Tesla: Man Out of Time
Once established in Colorado, Tesla intended to devote all his energies toward an immediate dual goal: to develop a worldwide wireless system well ahead of the ambitious Marconi, and to learn how to send energy abundantly and cheaply without wires to the ends of the Earth. No body of knowledge, except that which he had already developed, existed to guide him.
Yet there remained a little time to socialize with his friends, a little time to rekindle jealousy in the adoring Katharine. Marguerite was the pawn in this game, if it was a game.
“Agnes will come by all means,” he wrote to Kate, as if she were his social secretary. “And—wouldn’t you invite Miss Merington? She is such a wonderfully clever woman. . . . Really I would like to have her with us….”2
On the twenty-fifth of March he begged off a date with Luka, “having already accepted an important engagement with an English millionaire.” But he described his joy at having at last moved into the fashionable Waldorf-Astoria Hotel after ten years at the “abominable place” that appeared to pride itself more on the quality of being fireproof than on the honor of having a distinguished inventor in residence.3
Colonel Astor, at least, felt honored to have him as a guest. And Tesla was instantly at home in his smart new surroundings, where all the important men of Wall Street gathered in the afternoon.
In the flurry before departure he found time to initiate an effort to “get permission from the French government for transmitting energy and establishing communication with France without wires, in view of the coming Exposition. . . .” His reason for this was to be disclosed on his arrival in Colorado.
Tesla departed New York on May 11, 1899, traveling by train and making a stopover in Chicago to demonstrate again his radio-controlled boat. George Scherff was left behind to run the New York laboratory, with precise and lengthy instructions for more equipment to be built, bought, and shipped. Of course Tesla left him with neither adequate money nor a power of attorney to cover the day-to-day expenses. As the inventor saw the matter, when he considered it at all, his staff would soon share in his own wealth and fame.
Arriving at Colorado Springs on May 18, he was taken directly to the Alta Vista Hotel. After examining the creaky elevator, he chose room No. 207 (divisible by three and only one flight up), and left instructions for the maid to deliver eighteen clean towels daily. He said he preferred to do his own dusting.
The land made available to him was about a mile east of Colorado Springs, in the shadow of Pike’s Peak. Its main use was grazing pasture for the town’s dairy herd. His closest neighbor was to be the Colorado School for the Deaf and Blind, a choice reflecting some discretion. The elevation was 6,000 feet above sea level; the air clear, dry and crackling with static electricity.
To reporters who interviewed him on his arrival, he disclosed that he planned to send a wireless message from Pike’s Peak to Paris in time for the Paris Exposition of 1900. The journalists asked whether he meant to send messages from peak to peak. He replied haughtily that he had not come to Colorado to engage in stunts.
He had filed in the preceding decade a whole series of patents related to the wireless transmission of power and messages, beginning with the most basic equipment for the production of high frequencies and high voltages.* He had already built a coil that produced 4 million volts, and now he wanted to go much higher in order to power a device capable of making transmissions on a global scale. The tests were to be made in great secrecy—or, at any rate, as much secrecy as was possible in a small community titillated by the arrival of a famous inventor with mountains of mysterious equipment.
Tesla was directed to a local carpenter named Joseph Dozier, to whom he outlined plans for the experimental station, and the construction began immediately. He then sent the first of an almost continuous stream of wires and letters to Scherff in New York asking that Fritz Lowenstein, his young engineering assistant, be sent west: “He must be here to oversee construction and locate equipment.”
During the building of the experiment station the inventor commuted to and from the site each day by buckboard, his long legs sprawled over the sides—not so much from lack of space as in readiness to abandon ship. Tesla trusted horses no more than he did electric elevators. (In time, the horses of Colorado Springs would have equal reason not to trust Tesla, for when he got his powerful magnifying transmitter operating, it would electrify the Earth in all directions, making runaways of the gentlest nags.)
A fence surrounded the weird structure that began to rise from the prairie floor, and this barrier bristled with warnings: “KEEP OUT— GREAT DANGER.” When the station was completed an even more ominous quotation from Dante’s Inferno was posted at the door: “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.” It did not take long for the word to spread that the apparatus being built by Mr. Tesla was capable of killing a hundred persons in a single flash of lightning.
The experiment station, which had started out looking like a large square barn, ended up resembling a ship with a towering mast. Extruding from an open section of the roof was a tower that reached eighty feet above the ground. From this metal mast soared another 122 feet into the air. Poised upon its tip was a copper ball three feet in diameter.
Machinery was moved in and assembled as quickly as it arrived on the construction scene. Coils or high-frequency transformers in many shapes and sizes were built. From New York came the specially built two-turn primary circuit that he had had in his laboratory on Houston Street. With its associated circuit interrupters, it would drive his magnifying transmitter.
This transmitter, which he developed in Colorado, he would later claim as his greatest invention. Indeed, it is the Tesla invention that continues to fascinate many of his modern followers the most. Whenever and wherever in recent years phenomena have been detected, resulting from powerful radio signals pulsed at very low frequencies, journalists speak knowingly of the Tesla effect. The Russians, it has been claimed, are using a giant Tesla magnifying transmitter to modify the world’s weather, creating extremes of ice and drought. It is said to cause periodic disruption of radio communications in Canada and the United States with attendant brain-wave interference and vague symptoms of physical distress, not to mention sonic booms and almost anything else not otherwise explicable. Indeed, it was this same fabulous invention that Robert Golka in recent years tried to replicate, with considerable success, at Wendover, Utah, for the study of ball lightning, in conjunction with research in nuclear fusion.
But what exactly was it? Tesla was asked to describe it for The Electrical Experimenter in a way that young readers could understand. His explanation (which must have taxed his readers) is tantalizingly vague. “Well, then, in the first place,” he wrote, “it is a resonant transformer with a secondary in which the parts, charged to a high potential, are 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 so that no leak can occur even if the conductor is bare. It is suitable for any frequency, from a few to many thousands of cycles per second, and can be used in the production of currents of tremendous volume and moderate pressure, or of smaller amperage and immense electro-motive force. The maximum electric tension is merely dependent on the curvature of the surfaces on which the charged elements are situated and the area of the latter.”4
One hundred million volts, he declared, were perfectly practicable. Such a circuit could be excited with impulses of any kind, even of low frequency, and would yield sinusoidal and continuous oscillations like those of an alternator.
“Taken in the narrowest significance of the term, however,” Tesla wrote, “it is a resonant transformer which, besides possessing these qualities, is accurately proportioned to fit the globe and its electrical constants and properties, by virtue of which design it becomes highly efficient and effective in the wireless transmission of energy. Distance is then absolutely eliminated, there being no diminution in the
intensity of the transmitted impulses. It is even possible to make the actions increase with the distance from the plant according to an exact mathematical law.”5
Once this powerful equipment was built and the inventor began testing he was able to emulate the electrical fireworks of even the wildest mountain storms. When the transmitter was operating, lightning arresters in a twelve-mile radius from his station were bridged with continuous fiery arcs, stronger and more persistent than those produced by natural lightning.
For the first time he kept a careful daily diary in which he recorded every aspect of his research. And because visual effects were useful as well as thrilling, he devoted many hours to photographic experiments.
The equipment Tesla was perfecting would, he hoped, one day be adaptable for commercial use. But first, thousands of observations and delicate adjustments had to be made. He no longer trusted his legendary memory to store such a volume of information. His daily notes referred constantly to experiments that had failed to turn out as expected, and he would ask himself why. This process was at sharp variance with the one he claimed to have used throughout his earlier life. Now middle-aged, he may have felt his memory waning slightly. Certainly he felt driven by the pressures of his self-imposed deadline.
In his Colorado journal his lifelong fascination with visual phenomena is underscored. The flashing lights that he had always experienced on the screen of his mind were dramatically externalized, and his descriptions, among the mass of mathematical formulas, are detailed, loving, almost erotic in their lingering portrayal of the colors and grandeur of his Colorado electrical storms.6
Nights when experiments were being made with the magnifying transmitter the prairie sky exploded with sound and color. Even the earth seemed alive and the crash of thunder from the spark gap could be heard for miles. Butterflies were sucked into the vortex of the transmitter coil, which was fifty-two feet in diameter. Awed spectators at some distance from the station told of seeing tiny sparks flying between grains of sand and between their heels and the ground when they walked. They said that at three hundred feet away, arcs an inch long could be drawn from grounded metal objects.7 Horses grazing or trotting peacefully half a mile away would suddenly go berserk, feeling shocks through their metal shoes.
The inventor and his assistants, working nightly amidst thunder and lightning, stuffed cotton in their ears and wore thick cork or rubber soles on their shoes. Even so, Tesla described a frequent bursting sensation in the ears, something almost as positive as touch, and feared damage to their eardrums. Often the pain and buzzing they felt continued for hours after a test.
Hertz’s research of 1888, which confirmed Maxwell’s dynamic theory of the electromagnetic field, had convinced scientists that electromagnetic waves propagated in straight lines, like light waves. Therefore it was generally believed that radio transmission would be limited by the curvature of the Earth. Tesla, as we know, believed not only that the globe was a good conductor but that the “upper strata of the air are conducting” and “that air strata at very moderate altitudes, which are easily accessible, offer, to all experimental evidence, a perfect conducting path.”
Until recent years this theory of propagation of radio waves was ignored. In the 1950s, however, a number of scientists working on the propagation of very low (3 to 30 kHz) and extremely low (1 to 3000 Hz) electromagnetic waves confirmed Tesla’s principle insofar as they apply to low-frequency transmissions. As the world authority on electromagnetic wave theory, Dr. James R. Wait, has observed, Tesla’s experiments at Colorado Springs, “predate all other electromagnetic research in Colorado . . . [and] his early experiments have an intriguing similarity with later developments in ELF (extra-low frequency) communications.”8 In fact, the Tesla magnifying transmitter was the first in the world powerful enough to create ELF resonance in the earth-ionosphere wave guide.
He was equally prescient in a prediction made at this time that the Earth resonates at 6, 18, and 30 Hz. He later tried to verify this with equipment he built on Long Island, but not until the 1960s would the experiments that he had wanted to carry out be made by others. It was then found that Tesla had been remarkably close to the mark: The Earth resonates at 8, 14, and 20 Hz.
Since his wireless power-transmission concept involved Earth resonance, the closer he could bring his operational frequency to that of the Earth the better it would be for producing very large movements of power in his system. But low frequencies presented a difficult problem insofar as the length of his secondary winding was concerned. For example, for his magnifying transmitter, which operated at 50 kHz, the winding length was approximately 0.9 miles. At 500 Hz, the length would have had to be ninety miles.
Progress reports and requests for shipments were scorching the telegraph wires between Tesla and Scherff. Regular freight was too slow for the inventor, so he ordered Scherff to use expensive railway express. The presence of Kolman Czito was commanded. Tesla wrote Scherff, advising him that Czito’s salary of $15 per week was to be paid to his wife. Soon he was able to report, “Czito has just arrived and I was glad to see a familiar face again. He looks a little too fat for the work I expect of him.”
There was also discussion by telegraph about the two hundred bottles Tesla had ordered and about the eight-foot balloons that, according to Scherff, Mr. Myers feared “would not rise at the altitude where you are if it should be windy.”9 The balloons were to hoist stationary antennae into the high thin air. Eventually they were designed by a professional at $50 each and were to be filled only two-thirds full (probably with hydrogen) to avoid breakage at a great height.
Scherff, knowing of his hunger for news, kept him advised of every detail of the progress at home and especially informed him of the movements of Colonel Astor, his major financial backer. He also reported on the activities of Marconi and on matters related to Tesla’s European patents.
Busy as both men were, they found time to exchange the slightest tidbits of gossip or instruction. “Mr. L.” said Scherff, “has been coming to the shop intoxicated and making many errors in his drilling.” And Tesla admonished, “Tell Mr. Uhlman not to write yours truly, but sincerely;” and signed his own letter to Scherff, “Yours sincerely.” He added an anxious P.S.: “Has my friend JJA [Astor] called?”
To Scherff he enlarged on the problems of security and promised him reflected glory: “Do everything you can intelligently keeping the interest of my efforts in view and be particularly careful to any press representatives. I do not want you to say anything except what I state here. I think when I come back I shall have something to say…. You must all be as part of myself, then I shall pull you with me to success.”10
On August 16 he wrote to “My dear Luka” to thank him for his poem, “Dewey at Manila,” which was “simply great,” and added: “I wish you could see the snowdrops and icebergs of Colorado Springs! I mean those that float in the air. They are sublime, next to your poems, Luka, the finest things on Earth! Kind regards to all from your Nikola.”
But a little later he again wrote Johnson on a less ecstatic note. “The wireless torpedo got on the scene just a trifle too late and Dewey slipped into the gallery of immortal conqueror—but it was a close shave! Luka, I see every day that we are both too far ahead of our time! My system of wireless telegraph is buried in the transactions of a scientific society, and your great poem on the heroes of Manila did not even as much as save Montojo, and just as my enemies maintain that I am merely writing ideas of others, so yours will say that it is because of your poem that Montojo was condemned!
“But we shall continue in our noble efforts, my friend, not minding the bad and foolish world, and sometime . . . I shall be explaining the principles of my intelligent machine (which will have done away with guns and battleships) to Archimedes, and you will read your great poems to Homer….”11
Scherff wrote: “The New York Herald continues to boom Marconi….”
For all his worries about the project, Tesla was finding Colorado’s
weather and atmosphere exhilarating. His vision and hearing, both of which were always acute, responded to an extraordinary degree to the clarity of the air. The climate was ideal for his observations. The sun’s rays were fiercely intense, the air dry, and the frequent lightning storms of almost inconceivable violence.12
In mid-June, with all of his equipment installed and preparations for various tests going forward, he arranged one of his receiving transformers with a view to determining experimentally the electrical potential of the globe. In accordance with a careful plan, he wished to study its periodic and casual fluctuations.
He placed a highly sensitive device controlling a recording instrument in his secondary circuit, and, with the primary connected to the ground, he placed the secondary on an elevated terminal. This produced a surprising result: The variations of electrical potential gave rise to electrical surgings in the primary; these generated secondary currents, which in turn affected the sensitive recorder in proportion to their intensity.
“The earth,” Tesla later reported in an article, “was found to be, literally, alive with electrical vibrations, and soon I was deeply absorbed in this interesting investigation. No better opportunity for such observations as I intended to make could be found anywhere.”13
The natural lightning discharges in this part of Colorado were very frequent and sometimes of great violence, on one occasion about twelve thousand discharges occurring within two hours, all within thirty miles of Tesla’s laboratory. Many of them he described as resembling gigantic trees of fire with their trunks upside down. And toward the end of June he noticed a curious phenomenon: His instruments were being affected more strongly by discharges occurring at a great distance than by those nearby. “This puzzled me very much,” he wrote. “What was the cause?”
One night while he was walking home across the prairie with the stars glowing coldly above, a possible explanation came to him. The same idea had occurred to him years before when he was preparing his lectures for the Franklin Institute and the National Electric Light Association, but then he had dismissed it as absurd and impossible. “I banished it again,” he wrote. “Nevertheless, my instinct was aroused and somehow I felt that I was nearing a great revelation.”14