He claimed that a few such craft “could attack and destroy a whole armada—destroy it utterly in an hour, and the enemy never have a sight of their antagonists or know what power destroyed them.”
When word of this got out he received from Mark Twain, then in Austria, a letter in which the humorist wrote: “Have you Austrian and English patents on that destructive terror which you have been inventing? and if so, won’t you set a price upon them and concession me to sell them? I know Cabinet ministers of both countries—and of Germany too; likewise, William II.
“I shall be in Europe a year yet.
“Here in the hotel the other night when some interested men were discussing means to persuade the nations to join with the Czar and disarm, I advised them to seek something more . . . than disarmament by perishable paper. . . . Invite the great inventors to contrive something against which fleets and armies would be helpless, and thus make war thenceforth impossible. I did not suspect that you were already attending to that, and getting ready to introduce into the earth permanent peace and disarmament in a practical and mandatory way.
“I know you are a very busy man but will you steal time to drop me a line?”13
But the concept was too advanced and those in charge of American defense declared it an impossible dream. Even officials who had observed the midget naval maneuvers in the tank proclaimed it a mere “laboratory experiment” that could never be extended to actual battle conditions.
Tesla’s Madison Square Garden demonstration undoubtedly was the most prophetic event at the show, but other inventors also provided displays to bemuse the public. Marconi, without acknowledgment, used a Tesla oscillator to demonstrate how mines could be blown up by firing a “Cuban dynamite gun” with Marconi’s Wireless Telegraphy. And Edison demonstrated what would become his folly, the Magnetic Ore Separator.
Pupin, president of the New York Electrical Society, Edison, and Marconi, a powerful and brainy trio, were now joined by their faith in the financial possibilities of commercial wireless and by three ambitions as great as Tesla’s own. One other thing they shared was a growing resentment of Tesla’s success.
Tesla and Johnson followed the news of wartime maneuvers and naval encounters from day to day in hope of learning something of the mysterious mission of their friend Hobson. Nothing had been heard directly from him since his abrupt departure in early May.
In the first part of June Spanish Admiral Cervera, whose whereabouts had been the subject of wild speculation in the American press, slipped his vessels into Santiago harbor for coal. An American fleet of superior size moved in. And on the flagship New York, unknown to his family and friends at home, was Lieutenant Hobson. He had been thoroughly trained in gunnery and in the handling of explosives.
A desperate scheme, almost a suicide mission, was hatched to bottle up Cervera’s fleet. The idea was to sink a ship across the narrowest part of the harbor mouth. The old collier Merrimac was chosen and fitted with torpedoes to blow her own hull out. Lieutenant Hobson, at twenty-eight, was chosen to head the mission with a crew of six volunteers.
At 1:30 A.M. on a night of shadowed moonlight the lieutenant and his crew buckled on cork lifebelts over long underdrawers. Armed only with pistols, they moved the old coaling boat slowly toward the harbor mouth.
Hobson reports in a book he later wrote that he said to his gunner’s mate, “Charette, my lad, we’re going to make it tonight. There is no power on earth that can keep us out of the channel.”
At the moment of that ill-timed prediction, a Spanish searchlight picked them out, and the Spanish opened fire. A shell hit their pilot house. Hobson tried to touch off the torpedoes. Only two of them responded, the others having been defectively wired. In short order Spanish fire reduced the Merrimac to a sinking wreck—but in a position that failed to block the narrows.
Hobson and his men in their early-day frogmen suits, leaped into the sea and swam to a catamaran that had floated from their deck. But just as they were clambering aboard, a Spanish launch manned by armed soldiers pulled alongside.
Hobson records that as he stared up into their guns he thought, “Despicable cowards! Do they mean to shoot us down in cold blood? If they do, a brave nation will hear of this and call for an account.”
It came as something of an anticlimax, therefore, when Admiral Cervera, who was himself on the launch, took the Americans to a Spanish fortress where he treated them with great courtesy and soon exchanged them for Spanish prisoners.
When this feat of derring-do hit American newspapers, they carried little else for days. Hobson was lionized almost to the same degree that Charles Lindbergh would be much later, after flying the Atlantic. Tesla was filled with pride for his friend and delighted when Hobson was sent home for a round of public appearances across the country to rally greater enthusiasm for the war. Tesla and Johnson took the young officer to Delmonico’s for a promised celebration and referred to him frequently as “the hero.”
Later it greatly amused the inventor to read of how women swarmed over Hobson wherever he went. In Chicago the hero spotted two female cousins he knew and kissed them, which touched off the crowd, causing every woman to demand her due. In Denver he was mobbed again and, according to the press, had to kiss five hundred more. To cap this saccharine frenzy a candy manufacturer announced that he was bringing out a caramel to be called a “Hobson’s Kiss.”
Tesla was sharply reminded of reality by his bookkeeper, George Scherff, who pointed to the fact that money was running out and that his inventions were not being completed. There were potentially useful items that people needed, he said. For example, doctors and the ailing kept asking for the Tesla Pad—a heat-treating device he had worked on but not perfected for the market.
But where was he to find the time to develop such things?
He enjoyed a rare flurry of socializing with the Johnsons in the winter of 1898 and turned down the usual number of invitations.
On November 3, he wrote to “Dear Kate” saying he was glad she had accepted his invitation for Saturday and adding: “Though a day of plebeians—drummers, grocerymen, Jews,* and other social trilobites, the prospect is nevertheless delightful.”14
In his invitation he added that a month’s income would go on their dinner, but even so, “do not fear it will be extravagant, for just now there is a temporary ebb in my private fortune . . . but soon I am to be a multi-millionaire and then good-bye to my friends on Lexington Avenue!”
Shortly afterward, invited to dinner by Katharine and asked to suggest a partner, he predictably named Marguerite. “If she would come,” he said, “I know I would.”
On December 3, Hobson arrived back in Manhattan, and another celebration was planned. Tesla wrote to Katharine saying, “I am glad. . . . Now we can have that dinner.” He suggested that “afterwards we could adjourn to the laboratory,” and mentioned a certain lady “who is crazy to see Hobson.” Describing her as a great celebrity yet keeping her identity as a surprise, he said he knew how “the Filipovs hunger after such people.” And he added, “I do not want to say anything disparaging of a lady, but for my taste she is simply—well, I think you will look more splendid than ever. I warn you she is apt to come in a scarlet décolleté but is a great artist and she must be permitted the latitude. . . . I will sandwich her between Luka and Hobson and wedge you between the hero and myself….”
• • •
Tesla’s claims for his first robot vehicles soon came under attack by fellow scientists. Thus “An Inquiry About Tesla’s Electrically Controlled Vessel,” by N. G. Worth, appeared in the Electrical Review, the author expressing his opinion that the method of control could be counter-influenced by the enemy.15
Tesla wrote to Johnson at Century urging him to make no response on his behalf:
“I know that you are a noble fellow and devoted friend and, noting your indignation at these uncalled-for attacks, I am afraid that you might give it expression. I beg you not to do it under any condition, as you would
offend me. Let my ‘friends’ do their worst, I like it better so. Let them spring on scientific societies worthless schemes, oppose a cause which is deserving, throw sand into the eyes of those who might see— they will reap their reward in time….
“I could easily refute the statements contained therein, merely by referring to expressions of such men as Lord Kelvin, Sir William Crookes, Lord Rayleigh, Roentgen and others, which bear testimony of the high esteem and appreciation of my labors by these men. But I disdain to do so, because the attack was too undignified to deserve notice….”16
Under the heading “Science and Sensationalism,” the journal Public Opinion also criticized his work and methods.17
Much later, in his brief autobiography, Tesla disclosed that he had begun active work on building remotely controlled devices in 1893, although the concept had occurred to him earlier. During the next two or three years he had built several mechanisms to be actuated from a distance and showed them to laboratory visitors, but the destruction of the laboratory by fire had interrupted these activities.
“In 1896,” he wrote, “… I designed a complete machine capable of a multitude of operations, but the consummation of my labors was delayed until 1897. . . . When first shown in the beginning of 1898, it created a sensation such as no other invention of mine has ever produced.”
His basic patent was obtained in November, only after the examiner in chief had come to New York and witnessed the performance of his vessel, for he had claimed it seemed unbelievable.
“I remember that when later I called on an official in Washington, with a view of offering the invention to the Government,” Tesla wrote, “he burst out in laughter upon my telling him what I had accomplished. Nobody thought then that there was the faintest prospect of perfecting such a device.”18
These first robots, he wrote in 1919, he had originally considered crude steps in the evolution of the art of teleautomatics. As he had conceived it: “The next logical improvement was its application to automatic mechanisms beyond the limits of vision and at a great distance from the center of control, and I have ever since advocated their employment as instruments of warfare in preference to guns…. In an imperfect manner it is practicable, with the existing wireless plants, to launch an aeroplane, have it follow a certain approximate course, and perform some operation at a distance of many hundreds of miles.”19
He recalled that as a student in college he had conceived of a flying machine quite unlike the present ones.
“The underlying principle was sound but could not be carried into practice,” he wrote, “for want of a prime-mover of sufficiently great activity. In recent years I have successfully solved this problem and am now planning aerial machines devoid of sustaining planes, ailerons, propellers, and other external attachments, which will be capable of immense speeds and are very likely to furnish powerful arguments for peace in the near future.”20
The futuristic aircraft that he conceived of and illustrated was to be guided either mechanically or by wireless energy.
“By installing proper plants it will be practicable to project a missile of this kind into the air and drop it almost on the very spot designated, which may be thousands of miles away. But we are not going to stop at this. Teleautomata will be ultimately produced, capable of acting as if possessed of their own intelligence, and their advent will create a revolution.”21
As early as 1898 he had also proposed to manufacturers the production of an automated car which, “left to itself, would perform a great variety of operations involving something akin to judgment. But my proposal was deemed chimerical at that time and nothing came from it.”
Conceiving of robots as having many uses besides war, he believed their greatest role would lie in peaceful service to humanity. He later described his 1890s activity to Professor B. F. Meissner of Purdue University: “I treated the whole field broadly, not limiting myself to mechanisms controlled from distance but to machines possessed of their own intelligence. Since that time I had advanced greatly in the evolution of the invention and think that the time is not distant when I shall show an automaton which, left to itself, will act as though possessed of reason and without any wilful control from the outside. Whatever be the practical possibilities of such an achievement, it will mark the beginning of a new epoch in mechanics.”
He added: “I would call your attention to the fact that while my specification, above mentioned, shows the automatic mechanism as controlled through a simple tuned circuit, I have used individualized control; that is, one based on the co-operation of several circuits of different periods of vibration, a principle which I had already developed at that time and which was subsequently described in my patents 723,188 and 723,189*of March, 1903. The machine was in this form when I made demonstrations with it in 1898 before the Chief Examiner (of Patents) Seeley, prior to the grant of my basic patent on Method of and Apparatus for Controlling Mechanisms at a Distance.”22
It was this that Swezey alluded to in his comments on “coordinated tuning devices responsive only to a combination of several radio waves of completely different frequencies.”
Inventors of modern computer technology in the last half of the twentieth century repeatedly have been surprised, when seeking patents, to encounter Tesla’s basic ones, already on file. Leland Anderson, for example, states that Tesla’s priority was first pointed out to him years ago by a patent attorney for a major computer firm with which he was associated in a research and development capacity. Anderson writes, “I am puzzled by the reluctance of some in the computer technology field to acknowledge Tesla’s priority in this regard in contrast to the adulation given to Messrs. Brattain, Bardeen, and Shockley for the invention of the transistor which made electronic computers a practical reality.”23
Their patents and the Tesla patents were both directed at applications in the communications field, he notes. Both patents are combined to produce the physical embodiment of a solid-state AND gate. Computer systems contain thousands of logic decision elements called ANDs and ORs. All operations performed by a computer are achieved through a system design utilizing these logic elements.
“Tesla’s 1903 patents 723,188 and 725,605,” says Anderson, “contain the basic principles of the logical AND circuit element. The simultaneous occurrence of two or more prescribed signals at the input to the device element produced an output from the device element.”
Although Tesla’s patents used AC signals and today’s computers use pulsed DC, the basic principle of a prescribed combination of signals producing an output by virtue of their conjoint action is described.
“Thus,” declares Anderson, “the subject early Tesla patents, which were designed to achieve interference protection from outside influences in the command of radio-controlled weapons, have proved to be an obstacle for anyone attempting to obtain a basic logical AND circuit element patent in this era of modern computer technology.”24
The Nobel Prize was awarded to John Bardeen, Walter H. Brattain, and William B. Shockley in 1956 for their work on developing the transistor, which replaced electronic tubes in many applications. Yet Tesla has only recently been so much as recognized for having pioneered the field.
One of the earliest acknowledgments of the debt owed Tesla in the new technology of remotely piloted vehicles (now universally known in the military as RPVs) appeared in a 1944 Times editorial:
“The general principle of controlling apparatus by radio goes back to the early days of what was once called ‘wireless.’ At the first electrical exposition held in this city over forty years ago Nikola Tesla maneuvered and blew up a model submarine in a tank by radio. There soon followed a score of German, American, English, and French inventors who showed how engine-driven vehicles, torpedoes and ships could be steered by radio waves with never a man on board….”25
Yet Tesla, having done so much to introduce the era of automation, felt that he had no time just then to pursue a line of development for which the world was still manifestly unrea
dy. His sights were fixed on bigger game—if that were possible. His laboratory in New York was no longer a safe place for his experiments; or, rather, his experiments had become too dangerous for a crowded city.
To Leonard Curtis, a patent attorney who had loyally protected his and Westinghouse’s rights during the War of the Currents, he wrote: “My coils are producing 4,000,000 volts—sparks jumping from walls to ceilings are a fire hazard. This is a secret test. I must have electrical power, water and my own laboratory. I will need a good carpenter who will follow instructions. I am being financed for this by Astor, and also Crawford and Simpson. My work will be done late at night when the power load will be least.”26
Curtis, who was associated with the Colorado Springs Electric Company, immediately set to work on the inventor’s problem. His solution would have far-reaching consequences.
13. HURLER OF LIGHTNING
Leonard Curtis’s reply from Colorado Springs could not have brought better news: “All things arranged, land will be free. You will live at the Alta Vista Hotel. I have interest in the City Power Plant so electricity is free to you.”
Tesla, overjoyed, threw himself into detailed preparations, especially the ordering of machinery that would have to be shipped. Meanwhile, Scherff and his shop assistant, Kolman Czito, were called upon to labor almost around the clock for a major move of laboratory equipment.
Of paramount importance was the reorganizing of his finances. The $40,000 paid to him by Adams for stock in the Nikola Tesla Company had long since been spent. Ten thousand dollars given to him by John Hays Hammond, Sr., the famous mining engineer, had gone to underwrite his wireless and robot work for the Electrical Exhibition. But the drygoods firm of Simpson and Crawford lent another $10,000 to him for ongoing research, and Col. John Jacob Astor, owner of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, contributed $30,000 toward the building of the new research station in Colorado Springs.1