Tesla: The Life and Times of an Electric Messiah

by Nigel Cawthorne

  In this, he competed with Edison who claimed only to sleep 4 hours a night, though when he sat in his lab he would take two 3-hour naps a day. Tesla probably did the same. Hotel staff said that they often found him sitting transfixed and they found they could work around him in his home without disturbing him.

  He took brisk walks to aid his concentration, but even then he was often in a dream. People who he knew quite well could walk past him, even though he appeared to be looking straight at them. In 1935, he said he was lucky not to have been killed while jaywalking in such a state. Two years later, he was hit by a taxi and badly injured though, refusing to see a doctor he limped home. He had three cracked ribs and was confined to bed for 6 months.

  Wardenclyffe Revisited

  Tesla still had not given up on Wardenclyffe and sued the Waldorf-Astoria over its destruction. He maintained that he had put up Wardenclyffe as collateral against the $20,000 he owed. They assumed that it was theirs. They had torn it down to sell for scrap and resell the land. Tesla, of course, was expecting to make $30,000 a day from Wardenclyffe if it was ever finished. If he then paid the $20,000, the experimental station would then be his again. In court he insisted that the Waldorf-Astoria were supposed to take care of it but, even before it had been torn down, they had allowed vandals to break in and steal expensive equipment.

  During the trial Tesla was to give a loving description of his lost palace. The attorney for the Waldorf-Astoria tried to block this testimony, but the judge let him go ahead.

  The building formed a square about 100 ft by 100 ft [30 by 30 m]. 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 centre, the chimney rose. There were two 300-horsepower boilers surrounded by two 16,000-gallon water tanks. To the right of the boiler plant was one 400-horsepower Westinghouse engine and a smaller 35-kilowatt engine to drive the dynamo for the lighting. Along with them was the main switchboard that controlled the pumps and various compressors.

  Towards the road, on the railroad side, was the machine shop. That compartment was 100 ft by 35 ft [30 m by 10 m] with a door in the middle and it contained, I think eight lathes. Then there was the milling machine, a planer and shaper, a spliner, three drills, four motors, a grinder and a blacksmith’s forge.

  Now, in the compartment opposite, 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, 7 ft [2 m] high and about 5 ft by 5 ft [1.5 by 1.5 m] 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 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 Waldorf-Astoria’s attorney objected again, but the judge allowed Tesla to continue.

  Beyond the door of this compartment, there were to be 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 its 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, and elaborate regulating apparatus, and it was intended to give every imaginable regulation that I wanted in my measurements and control of energy.

  He went on to describe a special 100-horsepower motor equipped with elaborate devices for rectifying the alternating currents and sending them back to the condensers. On this apparatus alone, Tesla said he had spent thousands of dollars. ‘Then along the centre of the room I had a very precious piece of apparatus,’ he said. It was his remote-controlled boat.

  A Bolt from the Blue

  Asked whether that was all, Tesla replied: ‘Oh, no, nowhere near.’ And he went on to describe a series of cupboards that contained numerous devices that each represented a different phase in the development of his work. In the testing room there were other instruments, some of which had been given to him by Lord Kelvin. Tesla then described the tower with its expensive underground workings containing special apparatus for ‘gripping the earth’.

  The shaft, your honour, was first covered with timber and the inside with steel. In the centre of this there was a winding stairs going down and in the centre of the stairs was a big shaft through which the current was to pass, and this shaft was so figured in order to tell exactly where the nodal point is, so I could calculate exactly the size of the Earth or the diameter of the Earth and measure it exactly within 4 ft [1.2 m] 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 16 of them, 300 ft [90 m]. 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 honour, 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 not another 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 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 reproductions of signatures, cheques and everything transmitted from there.

  Tesla was asked whether he had any warning that the tower was going to be demolished. He replied, ‘No, sir. It came like a bolt from a blue sky…’

  Although the Waldorf-Astoria had not accounted for the machinery, they had sold off and destroyed property worth $350,000 to recoup $20,000, the judge found in favour of the hotel, who also had the last word:

  As a solace to the wild hopes of this dreamy inventor, 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 cheerfully have been reconveyed to him.

  Listening to Communist Overtures

  The 1920 US Presidential Election was the first to be broadcast to a national audience – though Lee De Forest had announced the wrong winner to a small audience four years before. In Italy, Fascist leader Benito Mussolini (1883 – 1945) saluted Marconi. His national broadcasting system allowed the dictator to reach the entire Italian nation after he came to power in 1922. Meanwhile, Vladimir Ilich Lenin (1870 – 1924), who had led the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917, made overtures to Tesla, asking him to come to the Soviet Union to build power stations and an AC distribution system.

  Tesla was also invited to speak at a meeting of the Friends of Soviet Russia in Springfield, Massachusetts, travelling there with Ivan Mashevkief from the Russian Workers Club of Manhattan. At the meeting, the organizers, a group of Italian radicals, addressed Tesla mysteriously as ‘Bettini’. According to an FBI agent at the event, Tesla ‘prophesied that Italy would soon adopt a communist form of government’. However, there is no evidence that he knew what he was getting himself into. Tesla took little interest in politics and he was, at best, naïve.

  Waiting for the Midnight
Hour

  While commuting to Milwaukee, Tesla was paying $15 a day for room 1607 in the Hotel St Regis on Fifth Avenue. However, he neglected to pay for 7 months and was forced to move to the Hotel Marguery on Park Avenue and 48th Street. Fortunately this was still close to his night-time haunts, Grand Central Station and Bryant Park behind New York Public Library. He was spotted there one night, sporting his derby, cane and white gloves by the New York World:

  Midnight is the hour he chooses for his visits … Tall, well-dressed, of dignified bearing, he 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.

  How This Man Worked …

  A young science journalist named Kenneth Swezey, once praised by Albert Einstein for his explanation of the Archimedes principle, sought out Tesla. While Swezey was only 19 and Tesla in his late sixties, they became firm friends for the rest of his life. According to Swezey, Tesla sometimes greeted him at the door stark naked, but insisted that Tesla was ‘absolutely celibate’.

  He confirmed that Tesla slept less than 2 hours a night, though he would occasionally doze to recharge his batteries. He would walk 8 to 10 miles a day and relax in a bathtub, though gone was the electric shower that bombarded him with cleansing particles. He would also clench and unclench his toes a hundred times each night to stimulate the brain cells. Swezey recalled:

  And how this man worked! I will tell you about a little episode … I was sleeping in my room like one dead. It was three after midnight. Suddenly the telephone ring awakened me. Through my sleep I heard his voice, ‘Swezey, how are you, what are you doing?’ This was one of many conversations in which I did not succeed in participating. He spoke animatedly, with pauses [as he had worked] out a problem, comparing one theory to another, commenting: and when he felt he arrived at the solution, he suddenly closed the telephone.

  In 1926, Tesla moved to the Hotel Pennsylvania. There the ‘tall, thin, ascetic man’ was interviewed by Colliers magazine and he gave another of his predictions: ‘This struggle of the human female toward sex equality will end in a new social order, with the human female as superior.’ Tesla forwarded his prediction to J.P. Morgan’s daughter Anne, who he had remained in touch with and was now an advocate for the women’s movement.

  Into the Realms of the Future

  It was around that time, Tesla retired. Miss Dorothy F. Skerritt, Tesla’s secretary until he closed his office at 70, described him at that age:

  As one approached Mr Tesla you beheld a tall, gaunt man. He appeared to be an almost divine being. When about 70, he stood erect, his extremely thin body immaculately and simply attired in clothing of a subdued colouring. Neither scarf pin nor ring adorned him. His bushy black hair was parted in the middle and brushed back briskly from his high broad forehead, deeply lined by his close concentration on scientific problems that stimulated and fascinated him. From under protruding eyebrows his deep-set, steel grey, soft, yet piercing eyes, seemed to read your innermost thoughts. As he waxed enthusiastic about fields to conquer and achievements to attain his face glowed with almost ethereal radiance, and his listeners were transported from the commonplaces of today to imaginative realms of the future. His genial smile and nobility of bearing always denoted the gentlemanly characteristics that were so ingrained in his soul.

  Too Great a Sacrifice

  In an interview with the New York World in 1926, he said: ‘Sometimes I feel that by not marrying I made too great a sacrifice to my work, so I have decided to lavish all the affection of a man no longer young on the feathery tribe. I am satisfied if anything I do will live for posterity. But to care for those homeless, hungry or sick birds is the delights of my life. It is my only means of playing.’

  One particular pigeon was special to him. When he found it, it had a broken leg and wing. ‘Using my mechanical knowledge, I invented a device by which I supported its body in comfort in order to let the bones heal.’ He kept the bird in his hotel suite and figured that it cost him more than $2,000 to heal her. It took a year-and-a-half before she was well again and, Tesla said, she was ‘one of the finest and prettiest birds I have ever seen’.

  My Life’s Work was Finished …

  His love of that one pigeon and her death affected him profoundly. He told John J. O’Neill:

  When she was ill I knew, and understood; she came to my room and I stayed beside her for days. I nursed her back to health. That pigeon was the joy of my life. If she needed me, nothing else mattered. As long as I had her, there was a purpose in my life.

  Then one night as I was lying in my bed in the dark, solving problems, as usual, she flew in through the open window and stood on my desk. I knew she wanted me; she wanted to tell me something important so I got up and went to her.

  As I looked at her I knew she wanted to tell me – she was dying. And then, as I got her message, there came a light from her eyes – powerful beams of light … it was a real light, a powerful, dazzling, blinding light, a light more intense than I had ever produced by the most powerful lamps in my laboratory.

  When that pigeon died, something went out of my life. Up to that time I knew with a certainty that I would complete my work, no matter how ambitious my programme, but when that something went out of my life I knew my life’s work was finished.

  Chapter 14 – A New Source of Energy

  I’m happy to hear that you are celebrating your 75th birthday, and that, as a successful pioneer in the field of high-frequency currents, you have been able to witness the wonderful development of this field of technology. I congratulate you on the magnificent success of your life’s work.

  Albert Einstein

  While working on his petrol-powered turbine in Philadelphia in 1924 – 25, Tesla met John B. Flowers, an inspector of an aircraft factory. With development of his bladeless turbine reaching a dead end, Tesla returned to the idea of powering planes and cars remotely from large central power stations like the one he had tried to build at Wardenclyffe. In Tesla’s hotel suite, Flowers helped draft a proposal to test and implement Tesla’s Wireless Power System to present it to J. H. Dillinger, head of the Radio Laboratory at the Bureau of Standards in Washington, DC.

  Flowers told Dillinger that Tesla’s system would power a plane at any point around the world and that Tesla had already developed an oscillator to provide the power which he was willing to give to the American government if they agreed to build the plant. A meeting in Washington was arranged and Dillinger sent the proposal to physicist Harvey L. Curtis (1875 – 1956).

  The 10-page document outlined a plan to use standing waves to operate cars and planes. To demonstrate this, a sketch showed a balloon, standing in for the Earth, and a mechanical oscillator standing in for the electrical device:

  … a mechanical oscillator arm was fastened to the tied opening of a rubber balloon 20 inches [50 cm] in diameter. The oscillator arm was operated with an electrical motor at 1,750 rpm by means of an eccentric on the motor shaft. The balloon hung free in the air. The rubber surface of the balloon represented the earth’s conducting surface and the air inside its insulating interior. The waves were propagated in the rubber surface at the rate of 51 ft per second [15.5 m per second], the frequency of transmission was 29 cycles per second and the wavelength was 21 inches [53 cm].

  The mechanical oscillator was used in place of Tesla’s electrical oscillator as it presents an almost perfect analogy. Standing or stationary waves of the rubber surface replace the electromagnetic waves of Tesla’s system. By the test of this analogue, the operation of Tesla’s system can be forecast. When the oscillator arm was set in motion by operating the motor, there were three standing waves having six loops on the Earth’s surface – all having the same amplitude of vibration!

  When the finger was pushed against one or more loops, all the loops were reduced in amplitude in the same proportion showing the ability
to obtain all the power out at one or more points! The waves extended completely around the world and returned to the sending station.

  Curtis rejected the proposal as, with Tesla’s standing waves, there would be a concentration of energy at the nodes. But, as Curtis pointed out:

  The system proposed by Mr Flowers does not have this feature. He proposes to collect energy at any point … some means would have to be devised for concentrating this energy and making it available. No such method has been proposed, and I do not think of any that would be feasible … I do not know of any wireless apparatus of sufficient magnitude to warrant the expectation that power can be economically transmitted by radio methods.

  Faster than the Speed of Light

  Tesla denied that the electricity would be available only at the nodal points, advising that, in a hydraulic system, the pressure of the fluid is the same throughout. There was energy available at an electrical outlet even when nothing is plugged in. He explained that the oscillations would spread from his magnifying transmitter theoretically at an infinite speed, then slow down – at first very quickly, then at slower rate. After around 6,000 miles (9,500 km) they would travel at the speed of light.

  From there on it increases in speed, slowly at first, and then more rapidly, reaching the antipode with approximately an infinite velocity. The laws of motion can be expressed by stating that the waves on the terrestrial surface sweep in equal intervals of time over equal areas, but it must be understood that the current penetrates deep into the Earth and the effects produced on the receivers are the same as if the whole flow was confined to the Earth’s axis joining the transmitter with the antipode. The mean surface speed is thus about 471,200 km per second [292,790 miles a second] – 57 per cent greater than that of the so-called Hertz waves.