“Now, suppose that at the precise moment when it begins to contract, I explode a ton of dynamite. That accelerates the contraction and, in one hour and forty-nine minutes, there comes an equally accelerated wave of expansion. When the wave of expansion ebbs, suppose I explode another ton of dynamite, thus further increasing the wave of contraction. And, suppose this performance be repeated, time after time. Is there any doubt as to what would happen? There is no doubt in my mind. The earth would be split in two. For the first time in man’s history, he has the knowledge with which he may interfere with cosmic processes!”
When Benson asked how long it might take him to split the Earth, he answered modestly, “Months might be required; perhaps a year or two.” But in only a few weeks, he said, he could set the Earth’s crust into such a state of vibration that it would rise and fall hundreds of feet, throwing rivers out of their beds, wrecking buildings, and practically destroying civilization. To the relief of ordinary citizens, Tesla later qualified his claim. The principle could not fail, he said, but it would be impossible to obtain perfect mechanical resonance of the Earth.
As usual, Tesla’s comments to the press smack of exhibitionism. But also, as usual, his research was fundamentally sound. He had begun to establish a new science that he called “telegeodynamics,” and it was to have important results. He saw that the same principles of vibration could be used to detect remote objects, such as submarines or ships. By using mechanical vibrations with the known constant of the Earth, he also hoped to learn how to locate ore deposits and oil fields. Modern subsurface exploratory techniques were thus presaged.
Tesla agreed with a theory suggested by O’Neill that a battery of gyroscopes, mounted in a region of severe earthquake hazard, could transmit thrusts into the Earth at equally timed intervals, building up resonance in weak strata and releasing the plate pressure before serious quakes could occur. Today there is renewed interest by seismologists in such techniques.
He described (and later tried to interest Westinghouse in developing) a machine embodying the art of telegeodynamics, with which he claimed to have sent six miles through the Earth mechanical waves “of much smaller amplitude than earthquake waves,” that lost little of their power with distance. They were not intended to transmit electrical energy but would enable messages to be carried anywhere in the world and received on a tiny pocket set. Such waves could travel without interference from weather. When pressed by reporters to describe his apparatus, he would say only that it was a cylinder of finest steel—suspended in midair by a type of energy which was old in principle but which had been amplified by a secret principle—combined with a stationary part. Powerful impulses impressed upon the floating cylinder would react on the stationary part and through it, on the Earth.
Nothing was to be developed from this concept. All his life, however, Tesla stuck by his guns as to the awesome potential of mechanical resonance and he went on throwing the fear of God (through science) into impressionable New Yorkers. He could walk over to the Empire State Building, he told reporters, “and reduce it to a tangled mass of wreckage in a very short time.” The mechanism would be a tiny oscillator, “an engine so small you could slip it in your pocket.” Only 2.5 horsepower would be needed to drive the little vibrator. First, he said, the outer stone coating of the skyscraper would be hurled off. Then the whole vast skeleton of steel, the pride and glory of the Manhattan skyline, would collapse. At this point superman would presumably slip the tiny mechanism into his pocket and casually saunter away, perhaps reciting a line or two from Faust. Then his critics would rue the day.
Whatever else Tesla may have been trying to invite by making flamboyant statements such as these—the adulation of his followers, the wrath of other scientists, the consternation of officialdom—he was certainly not courting indifference. But then public indifference was the one thing he could least afford. The more so since fate seemed constantly to be thrusting him into direct competition with that master enchanter of the public imagination, the formidable old Wizard of Menlo Park.
12. ROBOTS
The New Year 1898 found Edison and Tesla in a neck-and-neck race to see who could boggle the minds of lesser mortals with the more outrageous claims. News of their doings had spread all the way to San Francisco, where it was reported that Edison now was “credited with announcing that he can photograph thought. Nikola Tesla tells a New York paper that he has ‘harnessed the rays of the sun’ and will compel them to operate machinery and give light and heat. This invention is still in the experimental stage, but he declares that there is not a possibility of its failure. He has discovered a method of producing steam from the rays of the sun. The steam runs a steam engine which generates electricity….”1
Tesla’s solar engine was so simple in design, he said, that if it were fully described others might seize the idea, patent it, and control a blessing “which he intends shall be a free gift to the world.” He nevertheless permitted Chauncey McGovern of Pearson’s Magazine to see his invention, which he claimed employed a single secret factor.
In the center of a large room with a glass roof—his solar municipal powerhouse—reposed a huge cylinder of thick glass on a bed of asbestos and stone. Encircling it would be mirrors covered with asbestos coats to refract the rays of the sun into the glass cylinder.2 The cylinder would always be kept full of water, which would have been treated by a secret chemical process, and which he said was the only complicated part of the system.
All day long while the sun shone, with the chemical treatment making the water easily subject to heat, steam would be produced to run ordinary steam engines. These in turn would generate electricity for home and factory—enough, indeed, to supply a surplus, to be stored for cloudy days.
The inventor said he fully expected to be ridiculed for having devised a system so simple. The cost of generating such energy would be minimal and he believed—contrary to the experience of subsequent generations—that it should be easy to perfect batteries that could store a whole year’s supply of electricity against possible accidents in the generating machinery. The system, he declared, would be a “great deal less artificial than for men to delve down into the bowels of the earth at so much trouble and loss of life in order to get a few handfuls of coal to run an engine a short time and then to make spasmodic return trips for more.” Indeed, he hoped to see his solar engine replace not only coal, but wood and every other source of motive power, heat, and light.
Getting his inventions into working form was becoming an ever more serious problem for Tesla, laboring as he did almost alone and besieged with an incessant distracting flight of new ideas. So far as is known, his solar system was never used commercially. And he was having the same trouble with his new vacuum-tube photography lights.
To Robert Johnson he wrote: “I feel confident I have a light which for photography will be better than sunlight, but I have no spare time to bring it to perfection. . . .” He had recently taken a number of photos of the actor Joseph Jefferson to “vindicate” this mysterious new light. (Five years earlier he had taken, with Jefferson as model, the first photographs ever made with phosphorescent light.3) Now The New York Times reported, “The art of photography will hereafter be independent of sunlight and will be relieved of the inconvenience and discomfort of the flashlight if Nikola Tesla’s claims for his latest development of the vacuum tubes are well founded.”4 The Electrical Review declared it the oddest and most unlooked-for development of the vacuum tube.5Photographs made with the tube were widely printed in newspapers. But thereafter little was heard about it.
Other kinds of practical inventions also intruded on his mind, warring with his preference for basic research. He received an urgent request from George Westinghouse that he provide a “simple and economical device for converting alternating to continuous (DC) currents. . . .” The Pittsburgh industrialist was interested in converting current for, among other things, running electric trains. Tesla replied at once that he had given a lot of thought to
the problem and had “not one but a number of devices to put on your circuit and for all of them there is a great demand.”
He was convinced, and so announced, that with properly built railroad tracks, trains running on AC/DC could safely travel up to two hundred miles per hour. As usual his claim gripped the popular imagination even as it griped his fellow inventors. Westinghouse leased one of Tesla’s converters. At around this time he also lent the inventor $6,000 to underwrite other inventions in various stages of development. Although Tesla had little money at this point, he at least had no debts.
In May Prince Albert of the Belgians visited the United States and included Tesla’s laboratory on his tour. The experience “astonished” him, he said, adding that the inventor was among those Americans who made the strongest impression on him.
Tesla, never one to underestimate the usefulness of royalty, wired George Westinghouse and suggested he invite the Prince to be a guest in his Pittsburgh home. Westinghouse thought it an excellent idea and did so. Afterward Prince Albert visited the Westinghouse power plant at Niagara Falls, attended by his royal entourage.*
Meanwhile, publisher William Randolph Hearst was adroitly steering the nation toward war with Spain; and a strange concurrence of events was shaping that would cause a Teslian moment of glory to be stolen by one of the inventor’s closest friends.
Hearst’s man in Havana, Frederick Remington, wired his boss: “Everything is quiet. There is no trouble here. There will be no war. I wish to return.” To which the great man replied: “Please remain. You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.”6
Hearst saw real battles as a solution to the circulation war then raging between his New York Journal and Pulitzer’s New York World. His opening journalistic volleys were aimed at Spain for alleged cruelty to “the gentle Cuban people.” When the battleship Maine mysteriously exploded and sank in Havana harbor, he needed nothing more as an excuse to lash the country into a mood for vengeance. The U.S. Congress, yielding to the clamor of the press, by a narrow vote declared war upon Spain.7
Americans, fed by the jingoistic press with daily lies and contrived crises—which included warnings of imminent invasion by the Spanish navy of cities along the eastern seaboard—responded with righteous hysteria.
Spain had not the least desire to take on the United States in a fight she could not possibly win. Nevertheless the American defense machine was rolled into action; harbors were fortified to repel the imagined invader and the fighting forces rallied to the flag.
Chauncy Depew, former Secretary of State for New York, gave it as his opinion that America would never have declared war against Spain had the matter been left to President McKinley, rather than to a Congress responsive to the people’s mood. And British ambassador James Bryce, horrified by such irrational preparations and by the lies he read in the newspapers, said he hoped the country’s attitude would not leave a permanent streak of bullying and jingoism in the national character. To this The New York Times retorted loftily that interceding on behalf of “oppressed womanhood” could scarcely be interpreted as bullying jingoism. This was a reference to Hearst’s romantic crusade to charge to the rescue of a Cuban rebel known to his American readers only as Miss Cisneros.
With patriotism pounding in the veins of every loyal son, gestures of a heroic dimension began to be made even by millionaires. Hearst, for example, sent a letter to the President of the United States: “Sir: I beg to offer to the United States, as a gift, without any conditions whatsoever, my steam yacht Buccaneer.” In his same “no strings” letter, the publisher requested that he be given a position in command on his boat. The Navy prudently accepted the craft but declined the skipper. J. Pierpont Morgan rather more thoughtfully offered to sell his yacht, Corsair, to the government.
One spring evening in the midst of this national furor, Tesla and the Johnsons, accompanied by their daughter Agnes and handsome naval Lieutenant Richmond Pearson Hobson, dined at the Waldorf-Astoria. It was the Johnson daughter’s debut into adult society and a last little fling for Lieutenant Hobson before he bade good-bye to Tesla in his laboratory and vanished on a secret Navy assignment. Almost at once a reporter from the Philadelphia Press, as the card in his hatband announced, appeared at the laboratory door.
“I hear you have a wireless device that will communicate with warships one hundred miles away, Dr. Tesla,” he said.
“That is true,” said the inventor. “But I cannot give you the details. One reason I cannot tell you just what my machine is, is that if it can be used on our ships it will give us an advantage; and I shall be proud to have been of so much use to my country.”
“Then you consider yourself a good American?” probed the reporter.
“I, a good American? I was a good American before I ever saw this country. I had studied its government; I had met some of its people, I admired America. I was at heart an American before I thought of coming here to live.”
As the reporter scribbled, Tesla expanded.
“What opportunities this country offers a man! Its people are a thousand years ahead of the people of any other nation of the world. They are big, broadminded, generous. I could not have accomplished in any other country what I have here.”8
He meant it. It was all true. Forgotten were the times when he had been cheated by Edison and his managers and other businessmen, when leading American scientists had derided his polyphase system, when they had laughed at his predictions. That was the way it went sometimes. But it was also true that he was hoping, after an impending exhibition at Madison Square Garden, to interest the government in his very latest wonders.
“The American people are quick to hold out a helping hand and give recognition,” he continued. “Yes, I am as good an American as there is. I have nothing to sell the government of the U.S. If it needs my services in any way it is welcome to them.”9
It was not on the whole, however, a comfortable time for a man of dark complexion and foreign accent to be an American. Hometown “spy-hunts” were just then a popular diversion. Police tended to look the other way if they saw a luckless Spanish-American citizen being beaten up in an alley. Sometimes the “spies” were taken in and grilled for possible deportation.
Andrew Carnegie reflected a popular yearning when he predicted, “Ere long we shall have a solid English-speaking race, capable of preventing much of the evil of the world.”
Teddy Roosevelt impetuously resigned as assistant secretary of the Navy and began recruiting Rough Riders from among the membership list of the Knickerbocker Club. Colonel John Jacob Astor mustered an artillery battery. Cowboys and Sioux Indians rallied to the flag. Meanwhile, riots were reported in Spain and starvation in Cuba. In the end, six times as many U.S. troops would die in Cuba of cholera and typhoid as of Spanish bullets.
The day for which Tesla the inventor had been working and waiting arrived in the midst of martial distractions. The first Electrical Exhibition at Madison Square Garden was late in opening, the railroads having been preempted for the movement of soldiers and military supplies and some of the exhibits therefore having failed to arrive on time. Overshadowed by larger events, the show was almost squeezed out of the newspapers. And to cap it all, the weather was rainy. Even so, fifteen thousand persons showed up.
The demonstration of the world’s first radio-controlled robot boat by Tesla failed to make the splash it deserved, not only because it was overshadowed by the war, but because he made the mistake of presenting more than the public could absorb at once. The remarkable stage of development to which he had carried wireless, the forerunner of modern radio, would have been quite enough; but to introduce automation simultaneously, as he did, was probably too great a leap. On that day in 1898 when he demonstrated the common ancestor of modern guided weapons and vehicles, of automated industry, and of robotry, he was introducing an idea for which the world would not be ready for many years.
His first two radio-controlled devices were boats, and one was submersible by remo
te control. On this initial occasion he showed only the submersible. Commander E. J. Quinby (USN Ret.) who, during World War II, was in charge of electronic weapons research for the Navy at Key West, Florida, has written of visiting Tesla’s historic exhibit when he was a child: “I was there with my father, quite fascinated, but also quite unaware that I was witnessing the dawn of space navigation to be realized later, in the following century. Tesla was not using Morse code. He was not transmitting messages in any known language. Nevertheless, he was employing his own coded pulses via Hertzian waves to directly control this pioneer unmanned craft. He encoded the visitors’ commands, and the vessel’s receiver decoded them automatically into actuating operations.10
The full potential of the invention was concealed, in part because Tesla hoped the Navy would seriously consider using it in the war.
“One of the features not revealed,” science writer Kenneth M. Swezey later disclosed, “was a system to prevent interference by means of coordinated tuning devices responsive only to a combination of several radio waves of completely different frequencies. Another was a loop antenna which could be completely enclosed by the copper hull of the vessel; the antenna would thus be invisible and the vessel could operate completely submerged.”11
The inventor did not disclose more than his fundamental idea in his basic patent No. 613,809—a means he had learned to use to protect his discoveries.
What his patents included, but the Madison Square Garden viewers did not see, were specifications for a torpedo boat without a crew, including a motor with a storage battery to drive the propeller, smaller motors and batteries to operate the steering gear, and still others to feed electric signal lights and to raise or lower the boat in the water.12 Six 14-foot torpedoes were to be placed vertically in two rows so that when one was discharged another would fall into place. Tesla had advised the Navy that he thought such a boat could be built for around $50,000.