He proposed that his name be identified with any corporation that might be formed, and estimated a cost of $100,000 for building a transatlantic plant and $250,000 for a Pacific plant, with six to eight months to build the former and one year for the latter.6
He made no mention to Morgan of the wireless transmission of power, not because he had given up the idea, but for the prudent reason that it would have made some of the banker’s existing investments obsolete. In any event Mr. Morgan could not be expected to be enthusiastic about the prospect of beaming electricity to penniless Zulus or Pygmies.
Morgan replied that he would agree to finance Tesla to the extent of $150,000. That, however, he warned, was as far as he would go. Although he advanced only a portion of this sum and although the country was in the throes of rampaging inflation, which caused Tesla’s bankroll to begin shrinking immediately, the latter was nevertheless ecstatic.
The relationship (no doubt a familiar one for Morgan) quickly became like that between courtier and king. Morgan was “a great and generous man.” Tesla’s work would “proclaim loudly your name to the world. You will soon see that not only am I capable of appreciating deeply the nobility of your action but also of making your primary phil-anthropic investment worth 100 times the sum you have put at my disposal in such a magnanimous, princely way….”7
Morgan, who had no interest in philanthropic business arrangements, responded by sending Tesla a draft of their agreement and asking him to sign over 51 percent interest in his various radio patents as security for the loan.8
Tesla sent Morgan a note in which he quoted an admiring comment from Professor Slaby, now a German privy councillor in addition to being a renowned scientist: “‘I am devoting myself since sometime to investigations in wireless telegraphy which you have first founded in such a clear and precise manner. . . . It will interest you, as father of this telegraphy, to know….’” This would indicate to Morgan the speciousness of claims being advanced by Marconi and others. Tesla also observed to his patron that neither Raphael nor Columbus could have succeeded without their wealthy sponsors.
With financing apparently assured, Tesla now set about acquiring land on which to build his transmitter. James D. Warden, manager and director of the Suffolk County Land Company, who owned two thousand acres on Long Island, made two hundred acres at Shoreham available to the inventor.9 The parcel, isolated and wooded, was adjacent to the farms of Jemima Randall and George Hegeman, and sixty-five miles from Brooklyn. The delighted Tesla christened the site Wardenclyffe and visualized it as becoming one of the first industrial parks. Two thousand persons would be employed at the world broadcasting station while their families resided in the surrounding development.
In March 1901, Tesla went to Pittsburgh to place orders with Westinghouse for generators and transformers. At the same time he had agents in England scouting the coastline for a suitable location on that side of the ocean. He was now far too busy to think of the Paris Exposition, which came and went without a world-shaking demonstration by the inventor.
W. D. Crow, an architectural associate of White’s, worked closely with Tesla on the design of a tower, which would have at its peak a giant doughnut-shaped copper electrode 100 feet in diameter. Later this was changed to resemble the cap of a gigantic mushroom. The octagonal tower, made entirely of wooden beams preassembled on the ground, would rise from a large brick building. But the total height of this fantastic structure posed a worrisome question because of wind resistance.10
On September 13 Tesla wrote Stanford White: “I have not been half as dumbfounded by the news of the shooting of the President [McKinley was shot on September 6] as I have by the estimates submitted by you, which, together with your kind letter of yesterday, I received last night.
“One thing is certain: we cannot build that tower as outlined.
“I cannot tell you how sorry I am, for my calculations show, that with such a structure I could reach across the Pacific….”11
For a time they considered falling back on an older design utilizing two, or perhaps three, much smaller towers, but eventually a single tower was built that soared to a height of 187 feet. Within it was a deep steel shaft that ran 120 feet down into the earth. This shaft, encased by a timber-lined well twelve feet square and encircled by a spiral stairway, was designed so that air pressure could raise it to touch the tower’s top platform. Wardenclyffe was a landmark as magnificent in concept and execution as America’s Golden Age of electrical engineering ever produced. Magnificent and doomed.
Because of the inventor’s impatience for delivery of his machinery, Westinghouse assigned a special person to expedite it. But the slowness with which Tesla was getting his money from Morgan forced the inventor to take on other work while awaiting the completion of Wardenclyffe. He moved his offices to New York’s Metropolitan Tower for increased professional visibility.
One of his schemes for raising money involved developing a special kind of induction motor built by Westinghouse, but there were continuing problems with it. He also installed Westinghouse equipment at the New York Edison plant. Meanwhile, George Scherff went exploring for business opportunities as far away as Mexico.
A great disappointment to Tesla was the government’s continuing failure to order his radio-controlled devices for coastal defense. When Congress passed a Coast Defense and Fortification Bill providing $7.5 million, he wrote Johnson that perhaps half a million would be “invested in Teleautomatons of your friend Nikola,” and that the rest undoubtedly would find its way into the “hands and pockets of the politicians.” Even this note of cynicism betrayed unwarranted optimism.
He soon had cause for bitterness. As the year 1901 drew to a close the world press blazoned the news that Marconi, on December 12, had signaled the letter “S” across the Atlantic Ocean from Cornwall to Newfoundland. What astonished Morgan and many others was that he had done it without anything like the great plant that Tesla was building.
They doubtless did not know that Marconi had utilized Tesla’s fundamental radio patent No. 645,576 filed in 1897 and issued March 20, 1900. Small wonder that Tesla began to refer bitterly to the “Borgia-Medici methods” by which he was being deprived of credit and fortune. But radio technology was then a mystery to most scientists, let alone the average investment banker.
Angry though he was, Tesla wasted no time on sour grapes but kept his eyes on the magnificent obsession rising from the farming land of Long Island. At first he nursed it along from a private home near the construction site. When Scherff moved out from Manhattan to expedite the work, Tesla returned to his stylish retreat at the Waldorf-Astoria to keep a finger on the pulse of Wall Street. Each day he and Scherff exchanged several wires and letters. And since Wardenclyffe was only an hour and a half from New York by train, at least once a week the inventor, elegantly attired down to his gray spats and accompanied by a Serbian manservant bearing an immense hamper of food, entrained for Long Island.
He worried constantly about security. Across the Sound residents of New Haven watched in fascination as the octagonal tower rose like a mushroom grower’s fantasy above the tree line of the North Shore. As for the townspeople in nearby Shoreham, they believed themselves to be on the brink of fame and industrial prosperity.
16. RIDICULED, CONDEMNED, COMBATTED
As the “wonder tower” lifted its airy spars ever higher, Tesla drove himself and a large staff without mercy. He sent money to Germany for radio engineer Fritz Lowenstein’s return, and the latter soon joined the Wardenclyffe team. Another well-known engineer, H. Otis Pond, who had worked for Edison, helped build the laboratory.
Years later Pond was to say that he disagreed with history’s assessment of the two inventors. Edison was “the greatest experimenter and researcher this country has produced—but I wouldn’t rate him as much of an originator,” he said. Tesla, however, he considered “the greatest inventive genius of all time.”1
Pond often accompanied Tesla on long walks. They were toge
ther on the day in December 1901 when Marconi sent the first transatlantic signal. “Looks like Marconi got the jump on you,” he said.
“Marconi is a good fellow,” replied Tesla. “Let him continue. He is using seventeen of my patents.”
Pond also recalled Tesla’s worrying about the instruments of war that he had been inventing. He had just launched his model wireless torpedoes in the Sound, encircled a ship with them, and landed them on the beach. “Otis,” he said, “sometimes I feel that I have not the right to do these things.”2
The inventor’s hectic schedule often gave the impression that he was three or four individuals. His New York laboratory had become a meeting place for scientists from all over the world. The nights were filled with social activities, arduous experimental work, the writing of patent applications, professional-journal articles, and letters to editors.
Seeing and being seen by the “right” people compelled him to function as both a day and night person; nights in a row passed during which he scarcely closed his eyes. An inevitable consequence of this frenetic schedule was that his friends became compartmentalized, occupying cells of his life that others were unaware of. Intimates such as the Johnsons, for example, had no idea of the prominence or even the identity of some of his newer confidants, which is not to say that they were ever displaced in his affections.
The daylight hours were important for beseeching his patron, Morgan, to advance funds more rapidly; for reminding him that inflation was threatening to sink the ship. He met with other potential investors. He pleaded with manufacturers to expedite machinery and advance credit. And while he remained in New York, he wrote daily letters of instruction to Scherff.
One welcome event in this hectic year of 1902 was a visit to the United States by England’s famous Lord Kelvin, who proclaimed himself in complete agreement with Tesla on two controversial issues: 1. that Mars was signaling America; and 2. that the conservation of nonrenewable resources was of critical importance to the world.3 Kelvin, like Tesla, was convinced that wind and solar power should be developed to help save coal, oil, and wood. Windmills, he declared, should be placed on roofs at the earliest opportunity, to run elevators, pump water, cool houses, and heat them in winter.4
Edison, however, differed with his distinguished contemporaries, putting off the evil day of shortages for “more than fifty thousand years.” The forests of South America alone, he argued, would provide fuel for that long.
When Kelvin expressed high praise for the “scientific prophets” of America, it was an obvious appreciation of Tesla and came as balm for the inventor’s spirit. After a banquet in Kelvin’s honor at Delmonico’s, the Englishman proclaimed that New York was the “most marvelously lighted city in the world,” and the only spot on Earth visible to Martians.
Perhaps inspired by the excellent wine, he declared, “Mars is signaling… to New York.” The announcement made headlines in all the next day’s papers. When Tesla had made a similar assertion, the air had been filled with controversy. Now that a man of Kelvin’s stature had said it, not a single demurrer was raised by the scientific community, even including Professor Holden. This sudden change of attitude inspired Tesla’s friend Hawthorne to write a misguided article that went farther than Kelvin’s sensational announcement. Obviously, he wrote, the men of Mars and of other older planets had been visiting the Earth and looking it over year after year, only to report back, “They’re not ready for us yet.” However, once Nikola Tesla had been born, things had changed. “Possibly they (the starry men) guide his development; who can tell?”5
This one line alone may indict the romantic Hawthorne for planting the seed later nourished by those who would adopt Tesla as their pet Venusian and in so doing harm his scientific reputation.
Thus, Hawthorne went on, it had been the inventor in the lonely observatory on the mountain-flank for whom the first message was gently rapped out. “Another might have heard it and neglected it…. But Tesla, whose brain, compared with those of most of his contemporary scientists, is as the dome of Saint Peter to pepper-pots, had been trained to the hour, and the signal was not in vain.”6
Although no one ever accused Nikola Tesla of lacking ego, we may imagine that he had to grit his teeth when he sat down to his writing desk to thank his friend for this embarrassing literary flight. “That was very nice,” he wrote, “all except the dome of St. Peter’s and the pepper-pots!”
Then he prudently changed the subject and went on to speak of his scientific concerns: “Half the time I am like a man condemned to death and half the time the happiest of mortals. All is still but hope. It may take centuries but I feel it in every fibre it is coming sure! One thing is settled in my Colorado experiments. We can construct a machine which will carry a signal to our nearest neighbors as certainly as across your muddy Skykoll [sic] river. We can also feel safe about receiving a message, provided there are other fellows in the Solar System knowing as well as we know how to operate this kind of apparatus….”7
In June Tesla moved his laboratory from Manhattan out to the new brick building at Wardenclyffe. Here, except for the exigencies flowing from the project itself, the demands on his time would be fewer. Only workers were admitted to the grounds. The isolation and quiet were just what he needed.
What with one thing and another, when he was summoned for jury duty on a murder case in New York that fall, he put the notice aside and forgot it. Soon, to his embarrassment, newspaper headlines made him sharply aware of an American citizen’s duties: “Nikola Tesla Fined $100—Fails To Show Up for Jury Duty in General Session—Is Sorry Now.” So he was, and reported at once to court where he apologized. He was then excused from duty on the ground of his opposition to the death penalty. The New York Times quoted him as saying that capital punishment was “barbarous, inhuman, and unnecessary.”8
Marconi remained the hero of the hour in America as elsewhere. Tesla’s doings, by comparison, seemed merely mysterious. In February 1903 the Electrical Age carried a critical article about “Nikola Tesla—His Work & Unfulfilled Promises.” Wrote the author: “Ten years ago Tesla was the electrician of greatest promise. Today his name provokes a regret that a promise should have been unfulfilled.” It had been too long since he had scored a clear triumph, and he was learning how short mortal memories could be.
By spring (1903) Tesla’s money problems had grown so severe that he was again compelled to return to New York to try to raise more funds. Even so, he did not entirely put aside his scientific preoccupations. In a note to Scherff, one of hundreds, he asked that there be sent to Professor Barker of the University of Pennsylvania “the photograph (Roentgen) of the bones of a hand . . . taken in Colorado… the tube was operated without wire by my system….”9
When he returned to Long Island, it was for the raising of the fifty-five-ton, sixty-eight-foot dome frame onto the top of the tower. (The plans had called for covering the dome with copper plates to form an insulated ball, but this was never done.) Scherff took the occasion to remind him that funds were dangerously low. Creditors were impatient. Even when Morgan sent the remainder of the promised $150,000, it had scarcely covered outstanding bills. And Tesla felt that Morgan, with his great power over the national economy, had been responsible to a large degree for the rising costs.
He wrote the financier on April 8: “You have raised great waves in the industrial world and some have struck my little boat. Prices have gone up in consequence twice, perhaps three times higher than they were….”10
Morgan, his capital still heavily committed to railroad centralization and other sensible enterprise, declined to advance more funds. Two weeks later Tesla again wrote: “You have extended me a noble help at a time when Edison, Marconi, Pupin, Fleming, and many others openly ridiculed my undertaking and declared its success impossible….”
But Morgan still did not act, and Tesla, now beginning to feel pangs of desperation decided to play his final card. So at last he wrote to Morgan and bared his true goal—not just the
sending of radio signals but the wireless transmission of power.
On July 3, he wrote: “If I would have told you such as this before, you would have fired me out of your office…. Will you help me or let my great work—almost complete—go to pots?…”11
The answer came eleven days later, addressed to N. Tesla, Esq.: “I have received your letter,” wrote Morgan, “. . . and in reply would say that I should not feel disposed at present to make any further advances.”12
Tesla replied that night in Jovian style by going to the tower and setting off such a fireworks display as no one had seen before. His tests went on through the night and for several thereafter. Residents watched in awe as blinding streaks shot off from the spherical dome, at times lighting up the sky within a radius of hundreds of miles. Take that, Pierpont Morgan, they seemed to say.
When reporters rushed to the scene they were turned away. The New York Sun reported, “Tesla’s Flashes Startling, But He Won’t Tell What He Is Trying For at Wardenclyffe. Natives hereabouts… are intensely interested in the nightly electrical display shown from the tall tower where Nikola Tesla is conducting his experiments in wireless telegraphy and telephony. All sorts of lightning were flashed from the tall tower and poles last night [July 15]. For a time, the air was filled with blinding streaks of electricity which seemed to shoot off into the darkness on some mysterious errand. When interviewed, Tesla said, ‘The people about there, had they been awake instead of asleep, at other times would have seen even stranger things. Some day, but not at this time, I shall make an announcement of something that I never once dreamed of.’”
Even stranger things? Was it simply a journalistic tease?