by Marc Seifer
“I have got more than that,” replied Dr. Tesla. “I have an engine that will give ten horse power to a pound of weight. This is twenty-five times as powerful as the lightest weight engines in use today. The lightest gas engine used on aeroplanes weighs two and one half pounds [and produces one] horse power. With [that weight] I can produce twenty-five horse power.
“This means the solution of the problem of flying,” I suggested.
“Yes, and many more,” was the reply. “It is the perfect rotary engine. It is an accomplishment that mechanical engineers have been dreaming about ever since the invention of steam power.”11
The inventor thereupon proceeded to explain its principles. Having studied the properties of water and steam as they passed through a propeller, Tesla explored the relationship of viscosity and adhesion to the blade’s corresponding spin.
“The metal does not absorb any of the water, but [some of] the water adheres to it. The drop of water may change its shape, [yet its] particles remain intact. This tendency of all fluids to resist separation is viscosity,” the inventor explained. By exploiting these principles, Tesla had patented an entirely new kind of turbine which did away with the blades of an everyday propeller and replaced them with a series of disks thinly spaced apart like a stack of pennies on their side. Each disk had a hole in its center for removing the incoming fluid and for turning the central shaft. Whereas “skin friction impedes a ship in its progress through the sea or an aeroplane through the air,” Tesla exploited this seeming obstacle so that the spin of the turbine would be enhanced rather than retarded by the adhesion and viscosity of the medium. It was another stroke of genius from the master.
Spiral action was initiated at the periphery of each disk as the water formed a tighter and tighter corkscrew pattern as the center hole was approached thus augmenting spiral action. In this way, a fluid under pressure, such as steam, could enter the sealed chamber which housed the horizontal stack of disks and cause them to rotate. Following the natural tendency to create a whirlpool (like water exiting a drain), the fluid would naturally spin faster and faster as it moved toward the center. Simultaneously, its property of adhesion would carry, or drag, the corresponding disk around and around at a faster rate, and this spin could be used, for instance, as a turbine to generate electricity; reversing the entire process would turn the instrument into a pump; and hooking it up to an induction motor could transform the instrument into a jet engine.
“One such pump now in operation, with eight disks, eighteen inches in diameter, pumps four thousand gallons a minute to a height of 360 feet…
“Suppose now we reversed the operation,” continued the inventor…Suppose we had water, or air under pressure, or steam under pressure…and let it run into the case in which the disks are contained—what would happen?”
“The disks would revolve and any machinery attached to the shaft would be operated—you would convert the pump into an engine,” I suggested.
“That is exactly what would happen—what does happen,” replied Dr. Tesla…
“Then too,” Dr. Tesla went on, “there are no delicate adjustments to be made. The distance between the disks is not a matter of microscopic accuracy…Coupling these engines in series, one can do away with gearing in machinery…The motor is especially adapted to automobiles, for it will run on gas explosions as well as on steam…
“With a thousand horse power engine, weighing only one hundred pounds, imagine the possibilities. In the space now occupied by the engines of the Lusitania twenty-five times her 80,000 horse power could be developed, were it possible to provide boiler capacity sufficient to furnish the necessary steam…Here is…an engine that will do things no other engine ever has done.”12
In January 1909, George Scherff, who was now working for a sulphur company, sent off a pleading letter for financial aid to Tesla. “My creditors are hounding me hard. Anything you can do for me will be much appreciated,” Scherff wrote.13
Instead of sending him money, Tesla sent a check for Mrs. Schwarz, yet another disgruntled investor. In need himself, Scherff tried to divert the funds, but Tesla, having been in Scherff’s position numerous times, wrote back lightheartedly, “I am sorry to note that you are losing your equanimity and poise. Mrs. Schwarz is weak and you are fully able to fight your own battles. You must pull yourself together and banish the evil spirits.”14 Shortly thereafter, Scherff sent off another note informing Tesla that he had prepared the taxes for Wardenclyffe. “A few nights ago,” Scherff added, “a burglar entered my house and cleaned all the cash out of my pockets.” Tesla took the hint and began recompensing his former secretary, sending a check in November.
November 11, 1909
Dear Mr. Tesla,
Thank you for the $200…What gives me more pleasure than the money is the concrete evidence it furnishes of your progress towards the success for which you have battled so long and hard.
Sincerely,
George Scherff15
In March 1909, Tesla had formed the Tesla Propulsion Company with Joseph Hoadley and Walter H. Knight. With stock capitalized at $1 million, it was announced in Electrical World that turbines were being sold to the Alabama Consolidated Coal & Iron Company.16 Tesla also set up other firms: the Tesla Ozone Company, capitalized at $400,000, which produced ozone, and the Tesla Electrotherapeutic Company, which marketed electrotherapeutic machines with Colonel Ray.
PRESENT-DAY OZONE THERAPY
During a recent symposium marking the hundred years since Tesla’s arrival in America, G. Freibott, a medical doctor who used Tesla’s ozoneproducing equipment, stated that by injecting pure ozone directly into the bloodstream of a man afflicted with colon cancer, “thirty tumors were released.” According to Freibott, this form of oxygen, which is naturally produced by the sun’s action on the upper reaches of the atmosphere, contains “oxidizing, antiseptic and germicidal power…bringing palliative and curative results to many individuals.” When questioned about the dangers of creating embolisms, Freibott noted that “air embolisms” are not caused by bubbles of oxygen in the bloodstream, as is commonly believed, but rather by impurities carried by the oxygen. This work is new and controversial, although verification of these findings has been established by physicians.17
Tesla, of course, did not inject ozone into people; however, he did construct an electrotherapeutic device for Scherff’s wife, who was suffering from an ailment at that time. “I believe that it will do you and Mrs. Scherff a lot of good,” Tesla wrote, adding for the sally, “unless you have no electric supply circuit in your home, in which case, it will be necessary to move into other quarters.”18
Throughout 1909 and 1910 the inventor shuffled back and forth between Providence, Bridgeport, and New York City, where he had installed various renditions of his turbines. Most of the development work was at Bridgeport.
“I am now at work on new ideas of an automobile, locomotive and lathe in which these inventions of mine are embodied and which cannot help [but] prove a colossal success,” he wrote Scherff. “The only trouble is to get the cash, but it cannot last very long before my money will come in a torrent and then you can call on me for anything you like.” He added optimistically in another letter, “Things are developing very favorably, and it seems that my wireless dream will be realized before next summer.”19
In March 1910, Owen’s wife gave birth to their first son, Robert Underwood Johnson Jr., but in the spring a potential disaster of foreboding invaded the Tesla circle when it was announced that John Jacob Astor and his son Vincent were lost at sea. The inventor was one of the many who rejoiced when the news arrived that one of the ten richest men in the world (and his son) emerged unscathed. It is uncertain to what extent Astor contributed to Tesla’s work with the turbine, however, there is some evidence that the inventor installed a hydrofoil jet engine in a “mysterious craft” Astor had docked in the Harlem River. The New York Times reported that the vehicle “seemed to embody an airship with a practical water craft.”
20 If this was a radical flying machine which Tesla was working on, both he and Astor made sure that the reporters were kept away. One of the advantages of such a prototype was that the danger of death resulting from experimental flights could be minimized, since the craft was theoretically set up to hover only above water.
Feeling well on the way to success, Tesla wrote his friend Charles Scott at the Westinghouse Corporation for an order of a million induction motors to drive his turbines. “But as I have learned to go slow,” he added to the letter, “I shall take only one at first.”21
In November 1910, with his newfound tidal wave of momentum, he moved his headquarters to the prestigious forty-eight-story Metropolitan Towers, located at 1 Madison Avenue, just across the way from the Garden. With an office suite on the twentieth floor, right beneath the skyscraper’s famous tower clock, the inventor could look out on the burgeoning metropolis from the tallest building in the world to plan his next move for the recapture of his holy grail, his world-telegraphy scheme.
38
THE HAMMOND CONNECTION (1909-13)
November 8, 1910
My dear Mr. Hammond [Jr.],
I was glad to read the enclosed newspaper reports. This is water on my mill. Just go ahead and make a lot of money and I will sue for infringement and we will divide.
Yours sincerely,
N. Tesla1
It is unclear as to exactly when, and in what capacity, John Hays Hammond Sr. became involved financially with Nikola Tesla. John O’Neill, who knew the inventor for nearly forty years, wrote in his biography that Hammond Senior gave Tesla a gift of $10,000 for the development of the telautomaton, which was unveiled in 1898.2 John Hays Hammond Jr., or “Jack” Hammond, contradicted this assertion, writing twelve years after the book’s publication, “My father was financing one of his later inventions and in this way, I had the opportunity of meeting him even while I was at Yale (1907-1910).”3 Thus, based on Jack’s letter, Hammond Senior most likely helped finance Tesla’s bladeless turbine, although he may have invested in Wardenclyffe or some other enterprise.
In either case, it is unlikely that Hammond presented Tesla with an outright “gift,” so it is clear that at least part of O’Neill’s statement is incorrect. One of Hammond Senior’s oldest friends stemming from childhood was Darius Ogden Mills. Both men grew up as California gold miners.4 Mills, a long-standing friend of Stanford White’s, became a principal in the Edison Illuminating Company back in 1883, along with J. Pierpont Morgan.5 As a business associate of John Jacob Astor in the late 1890s, Mills was involved in the financing of the Niagara Falls enterprise and probably invested in Tesla’s company as well. Tesla also knew Hammond’s brother Richard, who had been to Niagara Falls to hear the inventor’s invocation.
Having correctly anticipated a “depression” resulting from Grover Cleveland’s 1892 election, Hammond had traveled with his wife and family to South Africa to run the Bernarto Brothers’ gold and diamond mines. Thus, he was on the other side of the globe at the time of Tesla’s work in telautomatics. Nevertheless, it is entirely possible that through Mills, Hammond participated in the venture. Jack Hammond, who would have been ten years old in 1898, would have therefore learned about this technology at an impressionable age. As the focus of Jack’s extraordinary career revolved around his work in radio-guided weaponry systems, this early Tesla connection would help explain his ardent interest. Although Jack made no secret of crediting Tesla as being the primary inventor of telautomatics, he may still have wished to suppress Tesla’s ultimate role in influencing so greatly the direction his life would take.
According to Jack Hammond’s research, “Prof. Ernest Wilson in 1897 controlled a torpedo on the Thames by Hertzian waves. He is the pioneer inventor in this art.”7
JOHN HAYS HAMMOND SR.
John Hays Hammond Sr., whose life became fictionalized as the “heroic Clay in Soldiers of Fortune,”8 was the ultimate daredevil. Born in 1855, Hammond’s maternal grandfather, Col. John Coffee Hays, was a Texas Ranger and the first sheriff of the “wickedest city in the world,” the seaport and bonanza town of San Francisco. Raised in California during the gold rush, Hammond’s father, Richard Pindell Hammond, was a West Point graduate and a friend of Robert E. Lee’s and also Franklin Pierce. Hammond was also a gold miner and federal tax collector for the port of San Francisco.
Schooled at Yale University with a major in mining, Hammond continued his studies in the mid-1870s in Europe. After his return, the energetic adventurer set out for the Sierra Madre in his search for silver and gold. Traveling with his family and brother Richard, Hammond encountered Apache Indians on the warpath and Mexican desperadoes in his quest for buried treasure. “By way of encouragement,” Hammond stated, “my wife frequently declared that in case Dick and I should be killed, she would faithfully promise to shoot: first the women,…then her child and then herself, rather than have them fall into the hands of the Indians.”9
Other excursions included travel through alligator-infested swamps in Central America and “the cannibal country of Columbia.”10 Successful in finding gold in Guatemala, Hammond also opened up lead and silver mines throughout Mexico and the Midwest. In 1891, with a six-gun strapped to each hip, he helped quell a violent mining strike in Montana; but in 1893, unhappy with the new Democratic administration, he decided to leave America, taking his family with him, to fulfill his childhood dream of searching for diamonds in the depths of the Dark Continent.
Placed in charge of the British Consolidated Gold Fields, Hammond made his fortune when he realized that searching for diamonds twenty-five hundred feet under the ground would be much more lucrative when this type of land was selling for $10 per acre, whereas shallow mining stakes were going for $40,000 per acre.11
Among his children, the most precocious was a five-year-old named John Hays Hammond Jr., or Jack. There was also Harris, six years Jack’s elder, Richard, a younger brother, and Nathalie, a little sister.
Swept into the Boer War in 1896, Hammond was arrested by the Transvaal government. Captured with Cecil Rhodes and the infamous Dr. Jameson, who had led a revolt against the Dutch, the elite members of the mining syndicate were sentenced to death by firing squad. With a plea from the U.S. secretary of state and perhaps a nudge from Mark Twain, who was in South Africa at the time, they were finally able to buy their way out. According to Hammond, Twain had informed the Dutch that they had captured “some of the wealthiest bugs in the world.” President Krueger placed the ransom at $600,000, or $125,000 a piece. With Rhodes fronting the booty, the deal was struck, and they were released. Hammond, with his wife and family, were free to return to the States. He would pay back his share with future profits from new mining ventures.
Considered one of the wealthiest industrialists in the world, with a list of friends that included three presidents and former Yale classmate William Howard Taft, John Hays Hammond Sr. became a natural choice for vice president. Resigning from the Guggenheim copper coalition, Hammond sought the position as Taft’s running mate with full vigor in 1908,12 during the initial years of Tesla’s partnership with his son Jack.
JOHN HAYS HAMMOND JR.
After a short stay in England in 1900, the Hammond family returned to the States and took up residence in Washington, D.C. Hammond Senior also had an office on Wall Street and a summer home in New Jersey. Having a keen interest in inventors, the mining engineer invited many of them to his home. Included on the list were Alexander Graham Bell, Guglielmo Marconi, Tom Edison, Nikola Tesla, and the Wright brothers.13 In 1901, when Jack was just twelve years old, he was invited with his father to Menlo Park. There Edison, who was working on “a new process to extract gold from South African ore, showed Jack models of his first phonograph, and gave the youth some original sketches. It may have been this contact,” Hammond speculated, “that stimulated my son’s interest in the study of electricity.”14
Shortly after Jack entered Yale in 1906, he began to study Tesla’s inventions. He also worked for A
lexander Graham Bell. Thus, it was during his college years that his interest in remote control became (re)awakened. “Tesla and Bell were, so to speak, my scientific god-fathers,” Jack wrote in his diary. “I found them deeply inspiring.”15 Jack’s “experiments started in early 1908, when he developed an electric steering and [also an] engine control for a boat…[finding] that he could control this mechanism over short distances with a radio impulse.”16
It was at this time that the Hammonds set up permanent residence on the harbor at the fishing village of Gloucester, Massachusetts, and it was there that the enthusiastic engineering student performed most of his investigations. Destined to have more patents than any American inventor except Tom Edison, Jack began his interest in inventing during his New Jersey prep-school years. His first significant creation, at age sixteen, was a reverse switch which automatically turned off his night light when the headmaster opened his dorm door to check to see if he was reading after curfew.17 After this, the floodgates were opened, and by the end of his career, John Hays Hammond Jr. had amassed an astounding array of over eight hundred patents, including inventions in the fields of military warfare, music and sound (no relation to W. H. Hammond of electricorgan fame), and home appliances. Some of Jack’s most unique contributions include a cigarette case which “popped out a lit cigarette when opened,” a microwave oven, a push-button radio, a superheterodyne (which greatly amplified radio waves and was coincident with Edwin Armstrong), aircraft guidance systems, a time-controlled gas bomb, a magnetic bottle cap, a combination piano-radio-phonograph, a windshield washer, a mobile housing unit, and a “telestereographer,” or “mechanism for projecting three-dimensional images via wireless.”18
In September 1909, during his senior year, the budding wunderkind wrote to his father to arrange for a meeting with the “Serbian High Priest of Telautomatics.”19 “Father, I have some important information that I desire to get from Mr. Tesla.”20