Tesla: The Life and Times of an Electric Messiah

by Nigel Cawthorne

  Heinrich Hertz (1857 – 94)

  After studying under Helmholtz, Hertz began his investigation of the theories of James Clerk Maxwell. He developed primitive equipment to generate electromagnetic waves and measured their wavelengths and velocity. Demonstrating that they could be reflected and refracted like light and radiant heat, he showed that light and heat were also electromagnetic waves. He was just 36 when he died.

  Michelson-Morley Experiment

  Devised by A.A. Michelson and later refined with Edward Morley, the Michelson-Morley experiment sought to detect the velocity of the Earth through the all-pervading ether which Helmholtz and Hertz maintained electromagnetic waves were propagated through. A sensitive interferometer was used to compare the speed of light in two directions at right angles to each other. If the universe is filled with ether, the speed of light along the Earth’s direction of travel should be less than its velocity at right angles to it. No difference was detected. Ergo the ether did not exist.

  Guglielmo Marconi (1874 – 1937)

  In 1894, Marconi began experimenting with an induction coil, a Morse key and a sparking gap, along with a simple detector, at his father’s estate near Bologna. Devising a simple aerial, he increased the range to 1.5 miles (2.4 km). He moved to London where he filed his first patent in June 1896. Using balloons and kites, he increased the range still further. In 1899, signals were sent across the English Channel and the America’s Cup used Marconi’s equipment for ship-to-shore communication. The following year Marconi took out patent No. 7777, which enabled several stations to operate on different frequencies. This was overturned by the US Supreme Court in 1943 when it was shown that Tesla and others had already developed radio-tuning circuits.

  In December 1901, Marconi transmitted a signal across the Atlantic from Cornwall in England to Newfoundland in Canada. This led to the discovery that the curvature of the Earth had proved no obstacle because radio waves reflected off ionized layers in the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Marconi continued to improve the range and efficiency of wireless devices and set up companies to exploit his discoveries. In 1909 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics and in 1932 the Marconi company won the contract to establish short-wave communication between England and the countries of the British Empire.

  Mark Twain (1835 – 1910)

  Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Twain was an American humorist and writer who found worldwide fame with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). He was also known for his travel writing – The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872) and Life on the Mississippi (1883).

  Joseph Rudyard Kipling (1865 – 1936)

  Born in Bombay (Mumbai), India, Kipling was a short-story writer, poet and novelist who chronicled the British Empire at the height of its power. He also wrote for children. Principally remembered for the adventure novel Kim, The Jungle Book, Just So Stories, the short-story The Man Who Would be King and the poems Mandalay, Gunga Din, The White Man’s Burden and If–, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907.

  John Muir (1838 – 1914)

  Born in Scotland, Muir emigrated to the US with his family in 1849. After studying science at the University of Wisconsin, he found work in a factory where he adapted and improved machinery. An accident nearly cost him his sight. In its aftermath he undertook a walk of nearly 1,000 miles (1,600 km) from Indiana to Florida. In 1868, he arrived in the Yosemite Valley in California and became an advocate for the preservation of the wilderness there. Due to his lobbying, National Parks were set up at Yosemite, Sequoia and elsewhere. In 1903, he accompanied President Theodore Roosevelt on a camping trip in the Yosemite region.

  Richmond Pearson Hobson (1870 – 1937)

  Graduating from the US Naval Academy in 1889, Hobson was given temporary command of the collier Merrimac during the Spanish-American War. Off Cuba, his ship was disabled by enemy fire and he scuttled her in the entrance to Santiago Harbour, blockading the Spanish Fleet. He and his crew of six were imprisoned in Morro Castle. When he was released in a prisoner exchange in 1898, he returned to the US to a hero’s welcome. Women admirers flocked to him and he became ‘the most kissed man in America’. Awarded the Medal of Honor, he became a congressman. One of Tesla’s closest friends, he said the inventor once told him that he had ‘never touched a woman’.

  The X-Ray Man – Wilhelm Röntgen (1845 – 1923)

  In 1895, while he was professor of physics at Würzburg, Germany, Röntgen noticed that when he ran an electric current through a partially evacuated glass tube it gave off a mysterious radiation that affected photographic plates. Unlike light this passed through paper, wood and aluminium, so he called them X-rays. Soon after, he took a picture of the bones in his wife’s hand. News of his discovery spread quickly round the world and he was awarded the first Nobel Prize in physics in 1901.

  Hammond and Son

  Mining engineer and philanthropist John Hays Hammond (1855 – 1936) gave Tesla $10,000 to develop his Telautomaton. Later his son, John (Jack) Hays Hammond Jr (1888 – 1965), developed Tesla’s ideas and became known as ‘The Father of Remote Control’. At Yale, Jack developed electrically controlled steering and engine control for a boat, controlling the mechanisms at a distance using a wireless device. In 1909, he got his father to arrange a meeting for him with Tesla because there was some ‘important information’ he needed from him. With Marconi wireless, which itself used Tesla Coils, attached to two 360-ft (110 m) towers, Jack could control a crew-less boat from a lookout station near his laboratory at Freshwater Cove. Later, Jack invited Tesla to speak at his graduation from Yale.

  Tesla, a boxing fan

  Tesla claimed to have made a study of heavyweight title fights after the 1892 match where street-fighter John L. Sullivan (1858 – 1918), who had held the world title for 10 years, was knocked out by college-educated ‘Gentleman Jim’ Corbett (1866 – 1933). In 1927, he made headlines predicting the outcome of the rematch between Gene Tunney (1897 – 1978) and the ‘Manassa Mauler’ Jack Dempsey (1895 – 1983) who, though he had lost the title a year earlier, was ahead in the betting.

  The New York Herald Tribune said: ‘Sitting in this suite at the Hotel Pennsylvania, the 71-year-old inventor did not hedge or pussyfoot, but declared that Tunney was ‘at least 10 to 1 favourite’. On the basis of mechanics, Tesla said, ‘Tunney will hit Dempsey continuously and at will’. He added that Tunney also had the advantage because he was single. ‘Other things being equal,’ Tesla said, ‘the single man can always excel the married man.’ In his later years, Tesla would be seen dining with other boxers, including the ‘Midland Mauler’ Jimmy Adamick and Yugoslav welterweight Fritzie Zivic.

  J.P. Morgan (1837 – 1913)

  The son of a successful financier, Junius Spencer Morgan (1813-90), John Pierpont Morgan began his career in 1857 with the New York banking firm of Duncan, Sherman and Company, which was the US representative of the London firm George Peabody and Company. By 1871 he was a partner at Drexel, Morgan and Company, soon the predominant source of government financing. In 1895, it became J.P. Morgan and Company, and one of the most powerful banking houses in the world. Because of his links with Peabody, Morgan was able to provide the rapidly growing US industrial corporations with capital from British banks.

  Investing in railroads, by 1902, he controlled some 5,000 miles (8,000 km) of track. In 1891, he arranged the merger of Edison General Electric and Thomson-Houston Electric Company to form General Electric. In the depression that followed the panic of 1893, he formed a syndicate to resupply the US government’s depleted gold reserve. Having financed the creation of the Federal Steel Company in 1898, he merged it with the giant Carnegie Steel Company in 1901 to form US Steel Corporation. The following year, he formed the International Harvester Company and the International Merchantile Marine, which dominated transatlantic shipping. He led the attempt to avert a general financial collapse following the s
tock market panic of 1907. Then he began amassing banks and insurance companies. This gave him control over the nation’s leading corporations and financial institutions.

  Lee De Forest (1873 – 1961)

  Like Tesla, De Forest was the son of a church minister who hoped his son would follow him into the ministry. Lee spent much of his youth at Talladega College, traditionally an African-American school where his father was president. In 1893, he enrolled at the Sheffield Scientific at Yale where he studied engineering. Six years later he was awarded a PhD for a thesis entitled Reflections of Hertzian Waves from the Ends of Parallel Wires.

  Experimenting in radio-telegraphy, he managed to interest the US Army and Navy in his apparatus. His equipment was used by European reporters to send despatches during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 – 05. In 1906, De Forest filed a patent for a vacuum tube diode to detect radio waves. The following year, he patented the triode or Audion valve. This placed a grid between the electrodes which allowed it amplify feeble electric currents. While others developed its full potential, it was the mainstay of amplification until the invention of the transistor. In 1912, De Forest was indicted, and subsequently acquitted, of mail fraud by seeking to promote this ‘worthless device’. His triode made transcontinental wireless telephony possible.

  Seeking to promote radio as a new medium, in 1910, De Forest broadcast a live performance by Italian opera star Enrico Caruso from the Metropolitan Opera House. Two years later De Forest found he could boost a weak signal further by feeding the output of one tube to the grid of the next, and so on. He also found that by feeding the output of an Audion tube back to its own grid, he could produce a stable oscillator whose signal could be modulated to carry speech and music.

  In the face of a storm of infringement suits, he sold his patents to others to exploit. He went on to invent a system for recording sound on film, making the talkies possible.

  Reginald Fessenden (1866 – 1932)

  Born in Quebec, Fessenden studied mathematics, but left university without a degree. In 1886, he moved to the US and went to work for Thomas Edison. He worked on a series of projects, but in 1890, when Edison suffered a financial set back, he was laid off. After working in various manufacturing companies, he became professor of electrical engineering at Purdue University, moving onto the Western University of Pennsylvania – now Pittsburgh University – the following year.

  From 1900 to 1902, he worked for the Weather Bureau, adapting wireless telegraphy for weather forecasting and storm warnings. In 1900 he was granted a patent for a sensitive detector that made wireless telephone possible and invented the heterodyne receiver which combines two high-frequencies to produce an audible tone. With two Pittsburgh financiers, he formed the National Electric Signaling Company in 1902, which transmitted the first voice signals over a distance. In 1906, he made the first two-way transatlantic transmission. But he fell out with his backers and the company ended up bankrupt.

  During his career Fessenden filed some 300 patents, many were subject to litigation. He sued RCA for $60 million, settling out of court in 1928 for a large cash payment. Among his admirers was Elihu Thomson who called Fessenden ‘the greatest wireless inventor of the age – greater than Marconi’.

  Fritz Lowenstein (1874 – 1922)

  Born in Carlsbad in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic), Lowenstein studied engineering in Europe before emigrating to the US in 1899 where he went to work for Tesla. He helped build and operate the magnifying transmitter in Colorado Springs. ‘Possessed of the highest technical training,’ Tesla said, he became a close confidant, discussing the project with him every day over lunch and dinner at the Alta Vista Hotel. They parted when Lowenstein returned to Germany to marry, but Tesla re-employed Lowenstein in 1902 to work at Wardenclyffe. He also worked with Jack Hammond and Alexander Graham Bell, and subsequently began a company making radio sets for the US Navy during World War I, paying royalties to Tesla for the use of his patents.

  Benjamin Franklin Miessner (1890 – 1976)

  Miessner studied electrical engineering at Purdue University and worked for the US Navy in 1908 before becoming chief assistant in the Tesla-Hammond lab at Gloucester. He worked on the development of the electric dog and superheterodyne reception. This improved the amplification in a wireless set fifty-fold and allowed them to work without a long aerial, essentially turning the wireless receiver from an experimental apparatus into a domestic appliance. He is also credited with inventing the ‘cat’s whisker’ detector in early crystal sets, which he sold for $200, and the electric organ. A pioneer in aircraft radio and directional microphones in submarines, he sold more than two hundred patents, making over $2 million.

  Sir Oliver Lodge (1851 – 1940)

  Lodge entered his father’s clay business in Staffordshire, England when he was 14. Then on a visit to London he heard prominent physicist John Tyndall (1820 – 93) lecture at the Royal Institution. This piqued his interest in science and, at the age of 22, he resumed his education. In 1890, the French scientist Édouard Branly (1844 – 1940) showed that iron filings in a glass tube coalesced – or ‘cohered’ – under the influence of electromagnetic waves. Lodge added a ‘trembler’ that shook up the filings between waves and made other improvements, making an effective detector.

  Following in the footsteps of Hertz, he studied standing waves in conducting wires. After Hertz’s untimely death in 1894, he gave a lecture at the Royal Institution called The Work of Hertz. When this was published, it had a widespread influence across Europe. He also filed a number of important patents. When his son Raymond was killed in World War I, he became interested in spiritualism and served as president of the Society for Psychical Research.

  Michael Pupin (1858 – 1935)

  Born in Banat, a buffer zone between the Ottoman and the Austrian Empires, Pupin was a Serb like Tesla. His parents were illiterate and sent him to Prague. After a year, not yet 16, he went alone to America, arriving in New York in 1874. For 5 years, he took a series of odd jobs, while studying at night for admission to Columbia College, now Columbia University. He went on to study in Cambridge and Berlin, where he worked under Helmholtz. He returned to New York to teach mathematical physics at the newly formed department of electrical engineering. In 1901, he was made Professor of Electromechanics, a position he held until he retired in 1931.

  In 1896, he discovered that atoms struck by X-rays emit secondary X-ray radiation and worked on X-ray fluoroscopy. Five years later, the Bell Telephone Company bought the patents for his method of extending the range of telephone communication by placing loading coils at specific distances along the line. In 1924, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his best-selling autobiography From Immigrant to Inventor.

  Pupin sided with Elihu Thomson in the controversy over who invented the AC polyphase system and Tesla accused Pupin of stealing his work. In the long passages on the development of AC in From Immigrant to Inventor, Tesla is hardly mentioned. When working with X-rays, Pupin again ignored Tesla’s contribution. It was Pupin who introduced Marconi to Tesla in 1900, but he also helped facilitate Marconi’s cooperation with Edison, earning him, once more, the enmity of Tesla.

  When Pupin was on his deathbed in 1935, he got his secretary to visit Yugoslav diplomat Stanko Stoilkovic and ask him to plead with Tesla to visit Pupin who wanted to make peace with him before he died. Tesla said that he would have to think about Pupin’s request overnight. The following day, Tesla turned up at the hospital. In Pupin’s room he approached the bed with his hand extended and said: ‘How are you old friend?’

  Pupin was overcome with emotion. They were left alone to talk. Tesla said they had agreed they would meet up again, but Pupin died immediately after Tesla’s visit. Reconciled at last, Tesla attended his funeral.

  Karl Ferdinand Braun (1850 – 1918)

  Born in Germany, Braun received his doctorate from the University of Berlin in 1872 and held a numbe
r of academic posts before becoming director of the Physical Institute and Professor of Physics at the University of Strasbourg in 1895. In 1897, he developed the first oscilloscope, or Braun tube, to study alternating currents using a beam of electrons in a cathode ray. From this, television tubes were developed. He went on to study why early wireless transmission was limited to 9.5 miles (15 km), concluding that the limiting factor was the length of the spark. The solution was to introduce a sparkless antenna circuit, which he patented in 1899. He also developed an antenna that directed the transmission in one direction. The Nobel Committee recognized that he had made considerable improvements to Marconi’s apparatus and awarded the Nobel Prize to them jointly in 1909.

  Braun travelled to New York in 1915. When the US joined the Allies in World War I in 1917, he was detained as an enemy alien and died before the war ended.

  John Stone Stone (1869 – 1943)

  Born in America, but brought up in Egypt and Europe, Stone, who was fluent in Arabic, French and English, was brought home to the US to study in the school of mines at Columbia and Johns Hopkins University, before entering the Bell Labs in Boston. In 1899, he set up the Stone Telegraph and Telephone Company. Lecturing on electrical oscillations at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he filed a patent on tuning in 1902. He also developed a wireless direction finder, worked on the use of loading coils on telephone lines before Pupin and became president of the Institute of Radio Engineers and the AIEE. He holds many ‘space telegraphy’ patents.