Tesla: Man Out of Time
The day following Christmas she wrote to Tesla:
“I have tried several times to thank you for the roses. They are before me as I write—so strong, so superb in color. . . . I must always when I write to you make several attempts, a system of repression because I can never express what I would say. I did not mean to be severe the other evening. I was only wrapped up in disappointment. I miss you very much and wonder if it is always to go on this way and if I can ever become accustomed to not seeing you. However I am glad to know that you are well and happy and prosperous. With every kind wish for the New Year my dear friend.”6
Typically, when Tesla got around to responding, he tried to lighten the mood with chiding. He only succeeded in being cruel, going on about how he had found her sister, whom he had recently met, much more pretty and charming than she. Then he went back to work.
After the lectures of 1893 in which he had described in detail the six basic requirements of radio transmission and reception, he had built equipment that could be operated between his laboratory and various points within New York City. The fire had destroyed all this and had set back his research, but by the spring of 1897, with financial help from Adams and strong support from Westinghouse, he was prepared to move ahead.
He announced to the Electrical Review in August, before filing his basic radio patents, that successful tests had been made, but the report was guarded and general: “Already he has constructed both a transmitting apparatus and an electrical receiver which at distant points is sensitive to the signals of the transmitter, regardless of earth currents or points of the compass. And this has been done with a surprisingly small expenditure of energy.”
By disturbing the “electrostatic equilibrium” at any point on the Earth, the Review explained, the disturbance could be distinguished at a distant point and thus “the means of signalling and reading signals becomes practicable once the concrete instruments are available.” By actual testing, said the report, he “has really accomplished wireless communication over reasonably long distances . . . and has only to perfect apparatus to go to any extent….”7
Tesla made tests from a boat chugging up the Hudson River, carrying the receiving set twenty-five miles from his new laboratory on Houston Street. And this was only a fraction of what his instruments were capable of doing.
He filed his basic patent applications No. 645,576 and 649,621 on September 2, 1897, and they were granted in 1900. Later, as we have noted, they would be contested in long litigation by Marconi; but first Tesla would sue the Italian for infringement.8
In 1898 he filed and was granted patent No. 613,809 which described radio remote control for use in guided vehicles. Here was yet another potentially spectacular application of wireless transmission. He could scarcely wait to show the public not just radio or the first breakthrough in automation, but both at once.
The year before when speaking at Buffalo on the occasion of introducing Niagara Falls power, GE having just completed its lines, Tesla had declared that he now hoped to see the fulfillment of his fondest dream, “namely, the transmission of power from station to station without the employment of any connecting wire. . . .”9 The visiting dignitaries—engineers, industrialists, financiers—had listened with mixed emotions. This gifted madman seemed bent on making whole systems obsolete as soon as they came into being, and just when they promised to start earning profits. But soon newspapers around the world were announcing that he had developed equipment that not only would transmit energy and intelligence through the Earth for a distance of twenty miles, but that he also could send it wirelessly through the air.10
And so certain was Tesla that he now claimed that communication with Mars would be possible in a short time.
An announcement was carried by the Electrical Review describing how Mr. Tesla had invented apparatus “capable of generating electrical pressures vastly in excess of any heretofore used,” with which the current “can be conducted to a terminal maintained at an elevation where the rarefied atmosphere is capable of conducting freely the particular current produced. At a distant point where the energy is to be used commercially a second terminal is maintained at about the same elevation to attract and receive the current, and to convey it to earth through special means for transforming and utilizing it.”11
The article was illustrated with streamers representing electrical pressure of 2.5 million volts pouring from a single coil. Other publications showed huge stationary balloons being used to maintain the terminals at required elevations.
“Tesla now proposes,” the Electrical Review continued, “to transmit without the use of any wires through the natural media—the earth and the air—great amounts of power to distances of thousands of miles. This will appear a dream, a tale from the ‘Arabian Nights.’ But the extraordinary discoveries Tesla has made during a number of years of incessant labor . . . make it evident that his work in this field has passed the stage of laboratory experiment, and is ready for a practical test on an industrial scale. The success of his efforts means that power from such sources as Niagara will become available in any part of the world regardless of distance.”12
Some of the articles appearing at this time reported the goal as a fait accompli, carrying such headlines as, “Tesla Electrifies the Whole Earth.” Michael Pupin read Tesla’s claim about being able to communicate with Mars and uttered a mute appeal to the patron saint of transplanted Serbs. Along with other scientific colleagues, he wondered, What next? Long ago as a boy herding cattle along the military frontier of Serbia, he had learned about the importance of the Earth as a conductor of acoustical resonance. He and the other boys had stuck their knives into the earth at night, falling asleep with their ears against the blades. The merest sound of moving cattle or of marauding Romanians stealing through the cornstalks would quickly awaken them.
Later Pupin realized that an oscillator sending out electrical waves would penetrate longer distances when one of its sides was connected to the Earth. But to speak of sending wireless signals to Mars seemed palpable nonsense, “because there would not be the acoustical resonance of earth to cover great distances.”
Such minor considerations did not deter Tesla, however, as he built equipment that exceeded anything ever designed before. He built many shapes, sizes, and varieties of Tesla coils, or high-frequency transformers, including a flat-spiral resonant transformer that represented a beautiful evolution in design and with which he could produce electromotive forces of many millions of volts.
One of the major problems associated with very high-voltage apparatus is the loss due to corona and other spurious discharges, which severely “drag down” the output and ultimately limit maximum capability. To these problems Tesla succeeded in evolving elegant solutions.
He considered the ultimate design to be a transformer having a secondary in which the parts, charged to a high potential, were of considerable area and arranged in space along ideal enveloping surfaces of very large radii of curvature, and at proper distances from one another, thereby insuring a small electric surface density everywhere. Thus no leak could occur even if the conductor were bare. This design was exemplified in his flat-spiral coil.
In his laboratory he had installed a two-turn primary circuit running all around the large room and it was this coil, plus the associated circuit interrupters, that he would later ship to Colorado to drive his magnifying transmitter. The primary was buried in the ground, and it probably had such special characteristics as a very large diameter and multistrands.
With such equipment, he felt, there were no limits: a message could be sent to Mars almost as easily as to Chicago. “I found that there was practically no limit to the tension available,” he wrote in the Electrical Review, and “I discovered the most important of all facts arrived at in the course of my investigation in these fields. One of these was that the atmospheric air, though ordinarily a perfect insulator, conducted freely the currents of immense electro-motive force producible by such coils…. So great is the
conductivity of the air, that the discharge issuing from a single terminal behaves as if the atmosphere were rarefied. Another fact is that this conductivity increases very rapidly with the rarefaction of the atmosphere and augmentation of the electrical pressures, to such an extent that at barometric pressures which permit of no transit of ordinary currents, those generated by such a coil pass with great freedom through the air as through a copper wire.”13
He had proved conclusively, he said, that great amounts of electrical energy could be transmitted through the upper air strata to almost any distance. And he learned what he considered an equally important fact: that the discharges of an electromotive force of a few million volts excited powerful affinities in the atmospheric nitrogen, causing it to combine with oxygen and other elements. “So energetic are these actions and so strangely do such powerful discharges behave,” he said, “that I have often experienced a fear that the atmosphere might be ignited, a terrible possibility, which Sir William Crookes, with his piercing intellect, has already considered. Who knows but such a calamity is possible?”
Electrical resonance was not Tesla’s original idea, for Lord Kelvin had introduced the mathematical potential of the condenser discharge; but Tesla exhumed the equation and gave it vibrant life.
In the 1899 Electrical Review article in which Tesla expressed fear of setting fire to the sky, several startling photographs appeared of the inventor working with the apparatus he had been building.14 One records a spectacular display of lightning achieved with pressure of about eight million volts in an experiment for transmitting electrical energy great distances without wires. Another shows the inventor holding a disconnected, brilliantly lighted vacuum bulb of 1,500 candlepower, the light being used for the photograph. The frequency is measured in millions per second.
A third shows Tesla in brilliant relief, with a coil energized by the waves of a distant oscillator and adjusted to the capacity of his own body, which is preserved from injury “by maintaining a position at the nodal point, where the intense vibration is little felt.” The pressure on the end of the coil, which is illuminated by powerful streamers, is nearly half a million volts.
A final photograph in this eerily remarkable series bears the caption: “In this experiment the operator’s body is charged to a great pressure by a direct connection with an oscillator. The photograph shows a conducting bar, carrying on the end a sheet of tin of determined size, held in hand. The operator is on the top of a stationary electrical wave and the bar and sheet are both illuminated by the violently agitated air surrounding them. One of the vacuum tubes used in lighting the laboratory, though at considerable distance on the ceiling, glows brightly, being affected by the vibrations transmitted to it from the operator’s body.”
Tesla delighted in such magic, but for critics who might think him more interested in effects than utility, he added that there were to be mundane rewards as well. With the tools of electrical resonance and circuits in exact synchronism, he said, nitrogen could be extracted from the air and valuable fertilizer manufactured. Also light, “diffusive like that of the sun,” could be produced with an economy greater than that obtainable in the usual ways and with lamps that never burned out.
His dreams were Utopian: Earth delivered from hunger and toil; easy world communication; control of weather; a bountiful supply of energy; limitless light; and last but not least, a link with the forms of life he was convinced existed on other planets. Martians he regarded as a “statistical certainty.”
Meanwhile, for his friends of a more pedestrian nature, life continued as usual. Katharine sent him a poignant and critical letter, inviting him to yet another party and reminding him that he was neglecting his friends. The Johnson children were growing up, and she could foresee a day when even they would have no need of her. Time raced, and she was suffering from intimations of mortality: “Do leave aside the millionaires, high-sounding titles, the Waldorf and Fifth Avenue…,” she wrote, “for some simple everyday people who are distinguished only by a great weakness….
“I have heard lots of things about you—I am sure some of them you don’t know of yourself, and I am just dying to tell them all to you, but of course you would not care to hear them. Do you know that I am going abroad in the Spring, the early Spring, and who knows, perhaps these familiar scenes may know me no more. So if you have not forgotten me entirely, or forgotten to be fond of me—I have forgotten to forget. You had better come now and again.
“‘O how fast the days are flitting.’ There are so few days left in my years, now it is Autumn and we are returning from exile, and then it is Spring and we are taking it up again, the interminable summer begins, there is no winter. Be human, be kind and come. You know it is Robert’s party. Perhaps you will come for him.”15
He emerged from his laboratory and went to the party. For a time he tried to be more thoughtful. In a note to the “Palais Johnson” he mentioned Luka’s “great translations of Serbian poetry,” and said he had sent three copies of his book to “three queens—American queens, I might add.” He invited the Johnsons to a celebration at the Waldorf—“before I run out of money.” And he sent a frivolous note to “Mrs. Johnston, the Belle of the Ball,” of which, many years later, Agnes Johnson Holden was to write on the envelope: “Joke played on mother by Mr. Tesla, disguising handwriting and misspelling her name.”
With partying resumed it was for a while almost like old times. But soon the seduction of the laboratory claimed him again. Tesla for a long time had been exploring the area of mechanical vibrations—as for example with the platform on which he had allowed Mark Twain to experiment for fun and health. Almost at once he had begun to produce unexpected effects.
One day in 1898 while testing a tiny electromechanical oscillator, he attached it with innocent intent to an iron pillar that went down through the center of his loft building at 46 East Houston Street, to the sandy floor of the basement.
Flipping on the switch, he settled into a straight-backed chair to watch and make notes of everything that happened. Such machines always fascinated him because, as the tempo built higher and higher, they would establish resonance with first one object in his workshop and then another. For example, a piece of equipment or furniture would suddenly begin to shimmy and dance. As he stepped up the frequency, it would halt but another more in tune would take up the frantic jig and, later on, yet another.
What Tesla was unaware of on this occasion was that vibrations from the oscillator, traveling down the iron pillar with escalating force, were being carried through the substructure of Manhattan in all directions. (Normally earthquakes are more severe at a distance from their epicenter.) Buildings began to shake, windows shattered, and citizens poured onto the streets in the nearby Italian and Chinese neighborhoods.
At Police Headquarters on Mulberry Street, where Tesla was already regarded with suspicion, it soon became apparent that no other part of the city was having an earthquake. Two officers were dispatched posthaste to check on the mad inventor. The latter, unaware of the shambles occurring all around his building, had just begun to sense an ominous vibration in the floor and walls. Knowing that he must quickly put a stop to it, he seized a sledgehammer and smashed the little oscillator in a single blow.
With perfect timing the two policemen rushed through the door, allowing him to turn with a courteous nod.
“Gentlemen, I am sorry,” he said. “You are just a trifle too late to witness my experiment. I found it necessary to stop it suddenly and unexpectedly and in an unusual way. . . . However, if you will come around this evening I will have another oscillator attached to this platform and each of you can stand on it. You will, I am sure, find it a most interesting and pleasurable experience. Now you must leave, for I have many things to do. Good day, gentlemen.”16
When reporters arrived, he blandly told them that he could destroy the Brooklyn Bridge in a matter of minutes if he felt like it.
Years later he told Allan L. Benson of other experiments he had
made with an oscillator no larger than an alarm clock. He described attaching the vibrator to a steel link two feet long and two inches thick. “For a long time nothing happened…. But at last… the great steel link began to tremble, increased its trembling until it dilated and contracted like a beating heart—and finally broke!”17
Sledgehammers could not have done it, he told the reporter; crow-bars could not have done it, but a fusillade of taps, no one of which would have harmed a baby, did it.
Pleased with this beginning, he put the little vibrator in his coat pocket and went out to hunt a half-built steel building. Finding one in the Wall Street district, ten stories high, with nothing up but the steelwork, he clamped the vibrator to one of the beams.
“In a few minutes,” he told the reporter, “I could feel the beam trembling. Gradually the trembling increased in intensity and extended throughout the whole great mass of steel. Finally, the structure began to creak and weave, and the steelworkers came to the ground panic-stricken, believing that there had been an earthquake. Rumors spread that the building was about to fall, and the police reserves were called out. Before anything serious happened, I took off the vibrator, put it in my pocket, and went away. But if I had kept on ten minutes more, I could have laid that building flat in the street. And, with the same vibrator, I could drop Brooklyn Bridge in less than an hour.”
Nor was this all. He boasted to Benson that he could split the Earth in the same way—“split it as a boy would split an apple—and forever end the career of man.” Earth’s vibrations, he went on, have a periodicity of about one hour and forty-nine minutes. “That is to say, if I strike the earth this instant, a wave of contraction goes through it that will come back in one hour and forty-nine minutes in the form of expansion. As a matter of fact, the earth, like everything else, is in a constant state of vibration. It is constantly contracting and expanding.