business. I would be willing to stake my life on it.

  NIKOLA TESLA1

  Sociologist Karl Mannheim suggests that the psychohistorian should attempt to reconstruct both the subject’s Weltanschauung and the spirit of the age in question. Irrational components should be recognized. Thus, and in this sense, history is paradoxical; it is contradictory, dynamic, multileveled, and dialectic.2 Tesla’s worldview involved a philosophy based on the work of Wolfgang von Goethe. His inventions were for him not true creations in the sense that they stemmed from nothing. They evolved from the work of others and from u
ncovering secret mechanisms lying within hidden laws of nature.

  Was it God who wrote each sign?

  Which, all my inner tumult stilling,

  And this poor heart with rapture filling,

  Reveals to me, by a force divine,

  Great Nature’s energies around and through me

  thrilling?

  Am I a God? It grows so bright to me!

  Each character on which my eye reposes

  Nature in act before my soul discloses.

  This idea can clearly be found in Goethe’s Faust, Tesla’s favorite poem, which he memorized in its entirety and which he referred to throughout his life.3 It was Faust which he recited in Budapest during his salad days, when he uncovered the secret to the rotating magnetic field, and it was a Faustian paradigm to which he adhered when he linked the invention of the world telegraphy system to the discovery of the Holy Grail.

  There manifests itself in the fully developed being—Man—a desire mysterious, inscrutable and irresistible: to imitate nature, to create, to work himself the wonders he perceives…He subdues and puts to his service the fierce, devastating spark of Prometheus, the titanic forces of the waterfall, the wind and the tide. He tames the thundering bolt of Jove and annihilates time and space. He makes the great Sun itself his obedient toiling slave…

  Can man control this grandest, most awe-inspiring of all processes in nature? Can he harness her inexhaustible energies to perform all their functions at his bidding?…If he could do this, he would have powers almost unlimited and supernatural…

  [This] would be the supreme manifestation of the power of Man’s mind, his most complete triumph over the physical world, his crowning achievement, which would place him beside his Creator, make him fulfill his ultimate destiny. Nikola Tesla4

  Two major themes which run through Goethe’s poem are that (1) secrets of nature can be revealed and harnessed to human needs and that (2) humans are enticed by satanic forces. Clearly, Tesla was driven by both tenets. In the second case, consciously or unconsciously, Morgan was sought out for the very reason that he was a demigod, a superhuman, whose life transcended that of mere mortals. Just as Faust was tempted by Mephistopheles, Tesla was lured by the House of Morgan. In the financier’s “strong hands” Tesla willingly, and alas irrationally, handed over the 51 percent control, insisting on it. Knowing that the contract involved relinquishing his cornucopia of past and future patent applications, the inventor still sealed the Faustian pact, as “the terms were immaterial” to him.