These strangely ephemeral objects, unlike regular lightning, move slowly, almost parallel to the ground. They have been known to appear in airplanes in flight, move eerily along the floor of the cabin, and after no more than five seconds vanish. In modern plasma physics the most commonly held theory is that the fireball receives its energy from its surroundings by a naturally created electromagnetic field, and that the diameter of the plasma sphere depends upon the frequency of the external field, so that a resonance occurs. But the returns are still not in, and scientists continue to differ (see chapter 30).
Nevertheless, Tesla’s speculations do accord with some hypotheses. He thought, for example, that the initial energy was insufficient to maintain the fireball and that there must be another source, which he believed came from other lightning passing through the fireball’s nucleus. For him fireballs were merely a fascinating nuisance, yet he took the time to follow this apparently useless research wherever it might lead—and in the process claimed that he had learned how to create the phenomenon at will.15 Modern scientists, using the most powerful nuclear accelerators, have tried and failed to replicate his achievement (although the fascinating, and potentially valuable, nuisance still occurs unasked).
Another of Tesla’s claimed discoveries at Colorado Springs came late one night as he was working at his powerful and sensitive radio receiver. Only elderly Mr. Dozier, the carpenter, remained on duty. Suddenly the inventor became aware of strange rhythmic sounds on the receiver. He could think of no possible explanation for such a regular pattern, unless it were an effort being made to communicate with Earth by living creatures on another planet. Venus or Mars he supposed to be the more likely sources. No one at that time had ever heard of such phenomena as regular sounds from space.16
Thrilled and awestruck, he could only sit and listen. Soon he became obsessed with the idea of returning the signal: There must be a way.
The probable explanation of what he had heard was radio waves from the stars. Not until the 1920s were such counting codes again picked up by astronomers (and given official credence); and in the thirties they began to be transmitted as coded numbers into a digital recorder. Nowadays “listening” to the stars is commonplace.
Although Tesla could not doubt the testimony of his ears, he could nevertheless anticipate the ridicule of his fellow scientists when they heard the news. He was therefore slow to reveal his discovery. And the reaction when it came was all that he might have guessed.
Professor Holden, the former director of the University of California’s Lick Observatory, was the quickest to criticize: “Mr. Nikola Tesla has announced that he is confident that certain disturbances of his apparatus are electrical signals received from a source beyond the earth,” he told a reporter. “They do not come from the sun, he says; hence they must be of planetary origin, he thinks; probably from Mars, he guesses. It is the rule of a sound philosophizing to examine all probable causes for an unexplained phenomenon before invoking improbable ones. Every experimenter will say that it is almost certain that Mr. Tesla has made an error, and the disturbances in question come from currents in our air or in the earth. How can anyone possibly know that unexplained currents do not come from the sun? The physics of the sun is all but unknown as yet. At any rate, why call the currents ‘planetary’ if one is not quite certain? Why fasten the disturbances of Mr. Tesla’s instrument on Mars? Are there no comets that will serve the purpose? May not the instruments have been disturbed by the Great Bear of the Milky Way or the Zodiacal light? There is always a possibility that great discoveries in Mars and elsewhere are at hand. The triumph of the scientists of the past century are still striking proof, but there is always a strong probability that new phenomena are explicable by old laws. Until Mr. Tesla has shown his apparatus to other experimenters and convinced them as well as himself, it may safely be taken for granted that his signals do not come from Mars.”17
But the last thing Tesla intended to do just then was to disclose his apparatus to other scientists. His work in Colorado was finished. The New Year, 1900, arrived and went almost unnoticed by the inventor, who was in the midst of preparations to dismantle his equipment and depart.
Tesla, at least, seemed perfectly satisfied with what he had achieved in Colorado. He had made lightning dance at his command; he had used the whole Earth as a piece of laboratory equipment; and he had received messages from the stars. Now he was in a hurry to get on with the future.
15. MAGNIFICENT AND DOOMED
When he reached New York in mid-January 1900, reporters and magazine editors pounced upon him.
Predictably, the eastern scientific fraternity had echoed Professor Holden in denouncing Tesla’s claim to have received a message of extraterrestrial origin—at least, without telling them how he did it. But Tesla’s offense was greater than that. The signals, as he had written to Julian Hawthorne of the Philadelphia North American just before leaving Colorado, indicated to him that “intelligent beings on a neighboring planet” must be scientifically more advanced than Earthlings, a suggestion not easily swallowed by doctors of philosophy.
Tesla burned to reply to these “messages” from outer space. Certain that he was at the forefront of a broad, revolutionary technology, he immediately began filing new patents for radio and the transmission of energy, based on his Colorado experiments.
As a first step, he envisioned building a world radio center offering all the services enjoyed today—interconnected radio-telephone networks, synchronized time signals, stock-market bulletins, pocket receivers, private communications, radio news service. He referred to it as a world system of intelligence transmission.
The first patent that he filed on his return (No. 685,012) was a means for increasing the intensity of electrical oscillations, the medium for doing so being liquefied air to cool the coil and thus reduce its electrical resistance. He also received two other patents in 1900 and 1901 related to buried power transmission lines and the method of insulating them by freezing a surrounding dielectric medium such as water. One, a reissued patent (No. 11,865), referred to a “gaseous” cooling agent—apparently a key word that had been inadvertently omitted from his original patent No. 655,838. He was therefore one of the originators of cryogenic engineering.
Many years later, in the 1970s, developmental projects were initiated in America, Russia, and Europe for methods of using superconductors to transmit underground bulk electrical power, employing various cryogenic enclosures. Brookhaven National Laboratory at Upton, New York, has been at the forefront of this international effort. Brookhaven’s method resembles Tesla’s except that the object of the modern work has been to cool the conductor to a few degrees above absolute zero. The similarity moves closer, however, when considering Tesla’s 1901 patent No. 685,012, in which he describes the supercooling of conductors to appreciably lower their resistance, thereby minimizing their dissipation when conducting current. This is yet another instance in which his pioneer work has gone unacknowledged—possibly because it might open a door for the U.S. Patent Office to invalidate later claims.
The race to be first with long-range radio transmission appeared to favor Marconi, of whose success the world press had made much during Tesla’s absence. Tesla scorned the paltry efforts being made in America, such as signaling the results of yacht races on Long Island Sound. He announced a plan to operate his robotic boat by radio control at the Paris Exposition—from his office in Manhattan!
Meanwhile, as George Scherff reminded him, there was a problem of some urgency with respect to his bank account. He had run through $100,000 during eight months in Colorado.
To whom should he turn? Colonel JJA? George Westinghouse? Thomas Fortune Ryan? J. Pierpont Morgan? C. Jordan Mott? Although he was being ridiculed in the press, his reputation among capitalists still remained good. One thing that impressed such hard-headed gentlemen was the record of the Westinghouse Company in maintaining its monopoly of alternating-current patents despite the efforts of competing industrialis
ts to batter down the walls.
In a search for new developmental capital he again began frequenting the Players’ Club in Gramercy Park, the Palm Room of the Waldorf-Astoria, and, of course, Delmonico’s. To the same purpose he suggested to a willing Robert Johnson that an article for Century magazine be written by Tesla on energy sources and the technology of the future. He slaved over this article, which was eventually entitled “The Problem of Increasing Human Energy,” and which appeared in June 1900. Like most of Tesla’s writing it turned out to be a lengthy philosophical treatise rather than the brisk report on his Colorado research which Johnson had desired. Nevertheless, it created a sensation.
Part of this was due to the accompanying photographs—some of the many taken in Colorado—in which the inventor resorted to a mild form of trickery involving not just time exposures but double exposures. They depicted him quietly seated on a wooden chair, absorbed in his notes, while enough lightning to kill a roomful of people slashed and snapped around his head. (Even though local photographers were available in Colorado, he had imported a Mr. Alley, a favorite from Manhattan, to record the experiments made with his magnifying transmitter.) The time exposures ran one or two hours in length, which of course produced much denser and more dramatic lightning effects than shots of single discharges would have done. And although the occupant of the chair did not simultaneously sit there—for he would certainly have been electrocuted—Tesla knew that the human focus was needed to heighten the dramatic effect.
It had been a painful modeling job, for the experiments and hence the photographs had to be made at night when the weather was usually below zero. He explained in his diary how it was done: “Of course, the discharge was not playing when the experimenter was photographed, as might be imagined! The streamers were first impressed upon the plate in dark or feeble light, then the experimenter placed himself on the chair and an exposure to arc light was made and, finally, to bring out the features and other detail, a small flash powder was set off.”1 Thus the structure of the empty chair in later exposures did not show through Tesla’s body as if in some weird kind of X-ray photo.
The results were as felicitous as even he might have wished for. Everyone who saw these photographs was astounded. When he sent a print to Professor A. Slaby, who was beginning to be known as the Father of German Radio, the latter replied that Tesla must have discovered something unique; he himself had never seen anything like it.
The inventor’s Colorado diary discloses that one reason for his constant experimenting with photographs there was his disappointment with the pictorial results of his ball-lightning research. Of this he wrote: “A very important matter is to use better means of photographing the streamers exhibiting these phenomena. Much more sensitive plates ought to be prepared and experimented with. The coloring of the films might also be helpful in leading up to some valuable observations.”2
He also was thinking further of “the value of powerfully excited vacuum tubes for the purpose of photography. Ultimately, by perfecting the apparatus and selecting properly the gas in the tube, we must make the photographer independent of sunlight and enable him to repeat his operations under exactly the same conditions . . . such tubes will enable him to regulate the conditions and adjust the light effects at will.”3
The Century article with its photographs and predictions thrust him even further into the center of controversy. But though his scientific colleagues sniped, the press remained generally loyal.
“The press at large has of late been having a good deal of fun with Nikola Tesla and his predictions of what is to be done in the future by means of electricity,” wrote the Pittsburgh Dispatch (February 23, 1901) from Westinghouse country. “Some of his sanguine conceptions, including the transmission of signals to Mars, have evoked the opinion that it would be better for Mr. Tesla to predict less and do more in the line of performance.
“Nevertheless a recent decision in the U.S. Circuit Court for the Southern District of Ohio fully recalls the fact that Tesla is by no means without his record of complete and thorough achievement….
“Mr. Tesla has a wealth of enthusiasm and fertility of imagination with regard to the future that naturally evokes witticisms. But anyone is ignorant of the recent history of electricity who does not know that Tesla stands in the front rank of electrical inventors, by what he has actually accomplished.”
From the electrical-engineering editor Thomas Commerford Martin came eloquent support: “Mr. Tesla has been held a visionary, deceived by the flash of casual shooting stars; but the growing conviction of his professional brethren is that because he saw farther, he saw first the low lights flickering on tangible new continents of science. . . .”
Publicity—whether good or bad—was precisely what Tesla wanted, for he still desperately needed to attract the attention of potential backers. One of the first (though not necessarily most important) to step forward was Stanford White, the celebrated architect. The two men met one evening at the Players’ Club, which White had just remodeled, and, feeling an immediate rapport, soon fell into an intense conversation. White had read and been excited by Tesla’s vision of the future as painted for Century magazine. When the inventor began to describe the physical plant that he envisioned for his world broadcasting system, the architect became an eager partner in the grand plan.
Nor was this grand plan a mere fantasy. Even while Tesla had still been in Colorado, oscillators and other equipment were being assembled in his New York shop under the close direction of Scherff and an engineering assistant. Security was tight as usual. Immediately upon his return he got in touch with George Westinghouse, knowing that his engineers could supply the custom-built machinery he would need.
His Colorado experiments, he wrote Westinghouse, absolutely demonstrated the practicability of establishing telegraphic communication to any point on the globe “by the help of the machinery I have perfected.” He would need an engine and a direct-current dynamo of at least 300 horsepower on either side of the Atlantic, and these would be expensive.
“You will know of course,” he confided, “that I contemplate the establishment of such a communication merely as the first step to further and more important work, namely that of transmitting power. But as the latter will be an undertaking on a much larger and more expensive scale, I am compelled to first demonstrate such feature to get the confidence of capital….”4 He also requested that Westinghouse lend him $6,000, to be guaranteed by his English royalties.
The industrialist invited Tesla to ride with him on the train from New York to Pittsburgh in his private “palace car” to talk over the whole matter. On the trip Tesla explained that his plant would surpass in performance the Atlantic cable both in speed and in the ability to send many simultaneous messages. He proposed that Westinghouse retain ownership of any machinery he furnished and interest himself to a certain extent in the venture. But Westinghouse had learned his lesson in the hard world of finance. He suggested that Tesla explore financing among capitalists who were looking for opportunities to invest excess wealth.
One such prospect to whom Tesla then turned was Henry O. Havemeyer, otherwise known as the Sultan of Sugar because of his impressive monopoly of refineries. Tesla, lavish in gift-giving whether he had money or not, sent a messenger all the way to Newport, Rhode Island, with an expensive cabochon sapphire ring as a wedding present for the Sultan. Alas, his homage was not at once rewarded.
Others to whom he confided his plans for the world system included Astor and Ryan. Although the full extent of Colonel Astor’s involvement in the project is unknown, Tesla must have had some success, for when the former’s estate was appraised in 1913, it revealed five hundred shares of stock in the Nikola Tesla Company.
The spring of 1900 passed with Tesla in an agony of frustration. He and Robert read with dismay the newspaper advertisement of F. P. Warden & Company, Bankers: “MONEY . . . Marconi certificates will net you from 100 to 1,000% better results than any labor of yours can produce.” T
he stock of the British Marconi Company had first been offered at $3.00; already it was selling at $22.
Tesla, believing that Marconi had infringed his patents, wanted to sue him. His mood was further inflamed by the final lines of the advertisement: “The Marconi system is endorsed by such men as Andrew Carnegie and Thomas A. Edison, and by the press of the entire world. Edison, Marconi, and Pupin are the Consulting Engineers of the American Company.”
There it was—the three of them in cahoots to cheat him of his invention of radio. Tesla wrote to Robert pretending to feel optimism about the damages he might recover in such a suit, saying, “I am delighted to learn from the enclosed advertisement that Andrew Carnegie has such responsibilities. He is a good man to call on for damages. My stocks are on the rise!”5
Of all the people who had read Tesla’s article in Century magazine and been impressed by the boldness of his vision, one fitted the inventor’s requirements perfectly: J. Pierpont Morgan.
The two met for a talk about the world system. Tesla instinctively was less forthcoming than he had been with Westinghouse: no need to distract the financier with too much technical information. Instead, he dilated on themes of money and power. He described to Morgan the plan for all wavelength channels to be broadcast from a single station. Thus the financier would have a complete monopoly of radio broadcasting. Where others in the field were thinking only in limited terms of point-to-point transmissions, as in ship-to-shore and transoceanic wireless, Tesla was talking about broadcasting to the entire world. Morgan was interested.
Tesla followed up their meeting with a letter on November 26, 1900, describing exactly what he was offering—up to a point. He had already made transmissions over a range of nearly seven hundred miles, he said, and was able to construct plants for telegraphic communication across the Atlantic and, if need be, the Pacific Ocean. He could operate selectively without mutual interference a great number of instruments and could guarantee absolute privacy of messages. He had all the necessary patents, he added, and was free to enter into agreements.