Tesla: The Life and Times of an Electric Messiah

by Nigel Cawthorne

  However, though painful, these did not worry him. Throughout his life, he said, ‘these luminous phenomena still manifest themselves from time to time, as when a new idea opening up possibilities strikes me …’

  Secrets in Strasbourg

  Tesla was sent as a trouble-shooter to lighting stations in France and Germany. He oversaw the illumination of an opera house in Paris, a theatre in Bavaria and cafés in Berlin. After helping develop an automatic regulator for Edison dynamos, he was sent to fix the illuminations at the central railway station in Strasbourg, which, in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 – 71, had been taken over by Germany.

  There had been a problem there when the wiring had shorted, blowing out a section of the wall during a visit of Kaiser Wilhelm I and a German-speaking engineer was needed to sort it out. In the station’s powerhouse, there was a Siemens AC generator. In their spare time, Tesla and Szigeti secretly experimented with the prototype of one of Tesla’s AC motors.

  ‘It was the simplest motor I could conceive of,’ said Tesla. ‘It had only one circuit, and no windings on the armature or the fields. It was of marvellous simplicity.’

  The problem was it did not work. The initial trouble was that it used a brass ring that would not magnetize. Steel had to be added in various positions. Then, said Tesla, ‘I finally had the satisfaction of seeing rotation effected by alternating current of different phase, and without sliding contacts or commutator, as I had conceived a year before. It was an exquisite pleasure, but not to compare with the delirium of joy following the first revelation.’ He had finally proved Professor Pöschl wrong.

  Passage to New York

  Tesla tried unsuccessfully to raise money to back his invention in Strasbourg. He returned to Paris expecting a bonus for his work in Strasbourg which did not materialize. He tried to find financial backing there too, again unsuccessfully. However, he did catch the eye of Charles Batchelor who had been head of the Edison organization in Paris. He was returning to New York to head the Edison Machine Works there and asked Tesla to come with him. To smooth Tesla’s passage into the Edison organization Batchelor got a letter of introduction from Tivadar Puskás addressed to Edison, saying: ‘I know two great men and you are one of them; the other is this young man.’

  Just before leaving for America, Tesla spent time with scientists studying microscopic organisms in drinking water. Having suffered cholera before, he now shunned unpurified water, avoided poor quality restaurants, and scoured the crockery and cutlery before eating. Later he wrote: ‘If you would watch only for a few minutes the horrible creatures, hairy and ugly beyond anything you can conceive, tearing each other up with the juices diffusing throughout the water – you would never again drink a drop of unboiled or unsterilized water.’

  His uncles again paid for the trip. The journey to New York was not a happy one. His money and most of his belongings were stolen, and there was some sort of mutiny on the ship and Tesla nearly got pushed overboard. On 6 June 1884, Tesla sailed into New York on the City of Richmond just as the first stones of the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal were being hauled into place. He was 28 years old.

  Although he spoke English, Tesla had difficulty making himself understood as the customs officer recorded that he was from Sweden. Tesla then recalled the clerk barking: ‘Kiss the Bible. Twenty cents.’ His first impressions of America were not good. He wrote:

  What I had left was beautiful, artistic, and fascinating in every way. What I saw here was machined, rough, and unattractive. A burly policeman was twirling his stick which looked to me as big as a log. I approached him politely with the request to direct me. ‘Six blocks down, then to the left,’ he said, with murder in his eyes. ‘Is this America?’ I asked myself in painful surprise. ‘It is a century behind Europe in civilization.’

  He went to work immediately. Passing a machine shop, he saw a mechanic who had just given up on trying to fix an electric machine and offered to help. In one version of the story, Tesla did this ‘without thought of compensation’; in another, it was one of the machines he had helped design and he charged $20. In either case, legend has that he said: ‘I had it running perfectly in an hour.’

  Chapter 3 – Meeting Thomas Edison

  I was thrilled to the marrow by meeting Edison who began my American education right then and there. I wanted to have my shoes shined, something I considered below my dignity. Edison said: ‘Tesla, you will shine the shoes yourself and like it.’ He impressed me tremendously. I shined my shoes and liked it.

  Nikola Tesla

  Tesla was soon too busy to dwell on the shortcomings of the New World. The dynamos the Edison organization had installed on the SS Oregon, then the holder of the Blue Riband for the fastest transatlantic passenger crossing, had broken down, delaying her sailing. Tesla immediately volunteered to make the repairs. He and his crew worked overnight and the Oregon set sail the following day for another record-breaking run.

  Returning to Edison’s Manhattan offices at 5 am, Tesla bumped into Charles Batchelor and Edison, who were just going home. According to Tesla, Edison said: ‘Here is our Parisian running around at night.’ They had met before in Paris and seem to have got on famously. Edison recalled:

  Oh, he’s a great talker, and, say, he’s a great eater too. I remember the first time I saw him. We were doing some experimenting in a little place outside Paris, and one day a long, lanky lad came in and said he wanted a job. We put him to work thinking he would soon tire of his new occupation for we were putting in twenty to twenty-four hours a day then, but he stuck right to it and after things eased up one of my men said to him: ‘Well, Tesla, you’ve worked pretty hard, now I’m going to take you into Paris and give you a splendid supper.’ So he took him to the most expensive café in Paris – a place where they broil an extra thick steak between two thin steaks. Tesla stowed away one of those big fellows without any trouble and my man said to him: ‘Anything else, my boy? I’m standing you a treat.’ ‘Well, if you don’t mind, sir,’ said my apprentice, ‘I’ll try another steak.’ After he left me he went into other lines and has accomplished quite a little.

  At their first meeting in New York, Tesla explained that he had just returned from the Oregon and had repaired both the dynamos. Edison said nothing and walked away. When he was a little distance away, Tesla saw him turn to Batchelor and say: ‘Batchelor, this is a damn good man.’

  Emulating Edison

  Plainly Tesla had impressed Edison and began work at the Edison Machine Works on 8 June 1884, only two days after arriving in America. He worked hard. ‘For nearly a year, my regular hours were from 10.30 am to 5 o’clock the next morning without a day’s exception,’ he said.

  Possibly thinking that Tesla came from Transylvania, Edison asked whether Tesla had ever tasted human flesh. Tesla was also appalled at Edison’s ‘utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene’, but enquired what the great man’s diet consisted of. ‘You mean to make me so all-fired smart?’ said Edison. Tesla nodded.

  Edison replied, perhaps in jest, that he ate a daily regimen of Welsh Rarebit as ‘it’s the only breakfast guaranteed to renew one’s mental faculties after the long vigils of toil’. Tesla began to do the same despite a protesting stomach. But his admiration was undiminished. Tesla wrote in his autobiography:

  I was amazed at this wonderful man who, without early advantages and scientific training, had accomplished so much. I had studied a dozen languages, delved in literature and art, spent my best years in libraries reading all sorts of stuff that fell into my hands, from Newton’s Principia to the novels of Paul de Kock, and felt that most of my life had been squandered.

  The admiration was mutual. According to Tesla, Edison told him: ‘I have had many hard-working assistants, but you take the cake.’

  However, Tesla still took the time to enjoy a good meal – the table d’hôte at a restaurant in Greenwich Village with a bottle of red wine – and play billiards, a game he had mastered as a student. According to Edison�
�s personal secretary Alfred O. Tate: ‘He played a beautiful game. He was not a high scorer but his cushion shots displayed a skill equal to that of a professional exponent of this art.’

  Avoiding the AC Subject

  Tesla set about redesigning Edison’s dynamos, replacing their long magnets with more efficient short cores, claiming that they gave three times the output for the same amount of iron. He kept quiet about his AC motor though, perhaps recalling the indifference of Edison’s men in Paris. Once, though, he was tempted to bring up the subject with Edison himself.

  ‘It was on Coney Island,’ he said, ‘and just about as I was going to explain it to him, someone came and shook hands with Edison. That evening, when I came home, I had a fever and my resolve rose up again not to speak freely about it to other people.’ Otherwise Tesla and Edison got on well enough. Tesla told the tale of visiting Edison’s office at 65 Fifth Avenue, when the great man was playing a game guessing weights.

  ‘Edison felt me all over and said: “Tesla weighs 152 pounds to the ounce” – and he guessed it exactly,’ Tesla recalled. He asked how Edison could guess his weight so accurately and was told: ‘He was employed for a long time in a Chicago slaughter house where he weighed thousands of hogs every day.’

  Tesla would occasionally dine with Edison, Batchelor and others of the company’s top brass in a restaurant across the road from the showroom at 65 Fifth Avenue where they would swap stories and tell jokes. Afterwards they would go to a billiard room where Tesla would impress them with his bank shots and his vision of the future.

  Arc Lighting

  Companies that had grown up making arc lights were now moving into incandescent lighting, robbing Edison of valuable contracts. He struck back by going into arc lighting which was more suitable for street lighting or illuminating large spaces. He filed an arc-lamp patent in June 1884 and left Tesla to work out the details. Tesla completed the job, but his system was shelved when Edison made a deal with a dedicated arc-lighting company and, by then, larger incandescent bulbs suitable for lighting larger spaces had been developed. Tesla felt cheated.

  ‘The manager had promised me $50,000,’ he wrote, ‘but when I demanded payment, he merely laughed, saying “You are still a Parisian! When you become a fully-fledged American, you will appreciate an American joke.”’

  As it was, Tesla could not even get his salary of $18 a week increased to a modest $25. This was a painful shock and he resigned. Later in life, Tesla re-assessed his opinion of Edison. When the Wizard of Menlo Park died in 1931, Tesla said:

  If he had a needle to find in a haystack he would not stop to reason where it was most likely to be, but would proceed at once with the feverish diligence of a bee, to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search … I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing just a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of the labour … Trusting himself entirely to his inventor’s instinct and practical American sense … the truly prodigious amount of his actual accomplishments is little short of a miracle.

  Indebted to Edison

  Despite the rift between the two men, Tesla was indebted to Edison. With Edison’s former patent attorney Lemuel Serrell, Tesla began patenting improvements to arc lights and dynamos.

  In Serrell’s office, Tesla met B.A. Vail and Robert Lane. They set up the Tesla Electric Light and Manufacturing Company. Tesla tried to interest them in his AC motor, but they were only interested in arc lighting. Together they set about lighting the streets and factories in Rahway, New Jersey, Vail’s hometown. Meanwhile Tesla used the patents he had been granted to buy shares.

  When the electrification of Rahway was completed, Electrical Review featured it on the front page of its 14 August 1886 issue. It was so successful that Vail and Lane decided to run the utility, leaving no role for Tesla. He was bounced from the company leaving him with nothing but ‘a beautifully engraved certificate of stock of hypothetical value’. He could not even use his own inventions as patents had been assigned to the company. It was the ‘hardest blow I ever received,’ he said. In the winter of 1886 – 87, he was forced to dig ditches.

  I lived though a year of terrible heartaches and bitter tears, my suffering being intensified by my material want. My high education in various branches of science, mechanics and literature seemed to me like a mockery.

  Rescued by a Patent

  In 1884, Edison had been experimenting with ways of producing electricity from burning coal or gas. It ended when an explosion blew the laboratory’s windows out. However, Tesla figured out a simpler – and safer – way to do it, and in March 1886, he applied for a patent for his thermo-magnetic motor.

  While Tesla was digging ditches, he told his foreman about his inventions. It seems that the foreman had been digging the ditches for the underground cables that connected Western Union’s head office with the stock and commodity exchanges, and knew Alfred S. Brown (1836 – 1906) who was superintendent of Western Union’s New York Metropolitan District.

  Brown probably knew of Tesla from the article in Electrical Review and was impressed by his thermoelectric motor and his AC inventions.

  The Egg of Columbus

  Eager to exploit Tesla’s ideas, Brown contacted Charles F. Peck, a wealthy lawyer from New Jersey. However, Peck knew of the general prejudice against AC and refused even to witness some tests.

  ‘I was discouraged,’ Tesla said. But then he remembered the ‘Egg of Columbus’. The story goes that Columbus was having dinner with some Spanish nobles who mocked him. So he challenged them to stand an egg on its end. They all tried and failed. Then he took the egg, tapped it lightly on one end, cracking the shell and denting it, so it would stand upright. As a result he was granted an audience with Queen Isabella and won her support for his voyage.

  Tesla told Peck that he could go one better. He would make an egg stand on its end without cracking the shell. If he could trounce Columbus, Tesla asked, could he count on Peck’s support? Peck said he had no crown jewels to pawn, but he would help.

  After the meeting, Tesla took a hard-boiled egg to a blacksmith and got him to cast one in copper. Then he placed four coils under the top of a wooden table to create a magnetic rotating field. When he turned on the current, the egg began to spin. Growing faster, it ceased to wobble and stood on its end. Peck was impressed. Not only had Tesla gone one better than Columbus, he had demonstrated the principle of his AC motor.

  Tesla Electric Company

  Together Tesla, Brown and Peck formed the Tesla Electric Company in April 1887. Tesla would get a third share of any money generated. Brown and Peck would split another third, and a third would be reinvested. Tesla also received a salary of $250 a month, while Brown and Peck would cover the cost of the patents. The following month, Szigeti came to New York to work as Tesla’s assistant.

  They set up a laboratory at 89 Liberty Street above a printing company. During the day the printing shop used a steam engine to power its presses. At night it provided power for Tesla’s experiments.

  First Tesla developed his thermomagnetic motor into the pyromagnetic generator, using the same principles. Tesla believed this was a great invention, but it did not work very well and his patent application was denied. Nevertheless, Peck encouraged him to continue inventing and his mind turned back to the AC motor he built in Strasbourg.

  This time, instead of a single coil, he used four coils wound around a laminated ring. Two separate AC currents were fed to the pairs of coils on opposite sides. If these two currents were 90° out of phase – that is, when one was at its maximum positive value, the other was at its maximum negative value – a rotating electrical field was produced. To Tesla’s delight, the rotor – initially a shoe polish tin balanced on a pin – began to spin.

  From this prototype, Tesla and Szigeti produced two full-scale motors. They were, Tesla said, ‘exactly as I had imagined them. I made no attempt to improve the design, but merely reproduce the pictures as they appeared to
my vision and the operation was as I expected.’

  Patents were applied for and issued on 1 May 1888. The motors were then tested for their efficiency by Professor William Anthony (1835 – 1908) of Cornell University and, on 15 May, Tesla delivered his ground-breaking paper A New Alternating Current Motor to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE).

  Chapter 4 – The Westinghouse Corporation

  There were many days when [I] did not know where my next meal was coming from. But I was never afraid to work, I went where some men were digging a ditch … [and] said I wanted to work. The boss looked at my good clothes and white hands and laughed to the others … but he said, ‘All right. Spit on your hands. Get in the ditch.’ And I worked harder than anybody. At the end of the day I had $2.

  Nikola Tesla

  Power stations had sprung up across America and Europe to provide electric light at night. In the 1880s the owners saw electric motors as a way to sell power to factories and streetcar lines during the day. However, most of the power stations produced DC and Brown and Peck were a little dubious of Tesla’s fixation with AC.

  Other inventors had used AC to power arc lights. This was particularly popular in Europe where experimenters found they could raise or lower the voltage of an alternating current using primitive transformers. Engineers at the Ganz Company found that, at a high voltage, electricity could be distributed over long distances using thin copper wires. Then, to make it safe to use in the home, it would be stepped down using a transformer.

  Westinghouse and AC

  In 1884, George Westinghouse became interested in electric lighting and hired the inventor William Stanley Jr (1858 – 1916), who had invented an incandescent lamp and a self-regulating dynamo. At first, Westinghouse thought of developing a DC system, but abandoned it as the market was already overcrowded.