Tesla: The Life and Times of an Electric Messiah

by Nigel Cawthorne

  Bernard A. Behrend (1875 – 1932)

  Born in Villeneuve, Switzerland, Behrend studied engineering in Berlin before emigrating to the US in 1894. He was one of the first to understand Tesla’s work with alternating currents and began publishing articles on the applications of AC in 1896. His treatise The Induction Motor was published by Electrical World & Engineer in 1901. It was expanded and published as a book, The Induction Motor and Other Alternating Current Motors in 1921. Behrend met Tesla in 1901 when he was assigned to design a motor for Wardenclyffe. In Behrend, Tesla found a like-mind. Behrend was the inventor of numerous electrical devices and took out over 70 patents. After a period of ill-health he committed suicide at his home in Massachusetts.

  Arthur E. Kennelly (1861 – 1939)

  Born in India of Irish parents, Kennelly studied in London before going to work for Edison in New Jersey as a mathematician. With Harold P. Brown, he worked on the development of the electric chair. He also developed the use of complex numbers in analyzing AC circuits. In 1901, he noticed that Marconi’s signals arrived in Newfoundland in greater strength than expected and postulated that they had been reflected from an ionized layer in the upper reaches of the atmosphere predicted by English electrical-engineer Oliver Heaviside (1850 – 1925). This became known as the Kennelly-Heaviside layer. Professor of Electrical Engineering at Harvard, Kennelly served as president of the AIEE (1898 – 1900) and the Institute of Radio Engineers (1916). He was awarded the Edison Medal in 1933.

  Hugo Gernsback (1884 – 1967)

  Born Hugo Gernsbacher in Luxembourg, Gernsback had heard of Tesla as a child. He studied electronics in Bingen Technicum in Germany, before emigrating to the US in 1903. He imported electronic components from Europe and, in 1908, founded the magazine Modern Electrics. The Electrical Experimenter followed in 1913 and Science and Invention in 1920. These magazines began to carry science-fiction stories, starting with his own RALPH 124C41+ set in the year 2660, which was serialized in Modern Electronics in 1911.

  He began the first dedicated science-fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, in 1926. Despite his reputation for dubious business practices, he continued to write and publish. The Hugo Awards, presented annually by the World Science Fiction Convention, were named after him and, in 1960, he received a special Hugo Award as the ‘Father of Magazine Science Fiction’.

  Frank R. Paul (1884 – 1963)

  One of the most influential science fiction illustrators of his time, Frank Paul was born in Austria and studied art in Vienna, Paris and New York. He was working as an illustrator on a rural newspaper when Gernsback employed him to work on Electrical Experimenter. He produced the cover illustration for Gernsback’s RALPH 124C41+ when it appeared in book form in 1925. He also worked for Amazing Stories, Science Wonder Stories, Planet Stories, Superworld Comics, Science Fiction magazine and Marvel Comics. Paul is credited with the first depiction of a flying saucer, a space ship and a space station.

  Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955)

  Born in Germany, Einstein completed his education in Switzerland and took a job in the patent office in Bern. It was there he realized that, if the speed of light was an absolute, Isaac Newton’s laws of motion must be rewritten to accommodate Maxwell’s equations. The result was his theory of special relativity, which he published in 1905. He then realized that this did not deal with acceleration or gravity. He combined those to make his theory of general relativity in 1915. This was confirmed by astronomical observation 4 years later and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1921.

  In 1933, he emigrated to the United States, settling in Princeton. Einstein’s equation E=mc2 predicts the possibility of making an atomic bomb. Fearing that Nazi Germany may well have been on their way to doing so, Einstein was persuaded to sign a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt warning him of the possibility. He spent the rest of his life trying to develop a unified field theory that would combine all the forces of motion into one theoretical framework.

  George Sylvester Viereck (1884 – 1962)

  One of Tesla’s more unusual friends towards the end of his life was the poet and author George Sylvester Viereck. Born in Munich, he was thought to have been the illegitimate grandson of Kaiser Wilhelm I, an idea he encouraged. He emigrated to the US with his family in 1896 and published his first book of poetry Gedichte in 1904 while still a student at the College of the City of New York. It received some favourable critical attention and he quickly built a reputation. But then came Word War I. He said: ‘In spite of my staunch support of the American war effort, I was decried as an isolationist and a pro-German. I was boycotted by the war party. Five celebrated authors banded themselves together under the slogan, Never Again Viereck. My verse was dropped from anthologies and my name from Who’s Who in America. I was expelled from the Poetry Society of America which owed its existence largely to my efforts and from the Author’s League. I was now a poet without a licence.’

  He then laboured to build a reputation as a novelist and, as a journalist, interviewed Sigmund Freud, George Bernard Shaw, Mussolini, Hindenburg, Grand Duke Alexander of Russia, Einstein, Henry Ford and, of course, Tesla. With the advent of World War II, he was again thought to be pro-German. This time with good reason. He was found to have accepted money from the Nazi Party to spread propaganda in the US and was jailed. After the war, his memoir of his prison experiences Men Into Beast sold well, but he never regained his literary reputation. Tesla knew all his poems by heart.

  Elmer Gertz (1906 – 2000)

  Another of the dinner guests Tesla met at Viereck’s house on Riverside Drive was the attorney Elmer Gertz. He was a friend of the poet Carl Sandburg (1878 – 1967) and the biographer and agent of British journalist and voluptuary Frank Harris (1856 – 1931). He also defended the work of American writer Henry Miller (1891 – 1980) in obscenity trials, murderer Nathan Leopold (1904 – 71) in the 1924 Leopold and Loeb case and club owner Jack Ruby (1911 – 67) who murdered President Kennedy’s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald (1939 – 63). He was impressed that he had seen Tesla in the same house as novelist Sinclair Lewis (1885 – 1951), Einstein and countless others. He said: ‘In a communicative mood, Tesla told his life story unostentatiously, simply, with quiet eloquence. He told of his platonic affairs of the heart … explained the inventions that have made the world his debtor … and told of his plans, of his credo, of his foibles. It was a tale of wonder, told with guileless simplicity.’

  Edwin Armstrong (1890 – 1954)

  At the age of 14, Armstrong read of the achievements of Marconi and set about building wireless equipment in the attic of his family home in New York. He studied under Pupin at Columbia, where he developed the regenerative, or feedback, circuit using De Forest’s Audion tube. This increased the amplification a thousand-fold. Signals that could barely be distinguished through headphones could now be heard across the room. At its highest amplification, the circuit became an oscillator that generated radio waves and became the basis of radio and television broadcasting. However, Armstrong was challenged by De Forest in a series of patent suits which dragged on for 14 years.

  In the army during World War I, Armstrong improved Fessenden’s heterodyne circuit to make the superheterodyne circuit, which again greatly improved the sensitivity and stability of radio signals that underlies nearly all radio, radar and television reception over the airwaves. He sold the patents to Westinghouse, which made him, briefly, a millionaire, and he married Marion MacInnis, secretary to David Sarnoff, then general manager of RCA.

  Armstrong went on to invent FM, or frequency modulation. By modulating the frequency of the signal rather than its amplitude, or strength, as in AM, high-fidelity broadcasting became possible. But the well established AM broadcasters were resistant. Armstrong had to spend $300,000 on building an FM station to prove its worth. After World War II, Armstrong began a patent-infringement suit against RCA who had adopted FM for television. Impoverished by litigation, Armstrong jumped t
o his death from a 13th storey window.

  Tesla’s Inventions

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  Tesla’s Thermo-magnetic Motor

  When iron magnets are heated they lose their magnetic strength. Tesla devised a small motor with one fixed magnet and a second moving magnet attached to a flywheel and a pivot arm that pushed against a spring. At room temperature, the attraction between the two magnets was enough to compress the spring and pull the moving magnet into the flame of a Bunsen burner. This would heat up the magnet. It would lose strength. The spring would then push the magnet back, turning the flywheel. With the magnet now out of the flame, it cooled down. Its magnetic strength was restored and the cycle began all over again.

  Tesla’s Pyromagnetic Generator

  Tesla took a large horseshoe magnet. Across its poles ran a number of hollow iron tubes which were magnetized and had coils of wire wrapped around them. Under the centre of the tubes was a firebox. Above there was a boiler. The coal fire in the firebox heated the iron tubes until they reached about 600°C (1,112°F) and glowed a dull red. As the tubes heated up, they would lose their magnetism and the collapsing magnetic field would induce an electric current in the coils. Then a valve was opened and steam, at 100°C (212°F), would circulate though the tubes, cooling them. As the magnetism in the tubes was restored, electric current would again be induced in the coils.

  Inside an Induction Motor

  An electrical motor works through the interaction of two sets of magnets – one stationary, the stator, and one able to move freely, the rotor. For practical motors, electromagnets are used as they don’t weaken over time. Permanent magnets do. So both the stator and rotor are essentially coils of wire around metal cores. However, even electromagnets have no reason to set the rotor spinning. But magnetic attraction will draw a north pole on the rotor towards a south pole on the stator. To keep the motor turning, the polarity of the electromagnets has to keep on switching. In early DC motors this was done by a split ring commutator supplying current to the rotor. Tesla’s genius was that he realized that you did not have to send electricity to the electromagnets on the rotor at all. If you supplied alternating current to the coils on the stator, the magnetic field created would induce an electric current in the coils of the rotor. The magnetic field produced would oppose that on the stator and the motor would turn.

  Essentially, a dynamo or generator is a motor worked in reverse. With a motor you supply electricity and get a mechanical turning force. In a dynamo you supply the mechanical turning force and get electricity. Add in the transformer and Tesla had created a complete system of generating, transmitting and utilizing power.

  The Legendary Tesla Coil

  Tesla had used coils and capacitors when experimenting with rotating magnetic fields for his motors. He continually refined the components, particularly the special transformer, or coil, at the heart of the circuit, taking out his first patent for a device to run a new and more efficient lighting system in 1891. The basic circuit connected a power supply to a large capacitor, the coil or inductor and the electrodes of an adjustable spark-gap. As the capacitor charges up, the voltage lags behind. In an inductor, voltage is felt immediately while current is held back as it has to work against the magnetic field its own passage causes.

  If the size of the coil and condenser are selected to have exactly opposite timing – with voltage peaking in the capacitor just as it reaches a minimum in the coil – current and voltage can be made to chase each other back and forth. This oscillation is initiated by the spark gap. When the voltage in a capacitor builds up, it reaches a level when the air in the gap, which acts as an insulator, breaks down due to ionization and lets current flow.

  In a Tesla Coil the inductor is the primary coil of a transformer. When the circuit sparks, all the energy stored over several microseconds is discharged in a powerful impulse, producing a high voltage in the secondary coil. Once the energy has been discharged, the voltage across the spark gap falls and the air becomes an insulator again, until the voltage in the capacitor builds up to the required level again. This whole process can repeat itself many thousands of times per second.

  In a Tesla Coil, secondary winding is designed to react quickly to a sudden energy spike. These electrical impulses propagate along the winding as waves. The length of the coil is calculated so that, when the wave crests reach the end and are reflected back, they meet and reinforce the waves behind them, so it appears that the voltage peaks are standing still. If the high-voltage end of the secondary coil is attached to an aerial, it becomes a powerful radio transmitter. In the early decades of radio, most practicable radio transmitters used Tesla Coils. Tesla himself used larger or smaller versions of his invention to investigate fluorescence, X-rays, radio, wireless power and even the electromagnetic nature of the earth and its atmosphere.

  Developing Electric Lighting

  The inventors of early electric lighting knew two ways to produce illumination – either by creating a spark, or arc, between electrodes or by running a current through a wire or fibre, heating it up until it glowed. Arc lamps are very bright and were used in searchlights, floodlights, lighthouses and movie projectors. They were not suitable for domestic use. But heated filaments also have their drawbacks. Most materials don’t behave well when heated near their melting points. They oxidize, unless surrounded by vacuum or inert gas, or break apart through internal stress. Joseph Swan (1828 – 1914) in 1878 and Thomas Edison the following year independently developed the carbon-filament bulb. This was superseded by the more efficient tungsten-filament bulb in 1908.

  However, there is another problem with incandescent lamps. In a domestic 60-watt light bulb, for example, no more than a few per cent of the energy radiated is visible. Most is lost as heat. But in 1859, Alexandre-Edmond Becquerel (1820 – 91) discovered that certain substances fluoresced when a current was passed through a Geissler tube – that is, a partially evacuated glass cylinder.

  Tesla developed this into the phosphorescent lamp – phosphorescent substances are slower to emit light than fluorescent ones and continue to glow for some time after the power is switched off. He began by powering conventional filament or arc lamps with high-frequency currents. This caused the diffuse gases inside to glow and made certain solid materials give off light. The bulbs remained cold because most of the electrical energy passed through them turned into light, rather than heat. Consequently, they were much more efficient. But although he used these experiments to illustrate his celebrated lectures, he seldom patented them.

  Having developed apparatus that produced higher frequencies and voltages than were available to anyone else, by 1890, he was able to light phosphorescent tubes without connecting wires. The energy was transmitted to them at radio frequencies. At higher energies, Tesla’s tubes gave off X-rays.

  Tuning-In to Early Radio

  Radio communication uses electromagnetic waves in the range of frequencies lying between around one hertz, or one cycle per second and a few giga-hertz, or a thousand million cycles per second. The wavelength of electromagnetic radiation is the distance from one crest to the next. In an ordinary AM broadcast signal, say about 1,000 kHz on the AM dial, wave crests are spaced at about 969 ft (295 m) apart. The number of crests going by in one second is called the frequency. In all waves, the frequency multiplied by the wavelength equals the velocity. The velocity of radio waves is the speed of light.

  The height of a wave is called its amplitude. In radio waves that is given in volts. For waves of the same voltage or amplitude, the more of them that arrive per second the higher the energy, so higher frequency gives more power. A single burst of high-frequency gamma rays is extremely dangerous, while the lower frequencies of radio disperse more easily and pack less of a punch.

  Radio communication requires a transmitter that produces a signal powerful enough to be detected some distance away, while at the same time incorporating useful information
in that signal. The receiver must be able to pick up that signal and extract the information. Once scientists had understood the nature of electromagnetic waves and detected them, the race was on to produce frequencies and voltages high enough to make wireless transmission. With what he called the ‘magnifier coil’ – now known as the Tesla Coil – Tesla had found a way to produce both.

  It quickly became clear to Tesla that, once radio transmission had become practicable, the airwaves would be full of signals. What was needed was a way to develop circuits that worked on pre-selected frequencies so that the desired signal could be picked out from among a background of static and unrelated radio traffic. Tesla perfected tuning which lies at the heart of all communication systems today.

  The Remote Control Boat

  Tesla’s tub-like craft was powered by large batteries on board. Radio signals activated switches, which controlled the boat’s propeller, rudder and running lights. But even registering the arrival of a radio signal pulse taxed the rudimentary technology of 1898. Tesla had to invent a new kind of coherer or a radio-activated switch to achieve this. The coherer was a canister with a little metal oxide powder in it. The powder orients itself in the presence of an electromagnetic field, such as radio waves, and becomes conductive. In Tesla’s coherer, the canister flips over after the signal has passed, restoring the powder to a random, non-conductive state.

  Each signal advanced a disc one step, making a new set of contacts. So if the contacts had previously given the combination ‘right rudder/propeller forward full/light off’, the next step might combine ‘rudder center/propeller stop/lights on’. The connected circuits operated levers, gears, springs and motors, then flipped the coherer over so it was ready to receive the next instruction. Tesla assumed that this system could be used on radio-guided torpedoes. But it was too far ahead of its time. The US Navy did finance some trials in 1916, but the money went to one of Tesla’s competitors as his patent had expired. Nevertheless, as the 20th century progressed, more and more uses were found for remote control.