Scherff left Wardenclyffe that fall. He never ceased, however, to keep an eye on Tesla’s financial affairs, working for him on evenings and weekends and almost always remembering to file his tax returns on time.
The world system for broadcasting—a concept designed to incorporate almost every aspect of modern communications—was all over but the mourning. Yet as long as the tower stood, Tesla continued his efforts to complete it.
Exactly when all the workers left, no one could say. Thomas R. Bayles, the general passenger agent of the railroad station just across the road from the abandoned plant, only noticed that passengers had stopped getting off there. A caretaker remained on duty for a time. When curious journalists or research engineers showed up they were allowed to climb to the tower top with its sweeping view of Long Island Sound. For all that the tower looked so light, it was built entirely without metal, even down to the wooden pegs holding together the wooden uprights and cross members. After abandoning the plan for covering the dome with a copper sheathing, Tesla had installed a removable disk through which a beam of radiation could be projected to the zenith.
The visitors found the laboratory filled with curiously complex apparatus. In addition to much glass-blowing equipment there were a complete machine shop with eight lathes, X-ray devices, a great variety of high-frequency Tesla coils, one of his original radio-controlled robot boats, and exhibit cases filled with thousand of bulbs and tubes. There were an office, library, instrument room, electrical generators and transformers, and great stocks of wire and cable.25 But after the watchman left, vandals entered, broke things, ransacked files, emptied paper on the floor and trampled them.
“It is not too much to say,” wrote a Brooklyn Eagle reporter, “that the place has often been viewed in the same light as the people of a few centuries ago viewed the dens of the alchemists or the still more ancient wells of the sorcerers. An atmosphere of mystery hung over the place, an unearthly influence seemed to be radiated from the alembic . . . as if drawn down from interstellar space and spread over the countryside to inspire wonder and awe in the minds of the nearby farmers and villagers….”26
In 1912 a judgment of $23,500 against the inventor for machinery supplied to the project was won by Westinghouse, Church, Kerr & Co. The equipment left at the site was taken to satisfy it.
Tesla, in order to maintain his fashionable mode of life at the Waldorf through the years, had given two mortgages on Wardenclyffe to the hotel’s proprietor, George C. Boldt. They secured bills of about $20,000. He had asked that the mortgages not be recorded, fearing damage to his financial credibility. When in 1915 he was at last unable to make any payments at all, however, he signed the Wardenclyffe deed over to Waldorf-Astoria, Inc.27
The hotel corporation tried to convert its strange security into cash but no one in those days knew what to do with the ruins of a world broadcasting center. The War Department was approached for ideas but nothing came of it. Next it was considered as a site for a pickle factory. Tesla must have wept when he heard this. But nothing caught on. And in 1917, rumors began to circulate that German spies were holed up in the magnificent tower, spying upon Allied shipping and radioing signals to U-boats. On July 4, 1917, an explosion of dynamite was discharged inside the tower. Newspapers and even the Literary Digest reported that it had been blow up by the U.S. government to halt espionage.28 Tesla denied the rumor.
In fact the tower was destroyed under a salvage contract between the owners and the Smiley Steel Company of New York, but the inventor did not wish to disclose the real owners. And it was destroyed only in an effort to realize a few dollars from scrap.
The tower proved to be more strongly built than its destroyers guessed. They had to keep blasting away as if it were rooted to the spot by some mysterious force. On the ensuing Labor Day it collapsed, dynamite having triumphed at last over the merely celestial. It brought the corporation $1,750 above salvage costs. A junkman noticed some of Tesla’s notes blowing down the street.
“I did not exactly cry when I saw my place after so long an interval,” the inventor wrote to Scherff, “but I came very close.”29
Marconi, with Carl F. Braun of Germany, won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1909 for their “separate but parallel development of the wireless telegraph.”
Never for the rest of his life would Tesla give up on his concepts of power transmission and broadcasting. It was not a dream, he declared, “but a simple feat of scientific electrical engineering, only expensive— blind, fainthearted, doubting world.”
Humanity, he wrote, was not yet sufficiently advanced to be willingly led by “the discoverer’s keen searching sense.” But perhaps it was better “in this present world of ours that a revolutionary idea or invention instead of being helped and patted, be hampered and ill-treated in its adolescence—by want of means, by selfish interest, pedantry, stupidity, and ignorance; that it be attacked and stifled; that it pass through bitter trials and tribulations, through the strife of commercial existence. So do we get our light. So all that was great in the past was ridiculed, condemned, combatted, suppressed—only to emerge all the more powerfully, all the more triumphantly from the struggle.”30
Next to Tesla and society, the greatest loser when Wardenclyffe fell was Morgan. There can be little question that he could have written his own ticket for an early lead in radio broadcasting, with a station operating on several adjacent-frequency channels, transmitting in multiplex mode, and thereby far surpassing the performance of the slow, single-channel transatlantic cable. Among the many who would use Tesla’s patents in the development of commercial radio (legally or illegally), one firm would soon be sending messages a distance of 9,000 miles. The clarity of Tesla’s understanding of radio should not be confused with his efforts to transmit electricity wirelessly. He did not confuse them.
17. THE GREAT RADIO CONTROVERSY
Errors once committed to print are stubborn. With respect to the invention of radio, they have permeated many reference sources, histories of science, scientific biographies, and popular journals. The confusion—partly caused by Tesla himself—was officially cleared up in 1943 when the U.S. Supreme Court reversed an initial finding in Marconi’s favor to rule that Tesla had anticipated all other contenders with his fundamental radio patents.*
The radio-engineering fraternity made a major effort to atone in 1956, on the occasion of Tesla’s one hundredth anniversary. It is strange therefore to find in the Dictionary of American Biography an article on Tesla by an eminent professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences, who cites reference sources through the forties, fifties, and sixties—yet completely omits reference to the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision.1 Even more curious, this author cites articles on Tesla by Anderson, O’Neill, Swezey, and Haradan Pratt (Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers), each of whom had done careful research to set the record straight. Popular historians both in the United States and Europe have consistently repeated the error.
Although the news has yet to penetrate encyclopedias, modern radio-engineering authorities now accord Tesla clear priority in a field that for years was confused by seesawing claims involving such international luminaries, besides Marconi, as Lodge, Pupin, Edison, Fessenden, Popov, Slaby, Braun, Thomson, and Stone, to name only the more famous of the pioneers.
Dr. James R. Wait writes: “The simple picture shown based on Tesla’s disclosure in 1893 is the birth of wireless communication. Admittedly, it follows the erudite theoretical and experimental investigations of Hertz who demonstrated the action at a distance from a spark gap discharge. But, by a few years, it precedes Marconi’s inventions and practical demonstrations of wireless telegraphy.”2
Figures 165 and 185, referred to in the United States Supreme Court case, are from Tesla’s 1893 lecture and are frequently cited as evidence supporting his claim of invention of radio.
Anderson points out that some have confused the argument with respect to the principles of transmission and reception of
radio signals with the matter of transmitting voice—an important improvement made practical by DeForest’s Audion, or triode vacuum tube. “In a discussion of priority in the invention of radio, one must be very specific about definitions,” he writes. “In the . . . case of the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America vs. United States (which was decided June 21, 1943, against the Marconi Company and striking down the fundamental Marconi patent), the following definition evolved out of the exhaustive depositions taken from many technical experts in the fields of radio and the physical sciences:
“‘A radio communication system requires two tuned circuits each at the transmitter and receiver, all four tuned to the same frequency.’ The definition does not embrace variable modulation that DeForest’s Audion provided and through which the transmission and reception of voice and music was made possible. It does not address the mode of electromagnetic propagation—that is, ground wave and/or sky wave and the effect of the former on the latter. It does, however, implicitly describe the deliberate, selective transmission at a specific frequency and the selectable reception at that same frequency.”3
Marconi’s original patent application was filed on November 10, 1900, and was rejected on the prior art disclosed by Sir Oliver Lodge. Tesla’s first patent was granted in 1898. Moreover Tesla was specific as to which of his patents were directed to wireless power transmission as opposed to signal communication, although this appears to have confused some of the critics of his radio patents.
The U.S. Supreme Court found that Tesla’s patent No. 645,576, applied for September 2, 1897, and allowed March 20, 1900, anticipated the four-circuit tuned combination of Marconi.4
Tesla, long before anyone else, published in Electrical World and Engineer (March 5, 1904) what has always stood out as the clearest statement by any pioneer working in the wireless art of what radio was to become and as we know it today. He envisioned the entire concept of transmission of intelligence, not just the sending of a single message from one point to another—and he alone of the pioneers in radio did so.
Tesla said his “World Telegraphy constitutes, I believe, in its principle of operation, means employed and capacities of application, a radical and fruitful departure from what has been done heretofore. I have no doubt that it will prove very efficient in enlightening the masses, particularly in still uncivilized countries and less accessible regions, and that it will add materially to general safety, comfort, and convenience, and maintenance of peaceful relations. It involves the employment of a number of plants, all of which are capable of transmitting individualized signals to the uttermost confines of the earth. Each of them will be preferably located near some important center of civilization, and the news it receives through any channel will be flashed to all points of the globe. A cheap and simple device, which might be carried in one’s pocket may then be set up anywhere on sea or land, and it will record the world’s news or such special messages as may be intended for it. Thus the entire earth will be converted into a huge brain, capable of response in every one of its parts. Since a single plant of but one hundred horse-power can operate hundreds of millions of instruments, the system will have a virtually infinite working capacity, and it must needs immensely facilitate and cheapen the transmission of intelligence.”
These ideas were also discussed by him in Century magazine in June 1900 following his return from Colorado.
Another pioneer of radio, J. S. Stone, said in reviewing a field that included Lodge, Marconi, and Thomson: “Among all those, the name of Nikola Tesla stands out most prominently. Tesla with his almost preternatural insight into alternating current phenomena that enabled him… to revolutionize the art of electric-power transmission through the invention of the rotary field motor, knew how to make resonance serve, not merely the role of a microscope, to make visible the electric oscillations, as Hertz had done, but he made it serve the role of a stereopticon. . . . [I]t has been difficult to make any but unimportant improvements in the art of radio telegraphy without traveling, part of the way at least, along a trail blazed by this pioneer who, though eminently ingenious, practical and successful in the apparatus he devised and constructed, was so far ahead of his time that the best of us then mistook him for a dreamer.”5
Among the many authorities in radio who seconded this view (although perhaps not quite soon enough for justice’s sake) was Gen. T. O. Mauborgne, former head of the Signal Corps and chief signal officer of the U.S. Army. In Radio-Electronics (February 1943, only weeks after Tesla’s death), he wrote: “Tesla ‘the wizard’… captured the imagination of my generation with his flights of fancy into the unknown realms of space and electricity . . . [saw] with astounding vision far beyond his contemporaries, very few of whom realized until many years after the work of Marconi that the great Tesla was the first to work out not only the principles of electric tuning or resonance, but actually designed a system of wireless transmission of intelligence in the year 1893.”6
Even Professor Pupin of Columbia University, testifying as an expert witness for the Atlantic Communication Company in a suit for alleged infringement of patent brought by the Marconi Wireless Company of America (Pupin’s side as expert witness was to change somewhat with time and circumstances), stated on May 12, 1910:
“When William Marconi was ‘a mere strip of a lad working for Signor Riggie’ in Italy he grounded both wires out of curiosity in an experiment to see what would result and he produced wireless waves without ever fully realizing the full significance of it.” But Pupin gave the credit for discovering wireless to Nikola Tesla, who “gave his discovery free to the world.”7
Another radio-engineering pioneer, Cdr. E. J. Quinby, USN (Ret.), has recalled from his personal experiences in the early days of commercial radio development in America:
“While others fought bitter word-battles in our courts over whose patents were really valid on the all-important system of tuning to avoid wholesale radio interference, nobody seemed to recall that Tesla had covered the subject back before the turn of the century with his comprehensive and fundamental patent on tuning of electrical circuits to resonance. Without this feature, today’s ever-expanding radio service would be utter chaos. A Supreme Court decision was finally reached in 1943, crediting Tesla with having anticipated all the others, thus making subsequent patents on the subject null and void.”
Tesla himself failed to accomplish his dream of a world wireless system, Quinby pointed out, but he lived to see this all done by utilization of the system he so clearly outlined.
“The high-frequency alternators Tesla built between 1890 and 1895 produced up to 20 kHz, despite the critics who said it couldn’t be done, and who accused him of being an impractical dreamer,” wrote Quinby. “It remained for Prof. Reginald A. Fessenden to demonstrate that such machines could produce the required quiet carrier for voice modulation, thus eliminating the background roar of the damped-wave spark and arc transmitters with which others were experimenting. Fessenden agreed with Tesla, that the damped-wave transmitters were an abomination, and that the future successful radio development rested on continuous-wave generators.”8
Thus on Christmas Eve, 1906, and New Year’s, 1907, Fessenden startled and delighted listeners up and down the East Coast of the United States and precipitated a flood of fan mail by broadcasting voice and music programs from his transmitter at Brant Rock, Massachusetts. He was using a high-frequency alternator which he built, based on Tesla’s design and principle.
During World War I, says Quinby, with the engineering talents of Steinmetz, Alexanderson, and Dempster, the General Electric Company at Schenectady succeeded in scaling up the small experimental models of radio-frequency alternators into the giant 200 kw production model, the first of which was installed at the Marconi Worldwide Wireless Station at New Brunswick, New Jersey, to replace the unsatisfactory high-power spark transmitter.
Ironically, Tesla was among dignitaries invited to witness the inauguration of reliable transatlantic service at this station
. President Woodrow Wilson’s Armistice terms were carried by radio from the station to Kaiser Wilhelm in April 1919.
Commander Quinby adds: “Later, when President Wilson made his historic voyage to Europe aboard the S.S. President Washington, voice communication was established between the New Brunswick station and President Wilson while he was at sea—thanks to the pioneering of Nikola Tesla in demonstrating his high-frequency alternator back in 1895.”
Galling as it was to Tesla, however, it remained undeniably true that Marconi first riveted the attention of the world with his successes in radio and thereafter cleverly held the lead in development with the Marconi Worldwide Wireless Company.
On May 13, 1915, Professor Pupin testified yet again as an expert witness for the defendant in a suit brought by Marconi against the Atlantic Communication Company. This time he appeared to suggest that he himself had invented the wireless “before either Marconi or Nikola Tesla had discovered it,” according to press reports of the trial.9
In his own experiments, he said, he had found a wireless wave but had not realized its importance. Tesla, he iterated, however, “had given his discoveries to mankind, and this is one of the points on which the Atlantic Company experts expect to deny the claims of Marconi to certain wireless patents.”10
Tesla himself sued Marconi at last, in August 1915. The Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America also sued the U.S. government for allegedly infringing on “Marconi’s” patents during World War I. The war of the wireless patents was waged back and forth for decades, and little wonder that confusion ensued.
A thorough account is contained in Anderson’s “Priority of Invention of Radio—Tesla vs. Marconi,” a monograph for The Antique Wireless Association (New Series) No. 4, March 1980. Anderson reports that radio pioneer Major Armstrong added an interesting—if somewhat confusing—sidelight to the controversy. He wrote to Anderson shortly before his own death in 1953, saying that in his opinion Tesla was the true inventor of the guided weapon (robotry) but that there had been efforts to reduce his claim to that invention. Moreover, said Armstrong, he did not believe Tesla should be advanced as the inventor of radio.