Tesla: The Life and Times of an Electric Messiah

by Nigel Cawthorne

  This was no joke to Robert Johnson who had fallen on hard times. He wrote later: ‘When that Nobel Prize comes, remember that I am holding onto my house by the skin of my teeth and desperately in need of cash!’

  As it was, neither Tesla nor Edison was awarded the prize. That year the Nobel Prize for physics went to William Bragg and his son Lawrence for their research into crystalline structures using X-rays. Tesla had not even been nominated, though Edison was. Tesla was not nominated until 1937 and did not get it then either.

  However, Tesla’s long-standing friend and first biographer John O’Neill said that Tesla actually turned down the award. ‘To have the award go first to Marconi, and then to be asked to share the award with Edison, was too great a derogation of the relative value of his work to the world for Tesla to bear without rebelling,’ he wrote in Prodigal Genius. According to O’Neill, Tesla did not put himself in the same category as Edison. He considered himself a discoverer of new principles, while Edison was an inventor who exploited new discoveries for commercial gain.

  The Bolts of Thor

  Although The New York Times had announced that the Braggs had won the Nobel Prize on 14 November 1915, it continued to say that Tesla was a 1915 Nobel Prize winner in an article on 8 December, headlined Tesla’s New Device Like Bolts of Thor, when the paper reported that he was taking out a patent on a ‘manless airship’. It had neither an engine nor wings and could be sent at a speed of 300 miles (480 km) a second to any place on the globe using electricity. According to the Times:

  Ten miles or a thousand miles, it will all be the same to the machine, the inventor says. Straight to the point, on land or on sea, it will be able to go with precision, delivering a blow that will paralyze or kill, as is desired. A man in a tower on Long Island could shield New York against ships or army by working a lever …

  Tesla refused to go into further details. However, he dismissed electrical engineer Charles H. Harris’s suggestion that, in time of war, the country would be surrounded by ‘an electrical wall of fire’ as ‘not practical’ as it would take more than all the generators in the US to power it.

  Describing Radar

  While Tesla’s ideas on unmanned airships and bolts of Thor seem unworldly, he also described a way of detecting ships at sea. His idea was to transmit high-frequency radio waves that would reflect off the hulls of vessels and appear on a fluorescent screen. In 1917, he said: ‘We may produce at will, from a sending station, an electrical effect in any particular region of the globe; we may determine the relative position or course of a moving object, such as a vessel at sea, the distance traversed by the same, or its speed.’ This was one of the first descriptions of what we now call radar. Again it was too far ahead of its time to be taken seriously. However, in 1934 the French engineer Émile Girardeau (1882 – 1970) built an obstacle-locating radio apparatus – ‘conceived according to the principles stated by Tesla,’ he said – and obtained a patent for a working system, part of which was installed on the liner Normandie in 1935.

  The Edison Medal

  In 1917, Tesla was awarded the Edison Medal by the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. According to O’Neill, Tesla was reluctant to accept it at first, but was persuaded to do so by the chairman of the medal committee, Bernard A. Behrend, who was an admirer and close personal friend. Tesla turned the medal down initially because it was nearly 30 years since he had announced his rotating electric field and his AC system to the Institute. ‘I do not need its honours and someone else may find it useful,’ he said. Pressed by Behrend for further explanation, Tesla said:

  You propose to honour me with a medal which I could pin on my coat and strut for a vain hour before the members and guests of your Institute. You would bestow an outward semblance of honouring me but you would decorate my body and continue to let it starve, for failure to supply recognition, my mind and its creative products which have supplied the foundation upon which the major portion of your Institute exists. And when you would go through the vacuous pantomime of honouring Tesla you would not be honouring Tesla but Edison who had previously shared unearned glory from every previous recipient of this medal.

  Despite his rancour, Tesla was cajoled into accepting the Medal. After all it could hardly be awarded to Edison. But the acceptance speech presented Tesla with something of a problem. When he had addressed the AIEE in 1888, he had a lab where he could prepare his demonstrations. Now he had none. Nor could he expect to equal the lectures he had taken on the road in the 1890s. He had no props.

  After a private dinner at the Engineers’ Club, the medal winner was to give a formal address in the auditorium of the United Engineering Societies Building. However, as the members of the Institute assembled there, Tesla was nowhere to be seen. Behrend found him feeding the pigeons in the plaza of New York Public Library. As Behrend approached, Tesla had pigeons perched on his head, shoulders and arms, and he had a carpet of them pecking at seed around his feet. It was clear that the pigeons meant more to him than the members of AIEE. Behrend begged Tesla not to let him down.

  The Wheels of Industry Will Cease

  In the auditorium of the United Engineering Societies Building, Behrend said that Tesla had been taken temporarily unwell, but he was now okay and the proceedings would be delayed by about 20 minutes. When the presentation began Dr Arthur Kennelly from the Edison company said that Tesla was being awarded the Edison Medal for the development of rotating magnetic fields, which had made it possible to use AC in electric motors, and for his investigations into high-frequency currents.

  Charles A. Terry, who had worked with Tesla on some of his early research, ran through Tesla’s achievements to date. Behrend followed up by pointing out that, by an extraordinary coincidence, Tesla had given the first lecture on polyphase AC there exactly 29 years earlier, adding:

  Not since the appearance of Faraday’s experimental researches in electricity has a great experimental truth been voiced so simply and so clearly as this description of Mr Tesla’s great discovery of the generation and utilization of polyphase alternating currents. He left nothing to be done for those who followed him. His paper contained the skeleton even of the mathematical theory.

  Three years later, in 1891, there was given the first great demonstration, by Swiss engineers, of the transmission of power at 30,000 volts from Lauffen to Frankfurt by means of Mr Tesla’s system. A few years later this was followed by the development of the Cataract Construction Company, under the presidency of our member, Edward D. Adams, and with the aid of the engineers of the Westinghouse Company. It is interesting to recall here tonight that in Lord Kelvin’s report to Mr Adams, Lord Kelvin recommended the use of direct current for the development of power at Niagara Falls and for its transmission to Buffalo.

  The due appreciation or even enumeration of the results of Mr Tesla’s invention is neither practicable nor desirable at this moment. There is a time for all things. Suffice it to say that, were we to seize and to eliminate from our industrial world the results of Mr Tesla’s work, the wheels of industry would cease to turn, our electric cars and trains would stop, our towns would be dark, our mills would be dead and idle. Yea, so far-reaching is this work that it has become the warp and woof of industry … His name marks an epoch in the advance of electrical science. From that work has sprung a revolution in the electrical art.

  Behrend then asked Tesla to accept the Medal, not for the purposes of perpetuating his name – ‘the name of Tesla runs no more risk of oblivion than does that of Faraday, or that of Edison’. Nor was the Medal evidence that Tesla’s work had received official sanction – ‘his work stands in no need of such sanction’.

  No, Mr Tesla, we beg you to cherish this medal as a symbol of our gratitude for the new creative thought, the powerful impetus, akin to revolution, which you have given to our art and to our science. You have lived to see the work of your genius established. What shall a man desire more than this? There rings out to us a paraphrase of Pope’s lines on Newton: �
�Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night. God said, Let Tesla be, and all was light.’

  Tesla’s Acceptance Speech

  Accepting the Edison Medal, Tesla said he was grateful for the sympathy and appreciation shown him. Great strides had been made in the transmission and transformation of energy, he said, but ‘we are pressing on, inspired with the hope and conviction that this is just the beginning, a forerunner of further and still greater accomplishments’. He had not written an acceptance speech and spoke off the cuff, saying:

  I come from a very wiry and long-lived race. Some of my ancestors have been centenarians, and one of them lived 129 years. I am determined to keep up the record, and believe there is a prospect of accomplishing it. Then, nature has given me a vivid imagination which, through incessant exercise and training, through the study of scientific subjects, and the verification of theories through experiment, has become very accurate in results, so that I have been able to dispense, to a large extent, with the slow labours, wasteful and expensive processes of practical development of the ideas I conceive. It has made it possible for me to explore extended fields with great rapidity and get results with the least expenditure of vital energy. By this means, I may tell you also, I am able to picture the objects of my desires in forms so real and tangible that I can rid myself of that morbid craving for perishable possessions to which so many succumb.

  My life was also wonderful in another respect, for physical endurance or energy. If you inquire into the career of successful men in the inventor’s profession, you will find, as a rule, that they are as remarkable for their physical as for their mental capacities … When I turned my thoughts to inventions, I found that I could visualize my conceptions with the greatest facility. I did not need any models and drawings or experiments, I could do it all in my mind, and I did. The way I unconsciously evolved what I considered a new method in materializing inventive concepts and ideas, is exactly opposed to the purely experimental method, of which undoubtedly Edison is the greatest and most successful exponent.

  The moment you construct a device to carry into practice a crude idea you will find that you will be engrossed with the details and effects of the apparatus. As you go on changing and constructing, you will lose the forces of concentration, and you will lose sight of the great underlying principle. You obtain results, but at the sacrifice of quality. I did not construct. When I got an idea, I started right away to build it up in my mind. I changed the structure, I made improvements, I experimented, and I ran the device in my mind.

  It is absolutely the same to me whether I place my turbine in my mind or have it in my shop actually running in my test. It makes no difference. The results are the same. In this way you see I can develop and perfect an invention without touching anything, and when I have gone so far that I have put into that device every possible improvement I can think of, that I can see no fault in it any more, I then construct it, and every time my device works as I conceived it would, my experiment comes out exactly as I plan it, and in 20 years there has not been a single, solitary experiment which did not come out exactly as I thought it would.

  Chapter 12 – Destroying the Dream

  I have received reports which have completely confounded me all the more as I am now doing important work for the government with a view of putting the plant to a special moment… I trust that you will appreciate the seriousness of the situation and will see that the property is taken good care of and that all apparatus is carefully preserved.

  Nikola Tesla

  Tesla had signed over Wardenclyffe to the Waldorf-Astoria as he could not pay his hotel bill which had now reached $20,000 ($400,000 at today’s prices). However, he still hoped it would be returned when he raised the money to pay the bill, but the hotel management was determined to demolish the tower and sell off parts. Tesla’s response was to emphasize the tower’s usefulness in the event of war. It was, after all, home to his death ray and could shatter armies with its ‘Bolts of Thor’. Nevertheless, he was told that the demolition of the tower was to go ahead. With the US now in World War I, there would be no more money. As part of the war effort, Westinghouse, American Marconi and AT&T were allowed to pool their patents and produced each other’s equipment without compensating the original inventors. ‘A great wrong has been done,’ he wrote later, ‘but I am confident that justice will prevail.’

  In July 1917, Tesla left the Waldorf-Astoria where he had lived for 20 years. After persuading the management to let him keep many of his personal effects in the basement, he took the train to Chicago where he planned to continue work on his bladeless turbines. There he moved into the Blackstone Hotel next door to the University of Chicago.

  The following month, Tesla received a letter from George Scherff, his secretary, telling him that explosives experts had placed charges on major struts of the tower at Wardenclyffe and had blown them up.

  Suspicions of Espionage

  Meanwhile the story was circulated that suspected German spies had been using the tower for radio communication. The Electrical Experimenter said: ‘Suspecting that German spies were using the big wireless tower erected at Shoreham, L.I., about 20 years ago by Nikola Tesla, the Federal Government ordered the tower destroyed and it was recently demolished with dynamite. During the past month several strangers had been seen lurking about the place.’

  And the New York Sun gleefully reported: ‘The destruction of Nikola Tesla’s famous tower … shows forcibly the great precautions being taken at this time to prevent any news of military importance getting to the enemy.’

  Tesla was upset by the implication that he was disloyal to his new country. He had argued that the structure should have been preserved to help locate and destroy enemy submarines. If the tower had been destroyed to curb spying, Tesla pointed out that he should have been compensated by the government for the large amount of money he had put into it. As it was, he made no public protest when the US was at war. However, 2 years later he wrote that his dream had been destroyed by rivals, saying:

  I am unwilling to accord to some small-minded and jealous individuals the satisfaction of having thwarted my efforts. These men are to me nothing more than microbes of a nasty disease. My project was retarded by the laws of nature. The world was not prepared for it. It was too far ahead of time, but the same laws will prevail in the end and make it a triumphal success.

  Telephony Takes Over

  With Tesla’s World Telegraphy Centre now in pieces, representatives of American Marconi, AT&T, Westinghouse and GE got together behind closed doors in Washington and formed RCA. At the end of the war, radio stations were returned to their rightful owners, favouring RCA. Using Marconi patents, Westinghouse set up independently. In 1920, Tesla wrote, offering his services. They were refused. However, a little later, Westinghouse wrote again, asking Tesla if he would like to broadcast to their ‘invisible audience’ one Thursday evening.

  Tesla replied that, 20 years earlier, he had promised his friend J.P. Morgan that his ‘world system’ would enable the voice of a telephone subscriber to be transmitted to any point on the globe. ‘I prefer to wait until my project is completed before addressing an invisible audience,’ he said proudly.

  The Science Fantasy Factor

  Though Tesla’s tower was in ruins, the idea would live on. Before leaving New York, Tesla teamed up with long-term admirer Hugo Gernsback, the editor of Electrical Experimenter. He had met Tesla in 1908 when he visited his lab to see a bladeless turbine. Eleven years later, Gernsback recorded his impressions in Electrical Experimenter:

  The door opens and out steps a tall figure – over 6 ft high – gaunt but erect. It approaches slowly, stately. You become conscious at once that you are face-to-face with a personality of a high order. Nikola Tesla advances and shakes your hand with a powerful grip, surprising for a man over 60. A winning smile from piercing light blue-grey eyes, set in extraordinarily deep sockets, fascinates you and makes you feel at once at home.

  You are guided into an
office immaculate in its orderliness. Not a speck of dust is to be seen. No papers litter the desk, everything just so. It reflects the man himself, immaculate in attire, orderly and precise in his every movement. Dressed in a dark frock coat, he is entirely devoid of all jewellery. No ring, stickpin, or even watch-chain can be seen.

  Tesla speaks – a very high almost falsetto voice. He speaks quickly and very convincingly. It is the man’s voice chiefly which fascinates you.

  As he speaks you find it difficult to take your eyes off his own. Only when he speaks to others do you have a chance to study his head, predominant of which is a very high forehead with a bulge between the eyes – the never-failing sign of an exceptional intelligence. Then the long, well-shaped nose, proclaiming the scientist.

  How does this man, who has accomplished such tremendous work, keep young and manage to surprise the world with more and more new inventions as he grows older?

  How does this youth of sixty, who is a professor of mathematics, a great mechanical and electrical engineer and the greatest inventor of all times, keep his physical as well as remarkable mental freshness?

  Gernsback employed the artist Frank R. Paul to show the world what Tesla’s tower would have looked liked if it had been completed. For the cover of the Electrical Experimenter Paul added transmitters and Tesla’s wingless flying machines zapping nearby ships with their death-rays. Tesla was so thrilled, he used the illustration as his letterhead.