In his earliest transmissions he used vibrating contacts to make continuous waves in a receiving system audible. A few years later the crystal detector was introduced to receive the signals of spark-gap transmitters. This became the accepted practice of commercial radio until the invention by Maj. Edwin H. Armstrong of the regenerative or feedback circuit, which brought radio into the era of amplified sound. Later, Armstrong introduced the superheterodyne beat-note circuit, which underlies all modern radio and radar reception. Armstrong, a graduate student of Prof. Michael Pupin’s at Columbia University, had been inspired by Tesla’s lectures. Later, however, perhaps influenced by Pupin, he would champion Marconi in the prolonged and bitter war between the latter and Tesla over radio patents.
The scientist who, next to Tesla, most deserved credit for pioneering radio was Sir Oliver Lodge, for in 1894 he demonstrated the possibility of transmitting telegraph signals wirelessly by Hertzian waves a distance of 150 yards.
Two years later young Marchese Guglielmo Marconi arrived in London with a wireless set identical to Lodge’s. Naturally he aroused little comment among the leading contenders in the race. He did, however, have a ground connection and antenna or aerial wire with which he had made crude experiments in Bologna. As it happened, this equipment was exactly what Tesla had described in his widely published lectures of 1893, which had been translated into many languages.10 Later, as we shall see, Marconi was to deny that he had ever read of Tesla’s system, and the U.S. Patent Examiner was to brand his denial patently absurd.
Significantly, until the early 1960s only eleven patent cases would reach the United States Supreme Court and of those few, two involved Tesla patents. The fundamental nature of his work was characteristic. The high court heard cases involving his polyphase alternating-current patents and his radio patents, and both actions were decided in his favor. Ironically, neither of these was brought by the inventor himself.
January sleet scraped at the windows of Tesla’s laboratory. Kolman Czito, his assistant, shivered as he helped to adjust a machine, but the inventor worked away in total concentration. For all that Tesla was aware of the temperature, it might as well have been blossom time.
The telephone rang, and he sighed as he went to answer it. The operator was putting through a long-distance call from Pittsburgh.
George Westinghouse’s voice boomed across the miles, almost stuttering in his excitement. His firm had gotten the contract for installing all the power and lighting equipment for the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, otherwise known as the Columbian Exposition—the first electrical fair in history. It would use Tesla’s alternating-current system, his maligned and ridiculed AC, all the way.
This was good news and bad: good because it offered a great international event as a showcase; bad because it meant leaving work that meant more to him than anything else in life. His radio research was now at its most exciting, critical point.
The industrialist’s words were tumbling over each other. It was going to be the grandest spectacle of modern times, he said; a chance not only to show what AC could do but to exhibit all the new electrical products being invented. Who would not give an arm and a leg for such an opportunity?
General Electric would be showing Edison’s inventions. Everybody who was anybody in international science would be there. The architecture was to be magnificent.
“When does the Fair open?” Tesla asked, fearing the worst.
“May first. Hardly time for everything we must do.”
“All right, Mr. Westinghouse,” said the inventor.
Turning away from his beloved coils, he went to work on the big show. Ideas were already racing through his mind for ways to amaze the scientific community and bewitch the public. He could not possibly have said no.
The United States both wanted and needed a spectacle. Shortly after President Grover Cleveland was elected to a second term of office, the nation was engulfed by bank failures, joblessness, and bankruptcies. The Panic of 1893 haunted the humble and the mighty alike. Something to take people’s minds off the imminent prospect of standing in breadlines seemed politically desirable.
The Columbian Exposition was devised as a celebration (one year late) of the four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America. President Cleveland invited the royalty of Spain and Portugal and other foreign dignitaries. He even agreed to turn the gold master key that would release the electricity and flood the City of Tomorrow with light, starting up fountains and machinery, raising flags and banners, and signaling the grand opening of the extravaganza. To agree to turn the master key took courage. Electricity had been installed in the White House in 1891, but thus far no president had ever been allowed to touch the switches. The task had been prudently left to hirelings, for, after all, the public had been warned by no less an authority than Edison of the dangers involved.
Chicago was a gray city when the great day finally came, the bread-lines now being actual and long. But the site of the Fair was breathtaking to the multitude that arrived, and reporters began to write of it as the White City. The New York Times (May 1, 1893) reported, “Grover Cleveland, calm and dignified, in a few eloquent words delivered in a clear, ringing voice, which was heard by the great multitude gathered before him, declared the World’s Columbian Exposition open …. and touched the ivory-and-gold key….”
A Tower of Light flared into brilliance with a thousand electric bulbs radiating the promise of a brighter future. Venetian canals had been built to mirror the modern illumination of “Old World” architecture. Everywhere the pulse of the future throbbed: alternating current.
As the lights went on, the massed human beings below uttered a great sigh. Then, in the seats reserved for them, the Cabinet officers, the Duke and Duchess of Veragua, and other foreign dignitaries began to cheer. The crowd lustily joined in while tightly corseted women fainted and fell like soldiers in battle.
Westinghouse, who had underbid General Electric on the illumination contract, had enjoyed a decisive triumph. In the Electricity Building could be seen all the latest products and inventions of American ingenuity. At night especially the Fair seemed an enchanted place. Colored searchlights played on the fountains, making them so beautiful that people actually wept tears of joy. Adventurous citizens careered around the fairgrounds on an elevated train driven by electricity. The foolhardy crowded to get seats on Mr. G. W. Ferris’s enormous wheel, which was 250 feet in diameter and like nothing ever seen before. They packed in sixty to a car to soar out precariously above both the White City and the gray city that lay beyond.
Between May and October, 25 million Americans visited Chicago to see the latest wonders of science, industry, art, and architecture. This was then a third of the total population.
Visitors crowded into the display rooms presided over by the famous Nikola Tesla. Clad in white tie and tails, he stood among a magician’s feast of high-frequency equipment, demonstrating one electrical miracle after another. A darkened alcove held tables that glowed with his phosphorescent tubes and lamps. One length of tubing radiated the words “Welcome, Electricians,” which Tesla had had laboriously blown letter by letter from the molten glass. His other lights honored such great scientists as Helmholtz, Faraday, Maxwell, Henry, and Franklin. And he had not forgotten—right up there with the famous scientists—the name of the most eminent living poet of Yugoslavia: Zmaj Jovan, whose pseudonym was ZMAJ.
Day after day he captivated the curious with demonstrations illustrating how alternating current worked.11 On a velvet-covered table small metallic objects—copper balls, metal eggs—were made to spin at great speeds, reversing themselves smoothly at fixed intervals.
He demonstrated the first synchronized electric clock attached to an oscillator and showed his first disruptive discharge coil. The audiences understood little of the science involved, yet were enthralled. And when he seemed to turn himself into a human firestorm by using the apparatus with which he had so often thrilled his laboratory visitors, they cried out
in fear and wonder.
A bevy of Tesla’s young women friends arrived under firm escort from New York City. They flirted with him, rode on the Ferris wheel, and visited the Woman’s Building to hear Mrs. Potter Palmer (Chicago’s retort to Mrs. Astor) declare that the model kitchen, which boasted an electric stove, electric fans, and even an automatic dishwasher, heralded the liberation of the female.
It is possible, however, that they felt more liberated by the sight of Princess Eulalia who, representing her nephew King Alfonso of Spain, brazenly smoked cigarettes in public.
They saw the first zipper and Edison’s Kinetoscope (early motion-picture photography) which brought “scenes to the eyes as well as sounds to the ear”; and they listened to thin bursts of music piped by telephone from a concert in Manhattan. They stood with crowds ogling the bellydancing of an energetic young woman billed as Little Egypt and—because the Fair offered something for every taste—admired a plump Venus de Milo molded in chocolate.
A journalist, one of a throng who visited the Tesla exhibition, sent this report to his newspaper:
“Mr. Tesla has been seen receiving through his hands currents at a potential of more than 200,000 volts, vibrating a million times per second, and manifesting themselves in dazzling streams of light…. After such a striking test, which, by the way, no one has displayed a hurried inclination to repeat, Mr. Tesla’s body and clothing have continued for some time to emit fine glimmers or halos of splintered light. In fact, an actual flame is produced by the agitation of electrostatically charged molecules, and the curious spectacle can be seen of puissant, white, ethereal flames, that do not consume anything, bursting from the ends of an induction coil as though it were the bush on holy ground.”
The inventor, it was reported, expected one day to envelop himself in a complete sheet of lambent fire that would leave him quite uninjured. Such currents, he claimed, would keep a naked man warm at the North Pole, and their use in therapeutics was but one of their practical possibilities.
“My first announcement [of medical diathermy] spread like fire and experiments were undertaken by a host of experts here and in other countries,” he later wrote. “When a famous French physician, Dr. d’Arsonval, declared that he had made the same discovery, a heated controversy relative to priority was started. The French, eager to honor their countryman, made him a member of the Academy, ignoring entirely my earlier publication. Resolved to take steps for vindicating my claim, I went to Paris, when I met Dr. d’Arsonval. His personal charm disarmed me completely and I abandoned my intention, content to rest on the record. It shows that my disclosure antedated his and also that he used my apparatus in his demonstrations….”12
Although Tesla is credited with having first recorded the fact (in 1891) that heat production resulting from the bombardment of tissue with high-frequency alternating currents could have medical uses for the treatment of arthritis and many other afflictions, the name “D’Arsonval current” persisted in medical terminology. In any event, the use of radiation spread rapidly, and a field of medical technology—at first called diathermy and now called hyperthermia—developed that today includes the application of X rays, microwaves, and radio waves to destroy cancer cells. They are also used for healing bones and tissue.
Throughout his life Tesla was also a firm believer in the therapeutic value of what he called “cold fire,” both for refreshing the mind and cleansing the skin. In fact, the brush discharge or corona from a low-power therapeutic device does seem to enhance muscular action, may improve circulation, and also generates ozone, which can be mildly stimulating when breathed in low concentration. Physicist Maurice Stahl said, “There is also a psychosomatic effect. I would consider the overall effect more than mechanical.”
The inventor also had hopes that electrical anaesthesia might become possible. And he proposed burying high-voltage wires in classrooms to stimulate dull students. To key up actors before they went on stage, he arranged to install a high-tension dressing room in a New York theater.
At the Columbian Exposition Tesla also described heating bars of iron and melting lead and tin in the electromagnetic field of specially designed high-frequency coils. This was to have important commercial consequences many years later.
Although he had left his laboratory for Chicago reluctantly, the Fair proved an exhilarating experience for him. It was equally so for George Westinghouse. The latter displayed in the Machinery Hall various commercial motors of the AC system and twelve generators of the two-phase type that had been built especially for distributing light and power. To show the complete adaptability of his system, Westinghouse demonstrated how a rotary converter could change polyphase AC into DC to run a railway motor.
Perhaps Tesla’s biggest day came on August 25 when he delivered a lecture to the Electrical Congress and demonstrated his mechanical and electrical oscillators. Thomas Commerford Martin, the well-known editor and electrical engineer, wrote that scientists would now be able to carry on investigations in alternating current with great precision. But also, he added, one of the uses of such equipment would be in the field of “harmonic and synchronous telegraphy” and that “vast possibilities are again opened up.”13
Hermann Helmholtz, the celebrated German physicist, attended the Electrical Congress as an official delegate of the German Empire and was elected its president. Tesla’s fellow countryman Michael Pupin, too, was a participant. “The subjects discussed at that congress,” Pupin later wrote, “and the men who discussed them, showed that the electrical science was not in its infancy, and that electrical things were not done by the rule of thumb.” Thus he too repudiated Edison’s contention that alternating current was too little understood for safe use.
Tesla returned to New York elated by his triumphs. In the flush of fame he was more determined than ever to avoid the many public claims on his time. He would have preferred to avoid all commercial claims as well, but the need to finance radio and other research soon made this impossible.
8. HIGH SOCIETY
Wall Street was dominated by personal adventures, including such legendary figures as Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, the Vanderbilts, Edward H. Harriman, Jay Gould, Thomas Fortune Ryan, and other more ephemeral but equally colorful specimens. Some might bloom for a day, only to be trampled and forgotten. Most thrived on trading of such dubious legality that anyone who tried to emulate them today would probably be obliged to live in a foreign capital beyond threat of extradition. Dealing in coal, railroads, steel, tobacco, and the new field of electrical utilities, they plunged, cornered, and sold short.
According to the irreverent Twain, the gospel as preached by the robber barons during this galloping phase of the industrial revolution was, “Get money. Get it quickly. Get it in abundance. Get it dishonestly, if you can, honestly, if you must.”
Each day when the closing gong sounded at the Stock Exchange on Wall Street, many members moved on to the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, which was then located where the Empire State Building now stands. For a broker to be admitted as a member of the “Waldorf Crowd” was a patent of success. The splendid lounges and dining rooms served as showcases in which to observe the preenings of the winners as well as the dismay of the losers. Fear was often a palpable presence.
Tesla instinctively gravitated to the glass-enclosed Palm Room to see and be seen by the money men so important to his career. He had begun dining there regularly some years before he was able to take up residence at the fashionable hotel. Compared to the enormous wealth amassed by the plungers and builders of the period, he was not affluent, but he was handsome, polished, charming, and lived as if his prospects for wealth were excellent, as indeed they were. And after all, as Ward McAllister observed of the Gilded Age, “A man with a million dollars can be as happy nowadays as though he were rich.”
Tesla himself was now a member of McAllister’s exclusive roster of wealth and social position, the New York “400.” He was meeting those fabled “great silent men with cold eyes and hard smile
s” on their own playing field. His knowledge was being courted, and he enjoyed the game. Should he allow himself to become, like Edison, “Morganized”? Should he be “Astored,” “Insulled,” “Melloned,” “Ryaned,” or “Fricked”? He had no illusions as to the risk involved. No matter who capitalized his inventions, there would certainly be meddling interference and probably ultimate control. That was how the system worked, and it was the price an inventor must pay.
A few knowledgeable men had already begun to call him the greatest inventor in history, greater even than Edison. If further proof of his success in the New World were needed, a backlash was developing against him—not just in the Edison camp but, more quietly, among other scientists who received less attention from the press and who were never invited to the exciting celebrity affairs in his laboratory.
All his life Tesla was to cultivate an adoring host of journalists, editors, publishers, and literati. Although his lectures made him world-famous and were preserved in the records of learned societies, he never once submitted an article to an academic journal. Indeed, when he first arrived in America there was none; institutional ties with the big three of industry, government, and universities had not yet become the accepted avenue to recognition for a scientist. But now that was changing.
He was a loner by preference when the time for lone operators was swiftly passing. Edison himself, as one of the last of the “independents,” was a transitional figure who built the first of the large industrial research laboratories, setting the style for modern science.