14. BLACKOUT AT COLORADO SPRINGS
It was on the 3rd of July [1899]—the date I shall never forget—when I obtained the first decisive experimental evidence of a truth of overwhelming importance for the advancement of humanity.”1
At dusk of that day Tesla had watched a dense mass of strongly charged clouds gathering in the west. Soon the usual violent storm broke loose “which, after spending much of its fury in the mountains, was driven away at great speed over the plains.”
He noticed heavy and persistent lightning arcs forming almost at regular time intervals. Prepared with a recording instrument, he noted that its indications of electrical activity became fainter and fainter with the increasing distance of the storm, until they finally ceased altogether.
“I was watching in eager expectation,” he noted in the diary. “Surely enough, in a little while the indications again began, grew stronger and stronger, and, after passing through a maximum, gradually decreased and ceased once more. Many times, in regularly recurring intervals, the same actions were repeated until the storm which, as evident from simple computations, was moving with nearly constant speed, had retreated to a distance of about 300 kilometers. Nor did these strange actions stop then, but continued to manifest themselves with undiminished force.”2
Soon Tesla felt sure of the true nature of the “wonderful phenomenon. No doubt whatever remained: I was observing stationary waves.”3
He summed up the implications of this discovery thus: “Impossible as it seemed, this planet, despite its vast extent, behaved like a conductor of limited dimensions. The tremendous significance of this fact in the transmission of energy by my system had already become quite clear to me.
“Not only was it practicable to send telegraphic messages to any distance without wires, as I recognized long ago, but also to impress upon the entire globe the faint modulations of the human voice, far more still, to transmit power, in unlimited amounts to any terrestrial distance and almost without loss.”
Tesla visualized the Earth as an extremely large container holding an electrical fluid which resonance caused to be formed into a series of waves frozen in position. It was now certain, he wrote, that stationary waves could be produced in the Earth with an oscillator. “This is of immense importance.”4 He already knew that power transmission and the sending of intelligible messages to any point of the globe could be achieved in two radically different ways: either by a high ratio of transformation or by resonant rise. From the tests with electrical oscillators he now concluded—and so noted in his diary—that power transmission would be best served by the first method, but that where a small amount of energy was needed, as with radio, “the latter method is unquestionably the better and simpler of the two.”5
Later, leading scientists would erroneously criticize him for having made no distinction between the two functions. And, in keeping with his policy of secrecy, he did not trouble to enlighten them. But before Tesla would apply his theories practically, he first had to perfect his equipment. The test for which he next prepared called for millions of volts and tremendously heavy currents. No past experience could prepare him for what might happen, except in a general way. Bolts of his man-made lightning were bound to explode from the top of the two-hundred-foot mast and tower structure, but whether they would kill the experimenters and burn down the station was a risk they would have to take.
On the appointed night he dressed neatly and carefully in his black Prince Albert coat, donned gloves and a black derby hat, and arrived at the station to find courageous Czito already waiting. The latter would man the switch, giving Tesla the opportunity to observe effects from the doorway of the laboratory. It was important for him to watch both the giant coil in the center of the room and the copper ball on the mast.
When all was ready, he shouted, “Now!”
It had been prearranged that on the first test the switch was to be closed for only a single second. Accordingly, Czito slammed it in, watched the second hand on his pocket watch, and almost instantly pulled it out. The effects in that brief instant were rewarding: threads of fire had crowned the secondary coil and electricity snapped above.
For the main event Tesla wanted to watch from outside where he would have a clear view of the mast and ball.
“When I give you the signal,” he told Czito, “I want you to close the switch and leave it closed until I give you the signal to open it.”
In a moment he called, “Now! Close the switch!”
Czito followed orders and stood poised to pull it out again on command. The vibration of heavy current surging through the primary coil made the ground feel alive. There came a snap and a roar of lightning exploding above the station. A strange blue light filled the interior of the barnlike structure.
Czito looked up to see the coils a mass of surging, writhing snakes of flame. Electrical sparks filled the air and the sharp smell of ozone stung his nostrils. Lightning exploded again and again, building to a crescendo, and still Czito waited for the order to yank open the switch. Unable to see Tesla from his post, he began to wonder if the inventor had been struck by lightning and lay injured or dead outdoors. To continue seemed madness. In another moment he feared the walls and roof of the station would be aflame.
Tesla, however, was neither injured nor dead. He was frozen in a paroxysm of bliss. From where he stood he could see the lightning bolts shooting 135 feet from the top of the mast, and as he later learned, the thunder was being heard fifteen miles away in Cripple Creek. Again and again the lightning surged and crashed. Sublime! Had ever a human being felt more in tune with the gods? How long he stood there he had no idea. Later it turned out to have been only about one minute.
But suddenly, inexplicably, all was silent. What could have happened? He shouted to Czito: “Why did you do that? I did not tell you to open the switch. Close it again quickly!”
Czito, however, had not touched the switch. The power was dead. God in His mercy had sent him a reprieve.
Tesla rushed to a telephone and called the Colorado Springs Electric Company. He began remonstrating and pleading. They had cut off his power, he charged, and must restore it at once.
The reply from the powerhouse was curt and to the point.
“You’ve knocked our generator off the line, and she’s now on fire!”6
Tesla had overloaded the dynamo. The town of Colorado Springs was in darkness. As soon as the fire was extinguished a standby generator was put into service, but Tesla’s request to be served by it was brusquely denied.
Determined to continue his experiments, he offered to take a team of skilled workmen to the powerhouse and repair the main generator at his own expense. The offer was accepted. Within a week the repairs had been made, and Tesla was once more provided with electricity.
Thereafter his experiments progressed smoothly. Scherff continued to ship new apparatus to him through the icy Colorado fall and winter. To encourage the inventor he wrote, “Mr. Lowenstein has told Mr. Uhlman and me something of your wonderful work, and we know that, instead of a century, you are a thousand years ahead of others.”
Unfortunately, we have only an imperfect idea of some of the things Tesla attempted—and, for all we know, accomplished—during this period. His diary notes and later writings are often maddeningly unenlightening. For example he appears at one point to have been experimenting with the production of some kind of potent ray. Among the items rushed to him by express were four double-focus Roentgen tubes with thick platinum targets; and one journal entry reads: “Arrangements with single terminal tube for production of powerful rays. There being practically no limit to the power of an oscillator, it is now the problem to work out a tube so that it can stand any desired pressure….”7 The exact purpose or results of these experiments are unknown, but for further information, please see chapters 29 and 30.
The general thrust of his inquiries is, of course, clear. He tested highpower oscillators, wireless transmission of energy, the reception and transmission o
f messages, and the related effects of high-frequency electric fields.
Whatever their nature, his experiments seldom lacked glamor. Despite the warning signs he had put up on the fences and building, he had been disturbed by neighborhood boys peering in through a single window in the rear. Tesla had it nailed up. As a result of this, he came as near to being killed as ever before in his risk-taking life.
“It was a square building, in which there was a coil 52 feet in diameter, about nine feet high,” he later recalled. “When it was adjusted to resonance, the streamers [of electricity] passed from top to bottom and it was a most beautiful sight. You see, that was about fifteen hundred, perhaps two thousand square feet of streamer surface. To save money I had calculated the dimensions as closely as possible and the streamers came within six or seven inches from the sides of the building.”8
The main switch for handling the heavy currents had proved hard to pull. To make its operation easier, Tesla had installed a spring that would cause it to snap closed at the merest touch. This innovation was soon revealed as more convenient than safe.
On the day in question Tesla had sent Czito downtown and was experimenting alone. “I threw up the switch and went behind the coil to examine something. While I was there, the switch snapped in, when suddenly the whole room was filled with streamers, and I had no way of getting out. I tried to break through the window but in vain as I had no tools, and there was nothing else to do than to throw myself on my stomach and pass under.
“The primary carried 50,000 volts, and I had to crawl through a narrow place with the streamers going. The nitrous acid was so strong I could hardly breathe. These streamers rapidly oxidize nitrogen because of their enormous surface, which makes up for what they lack in intensity. When I came to the narrow space they closed on my back. I got away and barely managed to open the switch when the building began to burn. I grabbed a fire extinguisher and succeeded in smothering the fire….”9
He wrote a Dear Luka letter in which he metaphorically alluded to having tamed a wildcat and to being a mass of bleeding scratches.
“But in the scratches, Luka,” he wrote, “there lives a mind—a MIND! Well, I do not want to say much, but…
“I have made splendid progress in a number of lines but—how grieved I was to find that a number of my confreres of wireless telegraphy—of the syndicating kind—have been indulging in an awful lot of lying! Not a single of the contentions they have brought forth is true and my system, Luka, is used—pure and simple—without the slightest departure….”10
This referred to Marconi who, working with the English Post Office electrician, William Preece, had sent a wireless signal eight miles across the Bristol Channel two years earlier and who now, in 1899, had just repeated this performance across the English Channel.
Edison, reminded of his own unpromising experiments sixteen years before, now would begin to wonder if he might have the basis for a lawsuit against the young Italian. As it happened, he later would be awarded $60,000 from the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company for his patent. But in truth, perhaps because of his deafness, Edison had never really believed that the “radio craze” would last.
As for Tesla in Colorado, he confided to Robert Johnson that he was absolutely sure he would transmit a message to the Paris Exposition of 1900 without wire—“my greeting to the crazy French!” He closed on a familiar note: “I have not yet found time to carry out my promise of becoming a millionaire, but I shall do so at the earliest opportunity….”11
What exactly did Tesla achieve during his sojourn in Colorado Springs? Certainly all the mystery, the furious activity, the considerable expense, and the periodic theatrical effects failed to produce any single practical invention—if by practical one means a telephone or a better bobbin. Judged by “Edisonian” standards, however, one might as well protest that Einstein invented no electric dishwasher.
But did Tesla during this period, then, make significant contributions to new knowledge? The answer is yes. Scholars do not know and may never know the full range of his explorations, and there is the further problem that he often did not follow up on his intuitions, theories, and preliminary experiments to the point of verification. But he certainly made significant fundamental contributions as his scientific successors in several fields continue to discover. (See chapter 30.)
The eminent Yugoslav physicist Dr. Aleksandar Marinčić points out that today when we have proof of the Earth’s resonant modes and know that certain waves can propagate with so little attenuation that standing waves can be set up in the earth-ionosphere system, “we can judge how right Tesla was when he said that the mechanism of electromagnetic wave propagation in ‘his system’ was not the same as Hertz’s system with collimated radiation.” In his introduction to Tesla’s Colorado Springs Notes, Dr. Marinčić observes that the scientist could not, however, have known “that the phenomena he was talking about would only become pronounced at very low frequencies”; and he surmises that further study of Tesla’s writings “will reveal some interesting details of his ideas in this field.” The diary especially throws light on his part in the development of radio, and there is no longer a question of his mastery of wireless transmission as early as 1893.
In part, however, scholars can only try to reconstruct what Tesla thought he had accomplished.
With his giant oscillator he believed he had set the Earth in electrical resonance, pumping a stream of electrons (at that time, a flow of electricity) into it at a rate of 150,000 oscillations per second. The resulting pulsations had a wavelength of about 6,600 feet. Tesla concluded that they expanded outward over the bulge of the Earth, first in increasing circles and then in ever smaller ones yet with growing intensity, and converged at a point on the globe directly opposite from Colorado Springs—that is, slightly west of the French islands of Amsterdam and St. Paul in the Indian Ocean.
Here, according to his experimental results, a great electrical “south pole” was created with a stationary wave that rose and fell in unison with his transmissions from his “north pole” at Colorado Springs. Each time the wave receded, it was reenforced and sent back more powerfully than before to the antipode.12
Had the Earth been capable of perfect resonance, the results could have been catastrophic, but since it was not, the effect, he believed, was merely to make available at any point on the Earth energy that could be drawn off with a simple piece of equipment. This would include the elements of a radio tuning unit, a ground connection, and a metal rod the height of a house. Nothing more would be needed to absorb household electricity from the waves rushing back and forth between the electrical north and south poles. He did not, however, satisfactorily prove this claim, let alone apply it. Nor has anyone else.
With his magnifying transmitter he had produced effects at least in some respects greater than those of lightning. The highest potential he reached was about 12 million volts, which is insignificant compared to that of lightning, yet far higher than anyone else produced for many decades thereafter. What he considered more significant, however, was that he obtained in his antenna current strengths of 1100 amperes. The biggest wireless plants for many years thereafter used only 250 amperes.*
One day, working with such currents, he succeeded, to his surprise, in precipitating a dense fog. There was a mist outside, but when he turned on the current the cloud in the laboratory became so dense that he could not see his hand inches in front of his face. From this he concluded that he had made an important discovery. “I am positive in my conviction,” he said later, “that we can erect a plant of proper design in an arid region, work it according to certain observations and rules, and by its means draw from the ocean unlimited amounts of water for irrigation and power purposes. If I do not live to carry it out, somebody else will, but I feel sure that I am right.”
This idea too went into his legacy of unfinished business, and to this date no one has implemented it.
It has been reported by various writers that during his powe
r transmission experiments in Colorado, Tesla succeeded in lighting up a bank of two hundred 50-watt incandescent lamps wirelessly, at a distance of twenty-six miles from his station. In his own writings, however, no such claim was ever made, nor is there other evidence that he did so. What he actually wrote was that, by use of the magnifying transmitter, he had passed a current around the globe sufficient to light more than two hundred incandescent lamps.
“While I have not as yet actually effected a transmission of a considerable amount of energy, such as would be of industrial importance, to a great distance by this new method,” he would write on returning East, “I have operated several model plants under exactly the same conditions which will exist in a large plant of this kind, and the practicability of the system is thoroughly demonstrated.”13 He also wrote that he had observed the transmission of signals up to a distance of 600 miles.
That was as specific as he cared to be on the subject. Two other remarkable scientific achievements, however, were to result from his months of concentrated research in Colorado.
In a diary entry dated January 3, 1900, after describing the taking of some laboratory photographs, he mentioned watching the formation of sparks into streamers and “fireballs.”14 Ball lightning, or fireballs, is a phenomenon that has fascinated and baffled scientists from ancient times to the present. Fireballs are mentioned on Etrurian monuments, in the works of Aristotle and Lucretius, and in the writings of the modern atomic scientist Niels Bohr. Arago analyzed some twenty reports of fireballs in 1838. Some scientists have maintained that they are merely optical illusions, and so Tesla himself thought until they began to appear accidentally on his high-voltage equipment in Colorado.