by Marc Seifer
The case dragged on for months and covered over three hundred pages of testimony. Tesla testified that in March 1915 he had put up Wardenclyffe as collateral against past monies owed to Francis S. Hutchins, personal counsel for George C. Boldt and the Waldorf-Astoria. Hutchins and the hotel interpreted the transaction as an outright transference of the deed. Since the hotel now thought that they owned the property, they felt that it was their right to resell the land and take down the tower to sell the lumber and other parts for salvage.
When Tesla took the stand, he was asked if he remembered the day he delivered the deed.
“I distinctly remember [telling] Mr. Hutchins that the plant had cost an enormous amount of money in comparison with which this indebtedness was a trifle, and that I expected great realizations from the plant, $30,000 a day, if the plant had been completed.” Tesla assumed that if he paid the $20,000 owed, he would have gotten back the plant. He further assumed that the Waldorf-Astoria would take good care of the property because of its enormous value. They did not take good care, however. Vandals broke in and stole equipment, such as expensive lathes.
“Can you describe the structures and any other equipment that was in the laboratory,” Tesla’s counsel asked. The plaintiffs attorney tried to block the testimony, but the judge allowed Tesla to begin.
The inventor sat back, removed his white gloves, placed them on the podium, and proceeded. “The building formed a square about one hundred feet by one hundred. It was divided into four compartments, with an office and a machine shop and two very large areas.” “The engines were located on one side, and the boilers on the other side, and in the center, the chimney rose.”
When asked how big the boilers were, Tesla said that there were two 300-horsepower boilers surrounded by two 16,000 gallon water tanks that utilized the ambient heat for hot water. “To the right of the boiler plant were the engines. One was a 400-horsepower Westinghouse engine, and a 35-kilowatt outfit which, with the engine, drove the dynamo for lighting and furnished other conveniences.” There were high- and low-pressure compressors, various kinds of water pumps, and a main switchboard for operating everything.
“Towards the road, on the railroad side, was the machine shop. That compartment was one hundred by thirty-five feet with a door in the middle and it contained I think eight lathes. Then there was a milling machine, a planer and shaper, a spliner, three drills, four motors, a grinder and a Blacksmith’s forge.
“Now, in the compartment opposite, which was the same size as the machine shop, there was contained the real expensive apparatus. There were two special glass cases where I kept historical apparatus which was exhibited and described in my lectures and scientific articles. There were at least a thousand bulbs and tubes each of which represented a certain phase of scientific development. Then there was also five large tanks, four of which contained special transformers created so as to transform the energy for the plant. They were about, I should say, seven feet high and about five by five feet each, and were filled with special oil which we call transformer oil, to stand an electric tension of 60,000 volts. Then there was a fifth similar tank for special purposes. And then there were my electric generating apparatus. That apparatus was precious, because it could flash a message across the Atlantic, and yet it was built in 1894 or 1895.”
The court sat humbled. The opposing attorney tried to block Tesla’s further testimony, but the judge allowed the inventor to continue.
“Beyond the door of this compartment,” Tesla continued, “there were to be the condensers, what we call electric condensers, which would store the energy and then discharge and make it go around the world. Some of these condensers were in an advanced state of construction, and others were not. Then there was a very expensive piece of apparatus that the Westinghouse Company furnished me, only two of this kind have ever been constructed. It was developed by myself with their engineers. That was a steel tank which contained a very elaborate assemblage of coils, an elaborate regulating apparatus, and it was intended to give every imaginable regulation that I wanted in my measurements and control of energy.”
Tesla also described “a special 100-horsepower motor equipped with elaborate devices for rectifying the alternating currents and sending them into the condensers. On this apparatus alone I spent thousands of dollars. Then along the center of the room I had a very precious piece of apparatus.” It was Tesla’s remote-controlled boat.
“Was that all there was, generally speaking?”
“Oh, no, nowhere near,” Tesla replied. The inventor then proceeded to describe a series of closets that housed numerous other appliances, “each representing a different phase” of his work. There was the testing room, which included precious instruments given to him by Lord Kelvin, a breach, and other instruments such as voltmeters, wattmeters, ampere meters. In that small space there was a fortune.
The opposing attorney asked that the statement “there was a fortune” be taken out.
“Yes, strike it out,” said the judge.
Tesla then went on to discuss the tower. After describing the structure above the ground, he described the shaft. “You see,” Tesla said, “the underground work was one of the most expensive parts of the tower.” He was referring particularly to special apparatus he invented for “gripping the earth.”
“The shaft, your Honor,” was first covered with timber and the inside with steel. In the center of this there was a winding stairs going down and in the center of the stairs there was a big shaft again through which the current was to pass, and this shaft was so figured in order to tell exactly where the nodal point is, so that I could calculate exactly the size of the earth or the diameter of the earth and measure it exactly within four feet with that machine.
“And then the real expensive work was to connect that central part with the earth, and there I had special machines rigged up which would push the iron pipes, one length after another, and I pushed, I think sixteen of them, three hundred feet. The current through these pipes [was to] take hold of the earth. Now that was a very expensive part of the work, but it does not show on the tower, but it belongs to the tower.
“The primary purpose of the tower, your Honor, was to telephone, to send the human voice and likeness around the globe. That was my discovery, that I announced in 1893, and now all the wireless plants are doing that. There is no other system being used. Then, the idea was to reproduce this apparatus and connect it just with a central station and telephone office, so that you may pick up your telephone and if you wanted to talk to a telephone subscriber in Australia you would simply call up that plant and that plant would connect you immediately. And I had contemplated to have press messages, stock quotations, pictures for the press and the reproductions of signatures, checks and everything transmitted from there, but…
“And then I was going to interest people in a larger project and the Niagara people had given me 10,000-horse power…”
“Did you have any conversation with Mr. Hutchins or anybody representing the plaintiffs concerning the taking down of the tower or anything like that?” asked the judge.
“No, sir. It came like a bolt from the blue sky.”
As the deed had been transferred in a legal manner with Tesla’s full compliance, Judge Miles ruled in favor of the hotel. The inventor’s lawyer countered, arguing that the Waldorf-Astoria sold equipment which they did not account for and destroyed a property worth $350,000 to try and recoup the $20,000 owed. “The property despoiled exceeded the value of the mortgage, and therefore the plaintiffs [the hotel management] should have been held to account to defendant Tesla.” Precedent cases were cited.
The Waldorf-Astoria, however, had the last word. “As a solace to the wild hopes of this dreamy inventor,” their lawyer wrote, “if prior to that time he should grasp in his fingers any one of the castles in Spain which always were floating about in his dreams, and had he paid the board bills which he owed, this wild scrubby woodland, including the Tower of Babel thereon, would ch
eerfully have been reconveyed to him. By no fair inference or construction can [Tesla’s counterclaim make void this judgment]. It was merely a sop to the vanity of a brilliant but unpractical mind. The judgement should be affirmed with costs.”5
In the summer of 1922, Robert Johnson and his ailing “ambassadress”6 returned to the States from Italy. They arrived in time to attend Paderewski’s comeback piano concerto with their elusive friend at Carnegie Hall in November.
Robert’s autobiography, Remembered Yesterdays, which was just completed, highlighted not only a memorable meeting between Tesla and Paderewski in the late 1890s but also the virtuoso’s 1919 stint as president of Poland. As the pianist had held office for only ten months, Tesla was moved to jest that it was “just long enough to gain publicity for his next tour.”
“That’s a terrible thing to say, Mr. Tesla,” Kate sparkled as they stepped into the limousine that was to take the trio to the opening. Dressed in black capes, canes, and silk high hats, the tall “angular” gentlemen struck a smart pair as they accompanied the suddenly recovering and radiant Mrs. Filipov.
“Seeing Paderewski again is like falling in love all over,” she said between her men. Tesla looked down and noticed the sorrow that lay hidden beneath her brow. His was apparent to her as well. Robert’s upper lip held them steady.
The Bolsheviks were taking over in Russia; Communist and anarchist uprisings reverberated throughout the world. In the United States there were race riots in Chicago, Negro lynchings in Minnesota, a suspicious explosion outside the J. P. Morgan Building, in New York, killing thirty people and wounding three hundred others, and forty thousand Klansmen marching on Washington. It was time to do something to stop the tide, so Attorney General A. M. Palmer rounded up three hundred Communists and sixty-seven anarchists in thirty-three cities. The last group arrested faced deportation for bombing out the windows and homes of Palmer and also Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt. Eugene V. Debs, still in prison for violating the Espionage Act, was nominated once again to run for president by the Socialist party; Woodrow Wilson received the Nobel Peace Prize.
The election of 1920 was the first to be broadcast by radio to a national audience; Lee De Forest announced the wrong winner four years earlier to a much smaller crowd. With his running mate Calvin Coolidge, Warren Harding trounced Democratic contender James Cox and vice presidential hopeful Franklin Roosevelt.
By this time, RCA was a megacorporation, writing million-dollar checks to John Hays Hammond Jr. and Edwin Armstrong. Having uncovered a great new market, RCA had increased its radio audience in 1924 to 5 million listeners. Profits were made not only in selling air space to advertisers but also in selling the radios themselves. By 1928 national broadcasts would link all forty-eight states, and soon after, regular shows featuring Buck and Will Rogers, Amos ‘n’ Andy, Burns and Allen, the Shadow, Stoopnagle and Budd, and Jack Benny would become daily fare. Such advertisers as Lucky Strike, Maxwell House, Canada Dry, Chesterfield, and Pontiac would soon insinuate themselves into the mass psyche. Tesla would say that he cared not to listen to the radio because he found it “too distracting.”
Other milestones during this period included the anointment of the “Manassa Mauler,” Jack Dempsey, as world heavyweight champion, a soaring stock market, and a number of key trials, most notably, Sacco and Vanzetti’s, alleged anarchists accused of murder, the Scopes monkey trial, and the $500 fine and ten-day incarceration of Mae West for lewd improvisations during her hit Broadway play Sex. Newest crazes included speakeasies, Al Capone, flapper dresses, and such dances as the Charleston, waltzing till you dropped, and the Shimmy. Although the radio was czar at home, for a night on the town, silent movies were king. Deaths during the Roaring Twenties included T. C. Martin, Jacob Schiff, Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie, Enrico Caruso, William Roentgen, Alexander Graham Bell, Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding, and the thirty-one-year-old heartthrob Rudolf Valentino, who, along with Harry Houdini, died of a ruptured appendix, Vladimir Lenin, Sarah Bernhardt, Princess Lwoff-Parlaghy, and Katharine Johnson, who passed on during autumn 1925.7
October 15, 1925
Dear Tesla,
It was Mrs. Johnson’s injunction that last night of her life that I should keep in touch with Tesla. This is a pretty hard thing to do, but it will not be my fault if it is not done.
Yours faithfully,
Luka8
THE MYSTERIOUS MR. BETTINI
Throughout the world, wireless inventors were becoming a precious commodity. In Italy, Mussolini “adroitly” redirected the Italian senate’s Fascist salute to Guglielmo Marconi for having established a national broadcasting system.9 A few years later, Il Duce approached Jack Hammond to institute a “foolproof secret radio system,” which, to Jack’s later revulsion, became a tool for killing anti-Fascists.10
In the Soviet Union, Lenin contacted Tesla to ask him to come over to his country to institute his AC polyphase and “regional power-distribution stations.”11 Sending emissaries to lure the Serbian nobleman. Tesla became enmeshed in a shady organization known as the Friends of Soviet Russia. With over 5 million people dying there of famine in 1922, the celebrated inventor had been approached by Ivan Mashevkief, of the Russian Workers Club of Manhattan, and by Elsie Blanc, a Communist leader from Massachusetts, to speak at “monster mass-meeting” at the Grange Hall in Springfield in June 1922. The purpose of the conclave, which was coorganized by a group of “Italian radicals,” was ostensibly to raise money for clothing and food for the starving and dying people of Russia. Since a Russian “bomb factory” was discovered in a warehouse in Manhattan at that time, no doubt some of the funds were also siphoned off for more nefarious activities.
Traveling to Springfield with Mashevkief, who described “with considerable imagination the manufacturing industries of Russia,” Tesla heard the first speaker announce “that the only solution to the economic problem [in Europe] was in the hands of the working class…[which] will have charge of all means of production. ‘They will do this for humanity’s sake and not for profit.’ The speaker prophesied that an economic collapse of the entire industrial structure of Europe will come and when it does, the working class will then secure full control of affairs. The speaker emphatically stated that the famine in Russia to-day is caused by counterrevolutionary forces backed by world capitalists and not because of the alleged poor rule of the bolshevists.”
According to Adrian Potter, the FBI agent who monitored the event, “‘Nicolo Tesla’ was addressed by several Italians as ‘Bettini’…Tesla or Bettini prophesied that Italy was soon to adopt a communist form of Government.”12
Clearly, Tesla was, in some sense, a revolutionary and on the side of the worker, but more for the purpose of transforming and uplifting their station. Tesla’s inventions were purposely constructed so as to reduce consumer cost, preserve natural resources, and relieve humanity of unnecessary manual labor. The Serb believed in the profit motive and strove all his life to become what Lenin loathed, so the reader should read this FBI report with caution, as Tesla’s supposed statement and motive for attending the meeting are not totally clear. Most likely he was concerned with the plight of the starving people in Russia (the U.S. government would send a reported $60 million in aid to feed the Soviets over the next decade),13 and he was also looking to sell his inventions to this new regime, with an accompanying vast potential market.
Where the Soviet leadership sought Tesla out, the aging gnomewizard and odd-combination capitalist-socialist Charles Steinmetz initiated his own contact, writing the Soviet premier a letter in February 1922. “Wishing Lenin success,” Steinmetz “express[ed] confidence that he would complete the astonishing work of social and industrial construction which Russia had undertaken under difficult circumstances.”
Joining a variety of Soviet organizations, Steinmetz also publicized his correspondence with Lenin and “published two papers in the Electrical World that described Russia’s electrification plans.” Scratching his gna
rled arthritic fingernails on GE’s capitalist blackboard, the self-righteous $100,000-per-year supposed academic implacably “called for American capital to support the project.”14
Although Lenin’s correspondence with Tesla has not been located, his response to Steinmetz is well known. “Lenin replied…that ‘to my shame’ he had heard the name of Steinmetz only several months ago…thanked Steinmetz for his help, but suggested that the absence of diplomatic relations between the United States and Soviet Russia would impede its implementation.” Lenin, however, would publish the note from the prominent engineer and send Steinmetz an autographed photograph of himself, which he received a few months later.15
Just one year later, Charles Proteus Steinmetz, the four-foot giant of electrical engineering, bon vivant, and family man, was dead. He was fifty-eight.16
Tesla was living on Fifth Avenue, two blocks from Central Park, in the Hotel St. Regis, room 1607, for the years 1920-1923.17 Commuting to Milwaukee and paying an exorbitant fifteen dollars a day in rent, the inventor neglected to compensate the hotel for a seven-month period and was promptly sued for the balance, over $3,000.18 Forced to find other premises, he moved into the Hotel Marguery on Park Avenue and Fortyeighth Street, just a few blocks from his favorite stomping grounds: Bryant Park, behind the New York Public Library, and the great commuter’s hall at Grand Central Station. After hours, in the dead of night, the inventor would grab his coat, cane, white gloves, and derby and prance out for a tour of the park by the library, where he cogitated and fed his precious pigeons. Rumors began spreading about the gaunt eccentric who fed the pigeons, as Tesla purposely kept his identity concealed. “Midnight is the hour he chooses for his visits…Tall, well dressed, of dignified bearing [the man] whistles several times, a signal for the pigeons on the ledges of the building to flutter down about his feet. With a generous hand, the man scatters peanuts on the lawn from a bag. A proud man, yet humble in his charities—Nikola Tesla.”19