Empires of Light

by Jill Jonnes

  To keep his profile high and entice new backers, Tesla offered to write an article for his dearest friend, Robert Underwood Johnson, an editor at Century magazine. Johnson, who eagerly commissioned the piece, was appalled when Tesla submitted a long, tendentious mélange of philosophy and science titled “The Problem of Increasing Human Energy.” Tesla refused all editorial suggestions, so Century went ahead and published the whole rambling thing in June 1900. The article was most memorable for the amazing photos of Tesla taken at his Colorado Springs laboratory. It all caused a sensation, much of it negative. For some years now, Tesla had kept himself arrogantly aloof from his fellow engineers, disparaging the work of others, blithely describing feats and projects of his own that then never materialized. A decade earlier, he had begun criticizing Edison’s incandescent light bulb as expensive and wasteful and prophesying its imminent demise at the hands of his, Tesla’s, far superior “cold” light. Yet where was this much ballyhooed light? Tesla had done too much self-aggrandizing and expressed too much disdain for other electricians. His electrical peers were more than ready to pounce upon his strange and boastful writings. His subsequent assertion that he was in touch with Martians, based on radio signals received from outer space while in Colorado, did nothing to lessen the scoffing. Broke as ever, in early December 1900 Tesla asked Westinghouse if he could extend an earlier $3,000 loan he could not afford to repay.

  Just at this discouraging moment, Nikola Tesla was rescued from financial despair by none other than J. Pierpont Morgan, now Wall Street’s most fearsome, feared, and powerful financier. Tesla, circulating as he did in New York’s richest social circles, had become something of a favorite with Morgan’s grown daughter, Anne, twenty-eight. One evening after dinner at the family’s Italianate mansion, bedecked with a rich mix of Morgan’s fast-growing collections of European paintings and precious antiques and curiosities, Tesla had managed to persuade the great banker to consider backing his new venture, for Tesla was fervent in his desire to build his great electrical dream, his “World System” of power transmission. However, just as Colonel Astor wanted to invest in “cold” light, so J. Pierpont Morgan had one focused interest—world telegraphy. He knew Tesla’s AC patents had trumped all else at Niagara. What was to say his wireless patents would not prevail again in this latest race, the race to span the ocean skies with invisible, electrical words?

  Morgan seems to have also alleviated Tesla’s immediate pressing shortage of money, for on December 12 Tesla penned a scrawled, almost pathetic letter of gratitude: “How can I begin to thank you…. My work will proclaim loudly your name to the world!”38 Over the next few months, Tesla, who had initially imagined himself selling $150,000 worth of shares in a company to Morgan, found himself thoroughly cornered, with the ruthless financier at the last minute adding (as a condition to closing the deal) 51 percent ownership of Tesla’s patents not just for wireless, but also for the same “cold” light that Colonel Astor imagined he had a major interest in. Tesla, desperate to silence the rising clamor of his sneering critics with his “World System” of worldwide power and instant communication, acquiesced. By early March 1901, he finally had the prospect of funds. Yet could either Morgan or Tesla possibly have imagined this would be sufficient to launch any major electrical venture? Lighting the World’s Fair had been a $500,000 contract. Niagara alone had cost $6 million before ever a penny was earned.

  Presumably, all Tesla could think about was at least getting launched. He purchased two hundred acres out on a rural tract at Shoreham, Long Island, and by July 1901 was building his great dream, the Wardenclyffe tower, a strange, giant erector-set structure that rose 187 feet and was topped with a large globelike dome. Below the tower a shaft traveled 120 feet into the ground, while sixteen iron pipes pushed into the bowels yet another 300 feet, “gripping the earth.” Across the fields stood an attractive laboratory building designed by his friend Stanford White. But just as Tesla was busy creating his mysterious tower, Marconi stunned the world on December 12, 1901, by successfully transmitting the letter S across the Atlantic. Tesla had believed for some time that Marconi was infringing on many of his patents, but Tesla, like Edison in the early days of the light bulb, could not be bothered at first by inferior “patent pirates.” And by the time he saw Marconi for the true threat he was, he could not possibly afford—as Edison and Westinghouse had—to send in battalions of lawyers. He could barely pay for his expensive life at the Waldorf-Astoria.

  By January 2, 1902, Tesla needed more money if he was to complete his electrical tower and was pressing Morgan accordingly: “Now, Mr. Morgan, am I backed by the greatest financier of all times? And shall I lose great triumphs and an immense fortune because I need a sum of money!!”39 But Morgan could not see why he should pour more money into such a huge and expensive enterprise for wireless communication when Guglielmo Marconi had already succeeded with much less. Tesla explained the far more grandiose plans he had—the almost finished tower was not for mere prosaic transatlantic telegraphy but was a gigantic transmitter that would be capable of generating 10 million horsepower to straddle the globe with wireless communication and cheap electric power. “Will you help me or let my great work—almost complete—go to pot?” he asked.

  Morgan was not impressed, just deeply irritated that he had been snookered into squandering his money on visionary schemes. Not only was he adamant that “I should not feel disposed at present to make any further advances,” he was also unwilling to return to Tesla his patents, thereby preventing him from finding others to back him commercially.40 When Tesla humbly presented himself at Morgan’s Wall Street office in January of 1904 to “show you that I have done the best that could be done, you fire me out like an office boy and roar so that you are heard six blocks away; not a cent. It is spread all over town, I am discredited, the laughing stock of my enemies.”41 (We don’t know if Tesla even approached Westinghouse for money for Wardenclyffe, but it seems likely that he did and was rebuffed there, also.)

  Tesla’s biographers have all wondered whether J. P. Morgan, with his big investment in GE, deliberately sabotaged Tesla in his dream of developing a superior system of wireless energy. Morgan certainly had huge stakes in still expanding electrical power systems all over America (and elsewhere in the world). He drove a hard bargain to obtain control of Tesla’s patents and then would not relinquish them for development by someone else. Morgan might have had compelling reasons to thwart a new, untried, and possibly revolutionary technology, one that would make obsolete Morgan’s own efforts and giant investments. But by this time the ever idealistic, ever naive Tesla also had a terrible track record—with the notable exception of his Westinghouse AC collaboration—of turning his brilliant ideas and inventions into commercially viable products. So the hard-nosed Morgan may simply have felt that he had paid good money and had nothing to show for it but the possibly valuable patents.

  The desperate Tesla wrote Morgan long, lovelorn letters, piteous pleas that enumerated for page after page the reasons the giant of Wall Street should recommit to their brief, unfinished relationship. Tesla just did not seem to grasp that a tough-hearted titan like Morgan was not likely to be moved by such flowery confessions as “There has been hardly a night when my pillow was not bathed in tears, but you must not think me weak for that, I am perfectly sure to finish my task, come what may.”42 This elicited a reply from Morgan’s private secretary that “Mr. J. P. Morgan wishes me to inform you that it will be impossible for him to do anything more in the matter.”43 Tesla consoled himself by writing to the indifferent Morgan that the financier’s work was “wrought in passing form. Mine is immortal.”

  To this day, Wardenclyffe remains a scientific mystery. How exactly did Tesla plan to carry out his incredibly ambitious plan? Did he possess technology that would really work and do what he claimed? There had been an enormous amount of practical work and gigantic financial investments required to make Tesla’s AC motors work in the real world, necessary development work that
he often airily overlooked. Not only could Tesla not afford to move forward on his almost finished tower, he could not even afford the lawyers he desperately needed to defend his many patents, depriving him of all sorts of royalties. A loner by nature, unattached to the power and prestige of a great university or a major corporation, Tesla was at a total disadvantage. By 1905, he could no longer afford the laboratory out at Wardenclyffe. Over the next decade, he poured his inventive energy into turbines, but lack of money and the skepticism of his peers meant that yet again these machines never became fully developed commercial products. After J. P. Morgan died in 1913, Tesla soon began appealing to his financier son. Just before Christmas of 1913, he wrote, “I need money badly and I cannot get it in these dreadful times.”44 The younger Morgan took pity and sent Tesla $5,000 at the Waldorf-Astoria.

  Four years later, when the American Institute of Electrical Engineers bestowed its 1917 Edison Medal upon Tesla, the main speaker pointed out, “Were we to seize and eliminate from our industrial world the results of Mr. Tesla’s work, the wheels of industry would cease to turn, our electric cars and trains would stop, our towns would be dark, our mills would be dead and idle. Yes, so far reaching is this work, that it has become the warp and woof of industry.”45 Yet in the previous year, 1916, the man whose alternating current inventions literally powered the modern world had had to declare bankruptcy. Unable to pay his bills, Tesla eventually had to relinquish the mortgage for his beloved (and never completed) Wardenclyffe tower to the Waldorf-Astoria, where he had lived since 1898 and was $20,000 in arrears on his bill. In an effort to make the land easier to sell, the hotel blew up the tower.

  George Westinghouse had died in 1914, but Tesla continued to ply the electric company with ideas in the hopes that they would once again develop his inventions, especially when they entered the new field of radio. In 1920, Tesla was still offering his services, “provided your company is willing to come to an understanding with me on terms decidedly more generous than those under which they acquired my system of power transmission thirty years ago.”46 Again and again, the company politely said no. In 1930, Tesla became convinced that the Westinghouse people had pirated some of his early transmission patents and threatened in a letter, “It would be painful to me to have to resort to legal proceedings against a great corporation whose business is largely founded on my inventions.”47 Sadly broke and understandably bitter, Tesla wrote a letter to the New York World complaining, “Had the Edison companies not finally adopted my invention they would have been wiped out of existence, and yet not the slightest acknowledgment of my labors has ever been made by any of them, a remarkable instance of the proverbial unfairness and ingratitude of corporations.”48 This proud, brilliant eccentric continued to earn fees occasionally as a consultant, but he did not do well in corporate settings. He wrote articles from time to time, often nostalgic pieces about his role in the rise of electricity.

  Yet so great were Nikola Tesla’s early contributions and so prescient did his many “fantastical” predictions prove as the years and decades unfolded, the aging inventor always had a steady and loyal coterie of admirers who sought him out, young science writers like John J. O’Neill, up-and-coming scientists inspired by his work and writings, and old comrades from the Westinghouse days like Charles Scott, eminent professor of engineering. They made sure he received some honors, organizing on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday in 1931 a Festschrift that hailed his great contributions. Time magazine featured Tesla on the cover and celebrated him as an eccentric genius for the ages. “I have been leading a secluded life, one of continuous, concentrated thought and deep meditation,” he was quoted as saying. “Naturally enough I have accumulated a great number of ideas. The question is whether my physical powers will be adequate to working them out and giving them to the world.”49

  The Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company—worried about the bad publicity of an elderly, impoverished Tesla—decided in 1934 to begin paying his monthly bill at his new residence, room 3327 (divisible by three) on the thirty-third floor of the new skyscraper Hotel New Yorker. It was a piddling and insulting sum—$125 a month—for one who had given up so many millions to save the company long ago. In contrast, GE paid the inventor William Stanley, another elderly electrical pioneer on hard times, a stipend of $1,000 a month. The Yugoslav government also began to contribute a small pension. Tesla continued to invent, and when he announced patenting a new “death ray” weapon at the start of World War II, the press gave it great play. All told, Tesla had 111 American patents, and there were apparently many other inventions he never bothered to register. But lacking any major backer, most of his inventions remained either completely theoretical or were never fully developed for real commercial use.

  More and more, Tesla lived in his own world, as big a romantic as ever, and as eccentric. He had his vegetarian meals specially cooked by the hotel chef and insisted that the help not get closer to him than a few feet, part of his phobia of germs. He had finally abandoned wearing his old-fashioned frock coats and his kid gloves for a regular well-tailored business suit. Nikola Tesla in his later years developed a strange passion for pigeons. Never having married and with all his relatives back in Europe, he found solace and a certain familial companionship with these cooing, waddling birds. He had long outlived most of his old friends, Robert Johnson, Stanford White, Mark Twain. So he took to whiling away the hours by feeding and talking to the pigeons outside the New York Public Library and St. Patrick’s Cathedral, often late at night. If he found a bird that was sick or injured, he rescued it and smuggled it into his hotel room to nurse it back to health. A particularly elegant white pigeon was deeply beloved.

  One evening the elderly, almost cadaverous Nikola Tesla told John J. O’Neill about the white pigeon while they were sitting and visiting in the lobby of the Hotel New Yorker. Tesla said, “I loved that pigeon. Yes, I loved her as a man loves a woman, and she loved me…. 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…. As I looked at her I knew she wanted to tell me—she was dying…. 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 program, but when that something went out of my life I knew my life’s work was finished.”50

  On January 7, 1943, as snow tumbled past his room on the thirty-third floor of the Hotel New Yorker and World War II raged across the globe, Nikola Tesla died in his bed, age eighty-six, alone and impecunious. Though Tesla had long been an American citizen, the Yugoslav government made sure his funeral was a grand occasion at the magnificent Cathedral of St. John the Divine up in Morningside Heights. Two thousand mourners came on January 12 to pay their respects to this electrical genius. The U.S. government secretly confiscated some of his papers, concerned that they contained potentially important scientific material.

  Sadly, Tesla died too soon to savor one last wonderful vindication. The whole world believed Marconi to be the father of radio. Yet when Marconi brought suit against the U.S. government for infringing on his radio patents, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the record showed that Marconi’s patents infringed on those of Tesla! Though here, as with most of his inventions, Tesla had not done the hard labor of creating a commercially viable product.

  To this day, Nikola Tesla remains a brilliant but enigmatic figure, a scientist, inventor, dreamer, and visionary whose post-Niagara scientific contributions are the source of great debate. Did he degenerate into a kook, or was he just decades ahead of his time? Electricity had created many, many millionaires. But Tesla, who made possible the electric age, was never one of them. Still, he did live to see his AC system straddle the globe, illuminating nation after nation and powering millions of motors. Almost sixty years after he had stepped ashore in New York, dreaming a big dream of electrifying the world, that dream had more than come to pass.<
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  ELECTRICITY

  And what of electricity itself, that “subtle, vivifying fluid”? As electric power became more versatile, more reliable, more prosaic, the most far-fetched electrical dreams of these three Promethean creators—Edison, Westinghouse, and Tesla—were fulfilled. The Niagara powerhouses added generator after generator and even in 1902 were providing a fifth of all electricity in the United States. As described in historian David E. Nye’s book Electrifying America, by 1910 American business and industry were eagerly incorporating electricity into their daily operations, dramatically raising productivity. By 1940, when electricity had spread throughout society, American productivity had risen 300 percent. Edison biographer Matthew Josephson calculated that assembly-line plants such as those run by automaker Henry Ford saw efficiency rise 50 percent. While electricity was by no means the only explanation, it played an important part in the tremendous ensuing rise in living standards. The cost of electricity declined steadily as it was generated far more efficiently. In 1902, 7.3 pounds of coal were needed to generate 1 kilowatt-hour in a central station. By 1932, that figure was down to 1.5 pounds of coal.51

  Residential electrical service, however, spread far more slowly. This was partly because power companies concentrated first on wooing and supplying more profitable business customers. But it was also because in the early years electricity was still a luxury, more expensive than gas, and not as reliable. Nationwide, in 1907, only 8 percent of Americans lived in homes served by electricity. By 1920, that figure had risen, but only to 35 percent. As electric service improved and costs dropped, Americans signed up for electricity in their homes as eagerly as had business. In major cities like Chicago, 95 percent of homes had electricity by the 1920s.