Tesla: The Life and Times of an Electric Messiah

by Nigel Cawthorne

  Today, at 77, as a result of a well-regulated life, sleeplessness notwithstanding, I have an excellent certificate of health. I never felt better in my life. I am energetic, strong, in full possession of all my mental facilities. In my prime I did not possess the energy I have today. And what is more, in solving my problems I use but a small part of the energy I possess, for I have learned how to conserve it. Because of my experience and knowledge gained through the years, my tasks are much lighter. Contrary to general belief, work comes easier for older people if they are in good health, because they have learned through years of practice how to arrive at a given place by the shortest path.

  Developing the Death Ray

  Tesla had inherited a deep hatred of war from his father. Throughout his life, he sought ways to end warfare. Short of that, he thought wars should be fought out between machines. His idea for a death ray began back in the 1890s when he produced a type of lamp which, with a beam of electrons, could vaporize zirconia or diamonds. And in 1915, he talked of beaming energy from Wardenclyffe, that would ‘paralyze or kill’.

  In World War I, British inventor Harry Grindell-Matthews claimed to have invented a ‘diabolical ray’ that could be used against zeppelins. In the early 1920s, both the British and the French governments showed an interest. In 1924, he went to New York where he met Hugo Gernsback and, probably, Tesla. However, Gernsback and Professor W. Severinghouse, a physicist from Columbia University, tried unsuccessfully to duplicate his findings. Not to be outdone, the Germans and the Soviets both claimed to have developed beams that could bring down planes.

  But, Tesla was not convinced. In 1934, he said: ‘It is impossible to develop such a ray. I worked on that idea for many years before my ignorance was dispelled and I became convinced that it could not be realized.’

  He was working on something that he said was entirely different. ‘This new beam of mine consists of minute bullets moving at a terrific speed, and any amount of power desired can be transmitted by them. The whole plant is just a gun, but one which is incomparably superior to the present.’

  The war clouds were gathering over Europe again and, on 11 July 1934, The New York Times carried the headline on its front page, reading: Tesla, at 78, Bares New ‘Death Beam’. Tesla said his new invention ‘will send concentrated beams of particles through the free air, of such tremendous energy that they will bring down a fleet of 10,000 enemy airplanes at a distance of 250 miles (400 km) from a defending nation’s borders and will cause armies of millions to drop dead in their tracks’.

  The death beam would operate silently at distances as far as you could see with a telescope and limited only by the curvature of the Earth. It would be invisible and leave no marks beyond the evidence of its destruction. An army of a million men would be annihilated in a second and, even with the most powerful microscope, it would not be possible to see what had caused their deaths.

  It would also be the perfect defence against bombing. ‘The flying machine has completely demoralized the world,’ he wrote, ‘so much that in some cities, as London and Paris, people are in mortal fear of aerial bombing. The new means I have perfected afford absolute protection against this and other forms of attack.’

  Tesla said that his death beam would make war impossible by offering every country an ‘invisible Chinese Wall, only a million times more impenetrable’. It would make every nation impregnable to attack by aeroplanes or large invading armies.

  While making every nation safe from invasion, Tesla said they could not be used as offensive weapons as the death beam ‘could be generated only from large, stationary and immovable power plants, stationed in the manner of old-time forts at various strategic distances from each country’s border … they could not be moved for purposes of attack’.

  However, he admitted that smaller generating plants could be mounted on battleships with enough power to destroy incoming aircraft – re-establishing the superiority of the battleship over the aeroplane again. Submarines could also become obsolete, he said, as methods of detecting them had been perfected to the point where there was no point in submerging. Once a submarine had been located, the death beam could be employed as it would work underwater, though not as well as in air.

  Elsewhere he proclaimed that the battleship was doomed. ‘What happened to the armoured knight will also happen to the armoured vessel,’ he said. The money spent on battleships ‘should be directed in channels that will improve the welfare of the country’.

  Manifestations of Energy

  The production of the death beam involved four new inventions of Tesla’s, though he would not provide details of these until they had been submitted to the proper scientific authorities. However, he said, the first invention was an apparatus for producing rays and ‘other manifestations of energy in free air’, eliminating the high vacuum necessary at present for the production of such rays and beams. The second was a new method for producing a very great electrical force. The third was a method for amplifying this and the fourth, he said, was ‘a new method for producing a tremendous electrical repelling force’. Again Tesla was looking at a potential of 50 million volts which would catapult microscopic particles of matter towards the target. He reckoned that it would cost no more than $2 million and take only three months to build.

  ‘All my inventions are at the service of the United States government,’ he said.

  Should the government take him up on his offer, he said he would go to work at once and keep on going until he collapsed. However, he added: ‘I would have to insist on one condition – I would not suffer interference from any experts. They would have to trust me.’

  In the New York Herald journalist Joseph Alsop described the progress Tesla was making developing his death ray:

  He illustrated the sort of thing that the particles will be by recalling an incident that occurred often enough when he was experimenting with a cathode tube. Then, sometimes, a particle larger than an electron, but still very tiny, would break off from the cathode, pass out of the tube and hit him. He said he could feel a sharp, stinging pain where it entered his body, and again at the place where it passed out. The particles in the beam of force, ammunition which the operators of the generating machine will have to supply, will travel far faster than such particles as broke off from the cathode, and they will travel in concentrations, he said.

  As Dr Tesla explained it, the tremendous speed of the particles will give them their destruction-dealing qualities. All but the thickest armoured surfaces confronting them would be melted through in an instant by the heat generated in the concussion. Such beams or rays of particles now known to science are composed always of fragments of atoms, whereas, according to Dr Tesla, his would be of microscopic dust of a suitable sort.

  The chief differentiation between his and the present rays would appear to be, however, that his are produced in free air instead of in a vacuum tube. The vacuum tube rays have been projected out into the air, but there they travel only a few inches, and they are capable only of causing burns or slight disintegration of objects which they strike.

  Tesla tried to get Jack Morgan to finance a prototype of his invention, but Morgan was unconvinced. He tried to deal directly with the British, to no avail. Frustrated, he sent an elaborate technical paper, including diagrams, to a number of nations including the US, Canada, Britain, France, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Called ‘The New Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-Dispersive Energy Through Natural Media’, the paper provided the first technical description of a charged particle beam weapon. And it was not just fantasy. Tesla had solved one of the key problems of a death ray – how to operate a vacuum chamber with one end open to the atmosphere. He achieved this by directing a high-velocity stream of air at the tip of his gun to maintain ‘dynamic seal’. This would be provided by a large Tesla turbine.

  Interest came from the Soviet Union and, in 1937, Tesla presented a plan to the Amtorg Trading Corporation, in New York City, which handled trade with the Soviet Union.
Two years later, in 1939, part of the prototype was tested in the USSR and Tesla received a payment of $25,000. But by then, the Soviet Union had allied itself with Nazi Germany.

  While Tesla’s death beam did not see the light of day in World War II, during the Cold War both the US and the Soviet Union worked on charged particle beams.

  Resembling Dr Frankenstein

  Tesla made a further move into science fiction when the 1931 horror classic Frankenstein used Tesla Coils to make lightning flashes. Much of the equipment used by Dr Frankenstein bears an uncanny resemblance to the apparatus Tesla invented for his experiments. Indeed, Tesla favoured the movie’s producer Carl Laemmle as he fought patent battles with Edison when establishing Universal Pictures.

  In 1935, one of Tesla’s electrical extravaganzas was filmed by a newsreel camera man and offered to Paramount, but they found the subject too technical. Nevertheless Hugo Gernsback and Frank Paul continued to use Tesla’s ideas in their sci-fi comics.

  Meanwhile Tesla went about work on his death ray in a secret laboratory under the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. One of his other inventions of the period was a wooden birdcage, complete with birdbath. Western Union boys were despatched with these to rescue injured pigeons from around New York Public Library, Bryant Park and St Patrick’s Cathedral.

  Tainted with Anti-Semitism

  Tesla also had ties with a Hungarian architect named Titus deBobula, possibly through the Puskás brothers. deBobula borrowed money from the inventor as early as 1900. In 1908, he married the niece of Pittsburgh steel magnate Charles Schwab (1862 – 1939). deBobula then designed and built Schwab’s new mansion and borrowed money from him for a number of real estate ventures. He offered to find the backing to rebuild Wardenclyffe, but deBobula’s ventures turned sour. He fell out with Schwab and became an anarchist. Back in Budapest, he joined a pro-Hitler group and wrote a paper denouncing ‘Jewish physics’ as the Nazis dubbed the new departures into relativity and quantum physics. Echoes of anti-Semitism can be found in Tesla’s attacks on Einstein.

  Returning to the US, deBobula designed a 120-ft (36-m) tower for Tesla’s death beam. However, his involvement with a munitions company run by a German-American brought him to the attention of the IRS and the FBI. When his apartment was searched it was found to be full of grenades, tear-gas bombs and dynamite. Tesla was furious when deBobula used his name in an arms deal with Paraguay. Questioned by the authorities, deBobula denied any ties to the Communist Party or the German-American Bund which supported Hitler. The FBI monitored his activities throughout World War II. Nothing was ever proved against him. However, Tesla was tainted by association.

  Reviewing His Greatest Inventions

  The following year Tesla was still full of wild and abstruse pronouncements. He invited some 30 journalists to a gourmet luncheon to celebrate his 79th birthday in the private dining room of the Hotel New Yorker, where he was then staying. He had been thrown out of the Hotel Pennsylvania in 1930, owing $2,000, when other patrons complained of the pigeon droppings. While the reporters feasted at his expense, Tesla did not even touch a glass of water. However, towards the end of the meal, he went and got a small bottle of pasteurized milk which he poured into a silver dish and heated on a small oil stove beside the table. The Hotel New Yorker then supplied a birthday cake with one candle for their honoured guest.

  Asked what was his greatest feat in the field of engineering, he said: ‘An apparatus by which mechanical energy can be transmitted to any part of the terrestrial globe.’

  He called this discovery ‘tele-geo-dynamics’ and admitted that it would ‘appear almost preposterous’. However, it would give the world a new means of unfailing communication, provide a new and by far the safest means for guiding ships at sea and into port, furnish a ‘divining rod’ for locating any type of ore beneath the surface of the Earth, and give scientists a means of ‘laying bare the physical conditions of the Earth and enable them to determine all the Earth’s physical constants’.

  The apparatus needed to do this, he said, was simple. It consisted of a stationary part and a cylinder of fine steel ‘floating’ in the air. He had, he said, discovered a means of ‘impressing on the floating part powerful impulses which react on the stationary part, and through the latter to transmit energy through the Earth’. To do this he had ‘found a new amplifier for a known type of energy’. The purpose was ‘to produce impulses through the Earth and then pick them up whenever needed’.

  His second greatest invention, he said, ‘will be considered absolutely impossible by any competent electrical engineer’. It was a new method of producing direct current without a commutator – something, he said, ‘that has been considered impossible since the days of Faraday’.

  ‘Incredible as it seems,’ he said, ‘I have found a solution for this old problem.’

  Next he came to cosmic rays which, he said, were produced by the force of electrostatic repulsion and consisted of powerfully charged positive particles that come to Earth from the Sun and other stars. ‘After experimentation,’ he said, ‘the Sun is charged with an electrical potential of 215 billion volts, while the electric charge stored in the Sun amounted to around 50 billion billion electrostatic units.’

  Again he dismissed the theory of relativity, describing it as ‘a mass of error and deceptive ideas violently opposed to the teachings of great men of science and even to common sense’.

  The theory, wraps all these errors and fallacies and clothes them in magnificent mathematical garb which fascinates, dazzles and makes people blind to the underlying errors. The theory is like a beggar clothed in purple whom ignorant people take for a king. Its exponents are brilliant men, but they are metaphysicists rather than scientists. Not a single one of the relativity propositions has been proved.

  One of Tesla’s great bugbears with relativity was its prohibition of anything travelling faster than the speed of light, which upset his theories about standing waves and the wireless transmission of energy. He was adamant that, in his observations of cosmic rays, he had already discovered particles that travelled faster than light.

  In 1899, I obtained mathematical and experimental proofs that the Sun, and other heavenly bodies similarly conditioned, emit rays of great energy which consist of inconceivably small particles animated by velocities vastly exceeding that of light. So great is the penetrative power of these rays that they can traverse thousands of miles of solid matter with but slight diminution of velocity. In passing through space, which is filled with cosmic dust, they generated a secondary radiation of constant intensity, day and night, and pouring upon the earth equally from all directions. As the primary rays projected from the suns and stars can pass through distances measured in light-years without great diminution of velocity, it follows that whether a secondary ray is generated near a sun or at any distance from it, however great, its intensity is the same.

  As of yet, no one else has found particles that travel faster than light. However, neutrinos generated by the fusion reactions in the Sun do have the penetrative power Tesla mentioned. They were predicted by the Italian-born physicist Enrico Fermi (1901 – 54) in 1934, but not detected experimentally for another 20 years. Nevertheless in 1932, Tesla said that he had ‘harnessed the cosmic rays and caused them to operate a motive device’. Cosmic rays, he said, struck the atmosphere, ionizing the air and creating charged particles – ions and electrons. ‘These charges are captured in a condenser which is made to discharge through the circuit of a motor,’ he said. He also said that he had ‘hopes of building such a motor on a large scale’. However, by 1935, he was also telling the New York Herald Tribune that some day the Sun would explode.

  The Tesla Institute

  In 1936, the Tesla Institute was opened in Belgrade, then the capital of Yugoslavia. A fully equipped research centre, it was funded by the Yugoslav government and private sources. A week of celebrations commemorating the great man’s 80th birthday followed. They occurred in Belgrade on 26, 27 and 28 May, in Zagreb
, capital of Croatia, on 30 May and in his native village of Smiljan on 2 June, and again on 12 July 1936.

  Chapter 15 – The Final Days

  What has the future in store for this strange being, born of a breath, of perishable tissue, yet Immortal, with his powers fearful and Divine? What magic will be wrought by him in the end? What is to be his greatest deed, his crowning achievement?

  Nikola Tesla

  At 81, Tesla was honoured by both the Yugoslav and Czechoslovakian governments. He was awarded the Grand Cordon of the White Eagle, Yugoslavia’s highest honour bestowed by King Peter through his regent Prince Paul, and Czechoslovakia’s Order of the White Lion. These were presented at his birthday luncheon at the Hotel New Yorker. Meanwhile he was still making his birthday announcements of new discoveries to newspapermen.

  In 1937, he told them that he had perfected the principle of a new tube that would make it possible to smash atoms and produce cheap radium. He would give a demonstration of it in ‘only a little time’. He was expecting to put his discovery forward for France’s Pierre Guzman Prize of 100,000 francs (around €50,000). It was awarded by the Académie des Sciences to ‘the person of whatever nation who will find the means … of communicating with a star and of receiving a response’.

  The money, of course, is a trifling consideration, but for the great historical honour of being the first to achieve this miracle I would be almost willing to give my life. I am just as sure that prize will be awarded to me as if I already had it in my pocket. They have got to do it. It means it will be possible to convey several thousand units of horsepower to other planets, regardless of distance. This discovery of mine will be remembered when everything else I have done is covered in dust.