The Mammoth Book of Losers

by Karl Shaw

  The death of Kemmler, a pawn in a vicious battle between two players to control the future of electric generation, backfired spectacularly for Edison. Despite his devious attempts at subterfuge, Westinghouse’s more efficient AC prevailed and it continues to power our lives today. Ironically, Edison’s direct current is now considered to be more dangerous than alternating current since it allows electricity to be stored even after the power has been turned off.

  In 1891, at the age of thirty-five, Tesla became a US citizen and established a laboratory in South Fifth Avenue, New York. He was at the peak of his creative powers. In rapid succession, he developed new types of generators and transformers, radar, robotics, early models for wireless radio, fluorescent lights and a new type of steam turbine. One of his strangest enterprises was a vibrating platform that had a strong laxative effect. Tesla’s friend Mark Twain once saw the scientist make a desperate dash for the toilet after staying on the platform too long.

  There were other more hazardous bouts of self-experimentation. Tesla began to work with X-rays, a recent discovery by Wilhelm von Roentgen. Blissfully unaware of the dangers, he took part in horrific experiments on himself and on his laboratory assistants. He repeatedly exposed his head to X-rays “to stimulate the brain”. He wrote, “An outline of the skull is easily obtained with an exposure of 30-40 minutes. In one instance, an exposure of 40 minutes gave clearly not only the outline but also the cavity of the eye, the lower jaw and connections to the upper one, the vertebral column and connections to the skull, the flesh and even the hair . . . in a severe case the skin gets deeply coloured and blackened in places and ugly, ill-foreboding blisters form; thick layers come off, exposing the raw flesh. Burning pain, feverishness and such symptoms are natural accompaniments.”

  In 1880, Tesla’s interest turned to radio waves. There had been faltering attempts at using electro-magnetic waves as a means of communication before, most notably by the Scot James Clerk Maxwell. In 1888, Heinrich Hertz, a student of Maxwell, invented the first spark gap transmitter and receiver, thus becoming the first person to successfully utilize radio waves. Tesla made a major modification to Hertz’s system with the invention of the Tesla coil – an integral part of every TV and radio. He also hit upon the idea of using radio waves to transmit power to lightbulbs – the first remote control.

  Tesla patented his radio apparatus in 1893 but, two years later, on the eve of an experiment to demonstrate radio on a boat on the Hudson River, a fire all but destroyed his New York laboratory. It would take him another two years to build a new facility, during which time others stole a march on his radio work. In 1895, an enterprising young researcher called Guglielmo Marconi demonstrated a device in London which could transmit radio waves over a mile-and-a-quarter. His system was almost identical to Tesla’s, but Marconi insisted that he had not read any of Tesla’s papers, even though an Italian translation had been freely available for some time.

  By 1897, Tesla had built a new laboratory and had patented a radio communication device, but he refused to involve potential investors in his system until he was absolutely sure it would work. By this time, he had set off in a completely new direction, investing his time and his own money in developing a radio-controlled boat designed to carry six torpedoes and no crew. Tesla demonstrated a model in a water tank at Madison Square Garden in New York. Although the trial was impressive, he scared off potential investors by claiming that he was controlling the boat with his mind.

  Meanwhile, Marconi was busily attracting investors to his Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company. In 1901, Marconi sent his first transatlantic radio signal. When informed of this development, Tesla simply replied, “Marconi is a fine fellow . . . let him continue. He is using seventeen of my patents.” Unfortunately, it would take Tesla years of litigation to prove it and, by the time he did, he was already dead.

  Tesla’s greatest interest was, as it had always been, electricity. He was the electrical showman of the age, dazzling audiences with brilliant light displays. His flamboyant lectures and demonstrations in high-frequency currents made him internationally famous and, for several years, he was hardly ever out of the public eye. He made extraordinary headlinegrabbing claims for electrical power; it could be used as an anaesthetic or as stimulant for lethargic schoolchildren (wire them to their desks!) or as an energizer for actors by running electrical surges through their bodies before performances, or even as a cure for tuberculosis.

  In the late nineteenth century, electricity was often seen as something closer to magic than science and when Tesla gave his amazing light shows he appeared to take on an otherworldly quality. One of his most famous photos, faked by double exposure, shows him sitting inside a metal cage with millions of volts passing through him.7 At the Chicago World Fair in 1893, Tesla ran 200,000 volts through his body. According to newspaper reports, his clothing and body continued to glow for some time after the current was switched off (he told his audience that a similar surge of power could keep a naked man warm at the North Pole). One of his light shows caused so much alarm that it panicked the audience into a stampede for the exit.

  Tesla revelled in his role as showman. Strikingly tall and slim, he was very obsessive about his personal grooming and ridiculously overdressed even for his regular laboratory work, always wearing a starched collar and tie with a silk handkerchief in his suit pocket. When he “dressed up” for public lectures he looked more like a concert pianist than a scientist in white tie and tails, and on his large hands he wore grey suede gloves, which were discarded after he had worn them a couple of times because of his morbid fear of germs.

  He began to build a very large fan base of followers who adored him with a reverence bordering on the unhinged, including a cult following of science groupies who believed he was a superior being from another planet and had travelled to Earth on a flying saucer to advance the human race. A biography published as late as 1959 by Margaret Storm, written entirely in green ink, claims that Tesla was from the planet Venus.

  The great pioneer of radio and electricity was not short on sexual magnetism either, and he attracted droves of female admirers. But he never married, nor did he ever have intimate relations with women or, for that matter, men. Tesla was a lifelong celibate, apparently believing that sex was a drain on creativity. When a newspaper reporter presumed to ask him why he was still single, Tesla challenged him to name more than a couple of inventions made by married men. His bachelor status was the subject of great media speculation, an issue made even cloudier when he expounded on the topic of women in an interview for Collier’s magazine, mysteriously noting that women were probably better students than men and that fully trained women might bring about an efficient society resembling that of bees.

  It didn’t help that Tesla had a couple of well-documented phobias that made dating difficult, including a revulsion for women’s jewellery, especially earrings and pearls. Once, at a dinner party, he found he had been strategically seated next to Anne Morgan, the beautiful unmarried daughter of the industrialist J. P. Morgan. Tesla spotted her pearl earrings and sat throughout the meal in silent anguish, gnashing his teeth. He hated any form of physical contact and said he could never bring himself to touch anyone else’s hair, “except perhaps at the point of a revolver”. He found fat people, especially fat women, particularly repellent. He fired his female secretary because she was overweight, although she begged him to let her keep her job.

  In the early 1890s, Tesla moved his experiments to Knob Hill, near Colorado Springs, in a huge laboratory with a rollback roof where he could play with his new giant transformers. The first time he tested one at full power, the roar was heard more than ten miles away and blew the town’s entire electricity supply, causing a blackout. The local power company refused to supply him any more until he paid for the repairs in full, which he did out of his own pocket. His time in Colorado gained him a huge amount of media attention but very little of any use came out of it and he found it increasingly difficult to find any
backers for his work. In 1899, he abandoned his work in Colorado and moved back to New York.

  As Tesla grew older his schemes became more surreal and only served to tarnish his reputation. He built a powerful radio receiver in his lab and claimed that he was receiving messages from Mars. The much respected but now very elderly British physicist Lord Kelvin was the first to congratulate him on his remarkable discovery. (Kelvin went on to explain to colleagues that the Martians had obviously chosen to reveal themselves to New York, as opposed to London, because New York was well lit and the only place visible from Mars.) Most of the scientific community, however, ridiculed Tesla’s claim and demanded proof of his discovery, but Tesla declined to offer any. Similar scepticism was reserved for his claim that he could split the Earth like an apple, that he could modify the weather and that he had invented a death ray capable of destroying 10,000 aeroplanes at a distance of 250 miles.

  Tesla’s eccentricities, meanwhile, became more pronounced. He claimed that his hearing had become hypersensitive and informed disbelieving associates that he could hear a clock ticking three rooms away and the whistle of a steam engine twenty miles distant. He said he could hear the landing of a fly on a nearby table as a loud thump and that he had to put rubber castors under the legs of his bed to eliminate nocturnal vibrations. He also claimed that he could detect, in complete darkness, the presence of an object at a distance of twelve feet.

  Tesla’s alleged bat-like powers were the least of his problems. He suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder, which turned his daily life into a series of bizarre rituals. He spent his entire adult life holed up in expensive New York hotels where his behaviour constantly tried the patience of the staff. Everything he did had to be done in multiples of three: he always walked around the block before entering his hotel three times, counting his steps to make sure the total number was divisible by three. He chose room numbers that were also divisible by three – a favourite was room 207 at the Alta Vista Hotel. He phoned the hotel kitchen with detailed advance instructions for preparations for his meals. He insisted on calculating the cubic volume of any food or drink that he consumed. Napkins, crockery and cutlery also had to be provided in multiples of three. Before eating, he inspected each of his eighteen napkins in turn, then discarded them in a pile in the middle of the table. He refused to touch anything bearing the slightest hint of dirt or to touch anything round, which posed some quite obvious hurdles for an engineer.

  He was disarmingly candid about his undiagnosed disorder. In 1919, he informed readers of Electrical Experimenter magazine, “I get a fever looking at a peach and, if a piece of camphor was anywhere in the house, it causes me the keenest discomfort.”

  Although Tesla struggled to form relationships with people, he was an obsessive pigeon fancier. Almost every day and night for several years, he could be seen in Bryant Park, a small green square behind New York’s public library, carrying a brown paper bag full of breadcrumbs and covered in a carpet of pigeons. Surprisingly for someone suffering from severe mysophobia, he kept a flock of sick and wounded pigeons in his hotel room where he nursed them back to health. Tesla took pigeon fancying to a new level when he fell in love with a favourite white pigeon with brown-tipped wings. “I loved her as a man loves a woman and she loved me,” he wrote in his autobiography. “When that pigeon died, something went out of my life . . . I knew my life’s work was finished.”

  By the 1890s, Tesla had blown most of his money on a series of increasingly expensive scientific white elephants. As the hotel bills mounted and the years wore on, his circumstances grew ever less salubrious. Still the showman in him craved publicity and, in his final years, he took to giving interviews to various journalists from his hotel room. Although his days as a serious scientist were long gone, he was still guaranteed to give good copy. At the age of seventy-five, he gave a press conference announcing that he could disprove Einstein’s general theory of relativity; he would tell the world about his own idea when he was ready. He recommended that the USA should surround itself with an invisible force-field made of rays that could melt a squadron of aeroplanes 250 miles away; he only needed the government to give him $2 million and he would have the force-field ready within three months.

  He seemed to revel in the caricature he had been reduced to in the popular press and took to signing his name “GI” – Great Inventor.8 He was a regular but moderate drinker and believed that alcohol had life-enhancing qualities and was so upset when the USA established Prohibition in 1919 that he withdrew his long-standing prediction that he would live to 140. Over the years, he eliminated red meat from his diet, then fish and, by the 1930s, he had just about given up on solid foods altogether. His final years were spent holed up in his hotel room surrounded by pigeon excrement – he had become a fragile, almost ghostly figure, living on a diet of warm milk and crackers.

  Tesla’s light finally went out on 7 January 1943. A maid ignored the “Do Not Disturb” sign on his hotel door and discovered the emaciated corpse of the scientist on his bed, dead from heart failure, aged eighty-six. At the time, he held more than 700 patents; there were probably a couple of hundred more innovations he dismissed as “small-time stuff” and didn’t bother to patent, letting others pirate his work. Nine months after he died, the US Supreme Court eventually pronounced on the validity of Marconi’s wireless radio patents and decided that Tesla was the true “father of radio”.

  As with so much of Tesla’s work, he had finally been vindicated, but never lived to see a penny in compensation.

  ___________________

  1 Edison’s dying breath was preserved in a sealed test tube by his friend Henry Ford.

  2 Adjusted for inflation.

  3 In the spirit of bad car names, there was also the Probe, which some women drivers referred to as the “Speculum”; and the Nova, which in Spanish-speaking countries translates as “won’t go”.

  4 A less-than-impressed Texas rancher complained to the New York Times: “For a million bucks she ought to walk around with a hamburger in her mouth all the time.”

  5 Swedish for “scientifically invalid”.

  6 Perhaps he was on to something after all; it is almost impossible to eat cornflakes and masturbate at the same time.

  7 According to legend, this photo inspired the Universal Studios remake of Frankenstein starring Boris Karloff.

  8 The very first Superman comic in September 1941 featured the superhero battling a mad scientist called Tesla who was threatening New York City with a death ray.

  4

  Defeat from the Jaws of Victory: Great Military Losers

  In which King Harold falls for rope-a-dope; Lord Cardigan leads a suicide charge; a ship torpedoes itself; a general fails to frighten the enemy away by playing “God Save the Queen”; spies fail to kill Hitler with a set of deadly false teeth; and Mr Jenkins says, “Pardon?”

  Most Underachieving Invasion Force

  The Jutes.

  Who?

  Quite.

  In the middle of the fifth century, three Germanic tribes – the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes – sailed across the North Sea, landed on the coast of Britain and conquered the indigenous Celts. We know this because a monk called the Venerable Bede says so in his book The Ecclesiastical History of the English People. He wrote: “They [the invaders] came from among the three most powerful Germanic tribes, those of the Saxons, the Angles and the Jutes.”

  The Angles gave their name to East Anglia and moved inland to create the kingdom of Mercia in the Midlands. The Saxons established kingdoms in the south – Sussex, Essex, Middlesex and Wessex.

  Meanwhile, the Jutes arrived in Kent . . . and the Isle of Wight.

  The Angles and the Saxons combined to create a powerful kingdom that became England (Angle-land) and dominated the country for the next 600 years. Their rule ended in 1066 after the Norman Conquest, but the influence of the Anglo-Saxons continues to this day. They created most of England’s county boundaries and many English customs. M
ost importantly, they also gave their name to the language which was spoken and written by their descendants and went on to form the basics of modern English. Today, the English language is spoken in one form or another by a quarter of the world’s population. It reigns supreme as the language of international business, diplomacy, science, technology and of the Internet. That’s quite a legacy for a couple of small tribes from northern Europe; they were certainly punching above their weight.

  As for the Jutes – what have they been up to since the Dark Ages? Not much, frankly. The impact of the Jutes on England was so negligible that you’ll struggle to find any evidence that they invaded at all. One theory is that the Jutes, who were mostly farmers, were “ethnically cleansed” by the more warrior-like Saxons, although there is no real evidence for this. Some historians began to wonder if Bede hadn’t just made the bit about the Jutes up. He said, for example, that the Jutes (or lutae) came from Jutland in modern Denmark, which sounds logical enough, except that language experts point out that the two names come from completely different roots. So later historians with a different perspective of the foundation of the English nation started to write the Jutes out of the history books.

  More recent archaeological evidence, however, shows that Bede was right all along. The Jutes did come from Scandinavia, they did conquer Kent and they did occupy and rule the Isle of Wight. Then they opened a couple of farm shops.

  The (War) Elephant in the Room

  In war, there are winners and losers, but sometimes even the winners are losers. Pyrrhus, the Greek king of Epirus from 318–272 BC, was widely regarded in the Ancient World as one of the great military commanders. Plutarch and Hannibal rated him as the greatest the world ever saw. History only remembers him as a footnote for the phrase “pyrrhic victory” – a technical victory but won at ruinous cost.