Tesla: The Life and Times of an Electric Messiah

by Nigel Cawthorne

  America was in the grip of Martian fever at the time. The noted astronomer Percival Lowell (1855 – 1916) was studying the ‘canals’ on Mars and John Jacob Astor (1864 – 1912) – the richest man to die on the Titanic – had just published A Journey to Other Worlds. He gave a copy to Tesla.

  For the time being, Tesla was planning to see if he could receive signals from a ferry on the Hudson River, but on 13 March 1895 his laboratory burnt down. While Tesla was wrestling with depression, Westinghouse was fighting over the patents for Tesla’s AC induction motors against GE and others. GE, of course, promulgated the theory that the fire at Tesla’s lab had been caused by the sparks emanating from one of his motors. In fact, it had started on the floor below.

  Tesla set about finding a new lab. In the meantime, Edison let him use a workshop in Llewellyn Park, New Jersey, and, although uninsured, Tesla was confident that Westinghouse would pay for any new equipment he needed. However, Westinghouse was a hard-headed businessman and billed Tesla. Meanwhile, he announced that he was planning to use Tesla’s motors, whose patents he owned, to power locomotives.

  The following year, 1896, Tesla told the press that he was looking into the ‘possibility of beckoning Martians’ and, when Lord Kelvin arrived in America in 1897, he suggested using the lights of New York to flash a signal to the Martians. Meanwhile Edison was working on something even more outlandish – a telephone to contact the dead.

  But for Tesla contacting Mars was just an ‘extreme application of [my] principle of propagation of electric waves’. It was merely an extension of a more Earthly goal. He pointed out: ‘The same principle may be employed with good effects for the transmission of news to all parts of the Earth … Every city on the globe could be on an immense circuit … a message sent from New York would be in England, Africa and Australia in an instant. What a grand thing that would be.’

  Electric Demon Duo

  Arthur Brisbane in The World newspaper had announced that Tesla was ‘greater even than Edison’, but New York’s Troy Press asked: ‘Who is electric king, Edison or Tesla?’ Meanwhile, the two men, now billed as the ‘Twin Wizards of Electricity’, were appearing at the National Electrical Exposition in Philadelphia. Tesla was then on the ascendant as AC had been transmitted along telephone lines for a record-breaking 500 miles (800 km). Tesla was disappointed though as the power at the Exposition was restricted due to the fear of fire.

  By this time, Edison was conceding: ‘The most amazing thing about this Exposition is the demonstration of the ability to deliver here an electric current generated at Niagara Falls. To my mind it solves one of the most important questions associated with electrical development.’ Bell concurred, stating, ‘This long distance transmission of electric power was the most important discovery of electric science that had been made for many years.’

  Tesla told the Philadelphia Press: ‘I am now convinced beyond any question that it is possible to transmit electricity … to commercial advantage over a distance of 500 miles at half the cost of generation by steam … I am willing to stake my reputation and my life on this declaration.’

  The Power of Electrical Healing

  Following on from Mark Twain’s idea, Tesla began to experiment on the healing properties of electricity in his new laboratory on Houston Street in Greenwich Village. At the time, doctors were promoting electricity as a ‘vitality booster’ and a ‘universal healing agent’. Some even said that it could cure tuberculosis, which was rife at the time. It was reported that Tesla took daily doses to deal with his depression after his lab burnt down. He said that high-frequencies ‘produce an anti-germicidal action’. As part of his daily routine, he would strip off and climb on board his apparatus and crank up the juice.

  He was also said to be working on an electric weeding tool to clear railroad tracks of unwanted undergrowth. He paid a short visit to Colorado, where he claimed to have transmitted a signal through Pike’s Peak, using the energy of the Earth, rather than his oscillators. Announcing the success of this experiment in Arthur Brisbane’s newspaper The World on 8 March 1896, he said: ‘Electricity would be as free as the air. The end has come to telegraph, telephone companies, and other monopolies … with a crash.’

  X-Rays, Shadowgraphs and Cosmic Rays

  While running a current through partially evacuated glass tubes, Tesla had also noticed a special radiation was given off that could be detected by phosphorescent and fluorescent substances. In 1892, he gave lectures on what he called ‘black light and very special radiation’. Experimenting with his radiation he notice that he could produce what he called ‘Shadowgraphs’ on plates inside metal containers. Unfortunately, these were lost when his laboratory burned down.

  When he read of Röntgen’s discovery of X-rays, he realized that these were the same thing as his ‘very special radiation’. He produced more shadowgraphs and sent them to Röntgen who asked how they had been made.

  Tesla quickly realized that he could get better results with a Tesla Coil that developed 4 million volts. While others were X-raying thin structures such as hands and feet, he was taking photographs through the skull at a distance of 40 ft (12 m) from the tube.

  While experimenting, Tesla noticed that the energy had both particle and wave-like attributes, something later recognized by Albert Einstein. He also speculated that the tiny lumps of matter involved, later known as electrons, might be broken up into even smaller pieces and said that ‘similar streams must be emitted by the Sun’ – what we now know as cosmic rays.

  Tesla X-rayed birds and animals, himself and his assistants, quite oblivious to the fact that this might be dangerous. He reasoned that the amount of material involved was so small that it would take centuries to build up enough to be poisonous. He himself suffered from bad headaches when experimenting with X-rays and an assistant suffered blistering and inflammation of exposed skin.

  Edison was also experimenting with X-rays and noted that they caused sensations in the eyes of the blind. He believed that eyesight might be restored by the application of X-rays. Tesla disagreed and there was another falling out.

  The rift was mended when the Kentucky School of Medicine combined devices made by Tesla and Edison to remove birdshot from the foot of a voter who had been shot during an election scuffle. Thomas Martin then took Tesla, Edison and other electricians on a fishing trip off Sandy Hook. Ironically, Tesla caught a large flounder; Edison a huge fluke.

  Heading for The Falls

  In July 1896, Tesla, Westinghouse, Adams and others involved in the Niagara project, travelled up to the Falls. On their arrival, the Niagara Gazette reported:

  Tesla is an idealist, and anyone who has created an ideal of him from the fame that he has won will not be disappointed in seeing him for the first time. He is fully six feet tall, very dark of complexion, nervous, and wiry. Impressionable maidens would fall in love with him at first sight, but he has no time to think of impressionable maidens. In fact, he has given as his opinion that inventors should never marry. Day and night he is working away at some deep problems that fascinate him, and anyone that talks with him for only a few minutes will get the impression that science is his only mistress, and that he cares more for her than for money and fame.

  Tesla was overcome at the sight of the Falls and the first of the hydroelectric power stations designed by Stanford White built there. It would house some ten gigantic Tesla turbines generating over 35,000 kilowatts.

  Afterwards he returned to New York City, where he threw himself back into research into the wireless transmission, fearing that Marconi may steal a march. Again he refused to holiday with the Johnsons, though he did have Christmas dinner with them.

  Respect, Acclaim and Kudos

  The celebration for the inauguration of the Niagara Falls power station was held in January 1897 in the Ellicott Club in Buffalo, NY. The top 350 of America’s most prominent businessmen made the trek there. A notable no-show was Thomas Edison.

  Tesla was introduced as the ‘greates
t electrician on Earth’ and received a standing ovation. However, Tesla made a rambling, self-deprecating speech, saying it had been a mistake to invite him. He heaped praise on those who had helped. Running out of time, the master of ceremonies intervened and cut off the end of his speech. Just as well, as a blissfully unaware Tesla was about to enlighten the distinguished audience by telling them that they had wasted all their time and money building a power line from Niagara to Buffalo – he would soon be transmitting the electricity wirelessly …

  His continual self-deprecation did him no favours. Others were claiming to have invented the induction motor and the Tesla Coil, and they were pirating his inventions. Meanwhile he turned down several applications to be his assistant from a top Yale student, Lee De Forest (1873 – 1961), who eventually went on to rival Marconi in the development of radio.

  Chapter 7 – Tesla’s Extreme Science

  Suppose the whole earth to be like a hollow rubber ball filled with water, and at one place I have a tube attached to this, with a plunger in the tube. If I press upon the plunger the water in the tube will be driven into the rubber ball, and as the water is practically incompressible, every part of the surface of the ball will be expanded. If I withdraw the plunger, the water follows it and every part of the ball will contract. Now, if I pierce the surface of the ball several times and set tubes and plungers at each place the plungers in these will vibrate up and down in answer to every movement which I may produce in the plunger of the first tube. If I were to produce an explosion in the centre of the body of water in the ball, this would set up a series of vibrations in the whole body. If I could then set the plunger in one of the tubes to vibrating in consonance … in a little while and with the use of a very little energy I could burst the whole thing asunder.

  Nikola Tesla, explaining a global telegraph system

  Back in New York, Tesla began developing Elisha Gray’s teleautography into telephotography. Edison then announced that he planned to launch the autographic telegraph, which would allow journalists to file their stories effortlessly, along with sketches and pictures. Tesla claimed his system could also work wirelessly, at a time when sending a Morse signal still had to be perfected.

  Tesla had studied a system developed in 1846 by Scottish physicist Alexander Bain (1810 – 77). It transmitted pictures using a grid of wires imbedded in wax under a sheet of chemically treated paper. The receiver used the same grid where an electric stylus drew the shape. Tesla found that it was better to break down the elements of the picture using one wire and a spinning disc. Dr Arthur Korn of the University of Munich, who transmitted a photograph in 1902, cited his debt to Tesla. These experiments were the basis of the fax machine and the television.

  Connecting to the Earth’s Energy

  From what he read, Tesla began to suspect that Marconi was using clones of Tesla’s equipment in his experiments. After Sir William Preece had cancelled the test of Tesla’s equipment, Lloyds of London contacted Tesla and asked if he would rig up a ship-to-shore system for an international yacht race in 1896. Tesla high-handedly refused, fearing that his work would be confused with the amateurish efforts of others in the field.

  He then began secret experiments that he did not even tell his lab assistants about. He would set up his transmitter in East Houston Street, then take a battery-powered receiver up the Hudson River to West Point, a distance of some 50 miles. From there, he could tune in to the signal from the transmitter. He did this two or three times, he told a court in 1915.

  At the same time, he considered harnessing wind power, tidal power, solar energy and geothermal energy. Electricity could be used to electrolyze water, separating it into hydrogen and oxygen, whose explosive recombination would produce heat and steam. He patented a machine to produce ozone and worked out how to separate nitrogen out of air electrically. The farmer would simply shovel earth into the machine and switch it on. The current would drive out the oxygen and hydrogen, leaving the nitrogen to be absorbed in the soil which would emerge ready-fertilized.

  Over 4,000 people turned out to see his lecture on the advances he had made in the field of X-rays at the New York Academy of Science, though it is thought that they had hoped to see him hurling thunderbolts again. Then in an article in Scribner’s Magazine on Marconi’s successful transmission of a radio signal 8 miles (13 km), he outlined a system for transmitting messages instantly around the world using the telluric currents that run below the surface of the Earth. He also had plans to transmit signals through the ionized layers thought to exist in the upper atmosphere.

  While Tesla had done all the early development in radio, Marconi was preparing to transmit a signal across the English Channel. Once again Tesla had failed to exploit his own invention. Without the money to pursue his bigger projects, his pronouncements made him sound like a mad scientist. Brown and Peck were still earning thousands from his patents, while Westinghouse had joined forces with GE. Tesla’s induction motors and polyphase system were about to power subway trains without a penny going to the inventor.

  Tesla was further sidelined at an electrical exhibition in New York organized by Stanford White. The Marconi company was represented by Edison’s son, Tom Edison Jr. Marconi had needed some wireless patents that Edison had taken out, and the Wizard of Menlo Park was happy to do business.

  Making the Earth Move

  Tesla placed one of his oscillators in the central support beam in the basement of the building of his Houston Street lab and adjusted the frequency until the beam began to hum. While he was distracted momentarily, the building began to shake, along with the earth and all the buildings around it. According to the Brooklyn Eagle: ‘The Fire Department responded to an alarm frantically turned in; four tons of machinery flew across the basement and the only thing which saved the building from utter collapse was the quick action of Dr Tesla in seizing a sledgehammer and destroying his machine.’

  Tesla called the device a ‘Frankenstein’s monster’, and pointed out that no building could stand the strokes of a 5-pound hammer, delivered at its resonant frequency. On another occasion, Tesla claimed to have gone down to Wall Street where there was a ten-storey steel frame of a building under construction, clamped an oscillator the size of an alarm-clock to it and tuned it in.

  In a few minutes, I could feel the beam trembling. Gradually the trembling increased in intensity and extended throughout the whole great mass of steel. Finally, the structure began to creak and weave, and the steel workers came to the ground panic-stricken, believing that there had been an earthquake. Rumours spread that the building was about to fall, and the police reserves were called out. Before anything serious happened, I took off the vibrator, put it in my pocket, and went away. But if I had kept on 10 minutes more, I could have laid that building flat in the street. And, with the same vibrator, I could drop the Brooklyn Bridge in less than an hour.

  He told reporters that he could have split the Earth the same way, destroying mankind. He had worked out that the resonant frequency of the Earth has a periodicity of 1 hour, 49 minutes. If he were to explode a ton of dynamite every 1 hour, 49 minutes, the shock waves would keep reinforcing one another. He estimated that it would take a year to smash the world to pieces, ‘but in a few weeks I could set the earth’s crust into such a state of vibration that it would rise and fall hundreds of feet, throwing rivers out of their beds, wrecking buildings and practically destroying civilization. The principle cannot fail.’

  Researching Remote Control

  In 1898, the United States went to war with Spain after the battleship, the USS Maine, was sunk in Havana harbour. Cuba was still a Spanish colony at the time. It was thought that Tesla was on John Jacob Astor’s yacht when, to aid the war effort, he proposed the idea of a guided torpedo.

  While Astor and his yacht went to war, Tesla began making preliminary experiments with a remote-controlled boat. Tesla had a large tank in the auditorium of the Electrical Exhibition in 1898. In it was a 4 ft (1.2 m) boat. By means of transmi
tters working at various frequencies, he could start and stop the boat, steer it and switch its lights on and off. He had also planned to build a submersible, perhaps to stage mock battles between Spanish ships and the American fleet. But he was upstaged by the Marconi company who were demonstrating remotely controlled mines, detonated wirelessly. The press got particularly excited when Tom Edison Jr accidentally blew up his desk where other mines were stored.

  Crew-less Devil Automata

  Tesla’s invention seemed all the more crazy when he proposed a Torpedo Boat Without a Crew:

  My submarine boat, loaded with its torpedoes, can start out from a protected bay or be dropped over a ship’s side, make its devious way below the surface, through dangerous channels of mine beds, into protected harbours and attack a fleet at anchor, or go out to sea and circle about, watching for its prey, then dart upon it at a favourable moment, rush up to within a hundred feet if need be, discharge its deadly weapon and return to the hand that sent it. Yet through all these wonderful evolutions it will be under the absolute and instant control of a distant human hand on a far-off headland, or on a war ship whose hull is below the horizon and invisible to the enemy.

  I am aware that this sounds almost incredible and I have refrained from making this invention public till I had worked out every practical detail of it. In my laboratory I now have such a model, and my plans and description at the Patent Office at Washington show the full specifications of it.

  Even the Electrical Engineer, edited by his friend Thomas Martin, complained that Tesla was always promising great things and failing to deliver, saying: ‘Mr Tesla fools himself, if he fools anybody, when he launches forth into the dazzling theories and speculations associated with his name.’

  He would tether up aloft balloons in those strata and deliver to them large quantities of current at such high potential that it would travel economically across the space without wires, say from Niagara Falls to Paris. By this facile distribution of water power, coal and steam would become unnecessary to industry. The new plan may explain why Mr Tesla has abandoned his old steam oscillator. It is earnestly to be hoped that this novel idea will prove workable. Balloons were a dismal failure in our late war, but that is no criterion, and Mr Tesla may have some superior gas for inflation and sustentation purposes. It will be remembered that Mr Marconi has already telegraphed from balloon to balloon, without wires, a distance of over 20 miles, thus proving in advance the tenability of Mr Tesla’s proposition.