When the manager of Westinghouse’s railway and lighting division wrote asking for details on the turbine, Tesla replied confidently that it was superior to anything in the competition in terms of extreme lightness and high performance. Indeed, he said, he was planning to use it in a boxlike flivver airplane.
“You should not be at all surprised,” he wrote, “if some day you see me fly from New York to Colorado Springs in a contrivance which will resemble a gas stove and weigh as much.”1 (The plane would weigh only eight hundred pounds and could if necessary enter and depart through a window.)
This vision, however captivating, failed to bring Westinghouse orders. Accordingly, in his efforts to continue development of the turbine, he took the, for him, unusual step of working directly for two companies—the Pyle National Company and the E. G. Budd Manufacturing Company.
With the turbine he had invented a valvular conduit that enabled it to be used with combustible fuel. This unique conduit, with no moving parts, has recently been used in fluid logic elements, in which context it is referred to as a fluid diode.2 Tesla’s 1916 patent of his valvular conduit,* which closely followed Fleming’s vacuum diode, is one of the cornerstones of the modern science of fluidics. But once again, he would manage to profit very little by his discovery.
Today the Tesla turbine is at last beginning to get some of the attention it has long deserved. One of the country’s leading research experts on it is Professor of Engineering Warren Rice of Arizona State University who, however, has confined his work to the fluid mechanics of the flow processes that occur between the disks.3
In 1972 Walter Baumgartner built an experimental model of the Tesla turbine engine that ran on compressed air aided by steam injection, and produced some 30 horsepower, at 18,000 rpm.
In the 1980s the unique turbine is under active development for vehicular and power-plant use by SunWind, Ltd., of Sebastopol, California. SunWind, Ltd., plans to use a modified version of the Tesla turbine, burning hydrogen as the optimal fuel, in a three-wheel car called the Rainbow. The turbine will also burn propane, vegehol, and gasoline.
SunWind president Mark Goldis states that researcher Peter Myers has built an experimental model of the turbine which verifies that it performs as Tesla predicted it would. He is now working on incorporating a proprietary combustion chamber to bring it up to the needs of contemporary designs and taking into account modern metallurgy.
“We are convinced that the improved Myers vortex turbine, based on Tesla’s invention, will work better than any now in use, and that it will operate at 60 percent efficiency,” Goldis says. Efficiency of most other turbines is about 40 percent. He believes that most earlier experimenters failed in their efforts to build Tesla’s turbine because they did not understand laminar flow as opposed to turbulent flow. The turbine, says Goldis, is inexpensive and easily machined.4
Another California firm, General Enertech of San Diego, is building and selling the Tesla turbine as a pump. This too has been improved and modernized.
Alas, future vindication does not pay current bills. Tesla was having a hard struggle to meet the costs of day-to-day operation and to keep his credit for entertaining at Delmonico’s. It came as a trifling blow, a social anticlimax, when for the second time he was dropped for nonpayment of dues by the Players’ Club. With both Mark Twain and Stanford White gone, his pleasure in going to the old haunt had diminished.
Still, his name continued to appear regularly in the press, headlines never ceasing to proclaim the originality of his imagination. His ideas had news value even when substance was lacking. “Tesla’s Tidal Wave to Make War Impossible,” declared the English Mechanic & World of Science, disclosing his idea for the use of explosives to create destructive ocean waves upon demand. Little more was ever heard of this brainchild.
In a letter to the Times under the heading “Nicola [sic] Tesla Objects,” the new vulnerable and touchy Tesla issued a generalized complaint to the effect that he thought he should receive credit for his own inventions. Shortly afterward the sour-grapes attitude that his friends had marked with sadness was betrayed again on the editorial page of the Times in parallel columns—one a letter from Tesla, the other a story about the hero of the hour, Orville Wright.
Wright was being interviewed in a flat meadow near Washington, D.C., as he prepared to take up his plane, which he had now flown many times, on a test flight. This threatened to be a special occasion, however, for word had been brought to Wright that President Teddy Roosevelt was standing by in the White House, hoping to be invited to accompany him as the nation’s first Flying President.
Wright may be forgiven a certain nervousness at the thought of having for a passenger the toothy president, bundled from head to toe in high boots, leggings, helmet, goggles, and white silk scarf. It was a proper dilemma, as the Times report hinted. The flyer had wanted no part of such responsibility, knowing how genuinely risky the test could be. Yet it also seemed risky to have to say no.
A crowd of thousands had gathered on the crude flight strip awaiting the flyer’s decision. Wright had spent as much time as was decently possible tinkering with the motor. At last the pioneer aeronaut raised his wind gauge aloft and studied it. The crowd held its collective breath. A slight zephyr fanned their brows. Wright lowered the gauge, shaking his head. “We cannot attempt a flight,” he said gravely.
One column over, Tesla made clear his contempt for such a state of aeronautics. All his life he had been working on designs and engines for advanced high-speed planes, but thus far he had filed no patents. But he did not think much of what the competition had been doing and was at his most irritatingly superior:
“Place any of the later aeroplanes beside that of Langley, their prototype,” he wrote, “and you will not find as much as one decided improvement. There are the same old propellers, the same old inclined planes, rudders, and vanes—not a single notable difference. . . . Half a dozen aeronauts have been in turn hailed as conquerors and kings of the air. It would have been much more appropriate to greet John D. Rockefeller as such. But for the abundant supply of high-grade fuel we would still have to wait for an engine capable of supporting not only itself but several times its own weight against gravity.”5
The Langley plane, he said, was doomed if it encountered a downdraft, and the helicopter was in this respect much preferable, although objectionable for other reasons.
The really successful heavier-than-air craft would be based on radically new principles, he predicted, and would soon materialize. “[W]hen it does it will give an impetus to manufacture and commerce such as was never witnessed before, provided only that Governments do not resort to methods of the Spanish Inquisition, which have only proved so disastrous to the wireless art, the ideal means for making man absolute master of the air.”6
Although such letters throbbed with the injuries done to him and only created more resentment toward him, his prophecy was, as usual, accurate. Honored at a dinner at the Waldorf with Rear Admiral Charles Sigsbee, he described the “aerial warships” that were coming and once more predicted a wireless telephone that would encircle the globe.
The patents on his brilliantly designed flivver airplane or flying stove—in today’s technical literature the descendants of this craft (not to be confused with simple helicopters) are called vertical takeoff and landing aircraft (VTOL)—would not be filed until 1921 and 1927 and finally granted in 1928.7 This is believed to be the only invention patented by Tesla of which, probably for lack of developmental capital, he built no prototype. The year the patents were issued the inventor would have been seventy-two years of age.*
The tiny plane, which he thought should sell for less than $1,000, rose straight into the air with its helicopter-type lifting propeller. The pilot touched a tilting device that pitched the craft forward, placing the propeller in front, airplane-style. The pilot’s seat swivelled to remain upright while he moved the wings into a horizontal position. Tesla’s light but powerful turbine was to thrust the
plane forward at great speed. It could land by reversing the process—on a space the size of a garage roof, a living room, or the deck of a small boat.
Tesla’s vertical-takeoff concept languished until nearly a decade after his death. Then, in the early 1950s, both Convair and Lockheed tested vehicles that, although vastly more sophisticated in engineering, adhered faithfully to the Teslian fundamentals. The more successful of these craft, the Convair XFY-1 “Pogo,” was a 14,000 pound single-seat Navy fighter powered by a 5850 hp Allison T-40 turboprop engine. At rest, it sat on its tail, nose pointed skyward. In action, it took off vertically, then rotated 90 degrees to horizontal flight, in which it had a designed top speed in excess of 600 miles-per-hour at 15,000 feet.
Although tests of the “Pogo” were generally successful, the Navy decided not to put the plane into production. The Allison engine, Navy evaluators felt, was insufficiently powerful; the design of the pilot’s pivoting seat was inadequate to accommodate the radical changes of attitude required, and the tricky, essentially blind, landings were just too dangerous.
But the potential military and commercial advantages of a full-scale aircraft that could take off and land without benefit of extensive runways were too great to be ignored. Following the intriguing tests of the Convair and Lockheed machines, the international aerospace industry entered into a full-scale pursuit of the ideal VTOL design. Numerous ideas were tried, but by the beginning of the 1980s the favored design was of an aircraft which did not itself change attitude on landing and takeoff, but whose engines were modified so that the direction of thrust could be rotated through 90 degrees. Two of the modern world’s leading operational fighter planes—the Anglo-American British Aerospace “Harrier” and the Russian Yakovlev Yak-36—employ this principle.
Plainly Tesla’s flivver-cum-flying stove was a far cry from today’s sophisticated, massively powerful VTOL’s. Indeed, conceived as it was decades before the advent of the jet engine, the flying stove could hardly have been otherwise. But as the Convair and Lockheed experiments of the 1950s suggest, the Teslian concept was an almost inevitable first step in true VTOL research. That Tesla should have hit upon this idea at a time when the enterprise of aviation was in its infancy is astonishing enough, but if we can credit the Yugoslav magazine Review, Tesla’s VTOL concept may even have anticipated the advent of powered flight. According to this generally respected publication, there is information in the Tesla papers in Belgrade indicating that Tesla’s first VTOL drawings, along with plans for rocket motors, were destroyed in the laboratory fire of 1895!8
The Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade contains, in addition to drawings of the aircraft, plans for an “aeromobile,” a jet-propelled automobile with four wheels, apparently designed for flying or for terra firma. His papers, according to museum officials, include “calculations for horsepower, fuel and other aspects, all of which lost their true value when Tesla passed away.” In addition, they report that he left sketches of interplanetary ships. This information, however, has not been made available to western scholars.
In more down-to-Earth moments, Tesla designed specially mounted lightning rods and air conditioning systems, and wrote proposals for manufacturers demonstrating that his turbine could be operated on the waste gases from steel mills and factories. He never saw smoke escaping from a stack when he was not offended by the waste of uncombusted fuel that used up finite resources.
While his imagination continued to soar with the future, the circumstances of his present became drearier by the day. A rare quarrel over money occurred between the inventor and Scherff, but was soon forgiven. Scherff wrote that creditors were “hounding me hard,” and that the illness of his wife had put him in debt. He hoped Tesla would make some payment on his loans.
The inventor loftily responded, “Please do not give way to bitterness. You know that the experiences you have had were unusual and that while they have not benefitted you materially to a great extent, they have been the means of developing the good that is in you. . . .”9 When Scherff proved more insistent than usual, he sent a small amount of money and again took a superior stance in the matter: “I am sorry to note that you are losing your equanimity and poise. . . . You must pull yourself together and banish the evil spirits….”
To further bolster the morale of his former employee and loyal friend, he reported that the development of his steam and gas turbines and of a blower had been almost completed and that they held revolutionary promise. “I am now at work,” he wrote, “on new designs of automobile, locomotive, and lathe in which these new inventions of mine are embodied and which cannot help but prove a colossal success. The only trouble is where and when to get the cash, but it cannot last very long before my money will come in a torrent, and then you can call on me for anything you like.”10
On another occasion the much-tried Scherff pointedly wrote to say he was glad to hear a Tesla therapeutic device would soon be on the market because he himself could use one. Rather late in life, he bought a modest home at Westchester, Connecticut, and meeting his mortgage payments became a recurring subject with respect to Tesla’s outstanding notes.
Although the “torrent” of money never came, Tesla did manage to find occasional major investors. Thus the Tesla Ozone Company was incorporated in 1910, with a capital of $400,000, to develop a process with several commercial uses, among them refrigeration. Later, the Tesla Propulsion Company was capitalized at Albany, New York, for $1 million by the inventor with Joseph Hoadley and Walter H. Knight, its purpose being to build turbines for ships and for the Alabama Consolidated Coal & Iron Company.
To add to his other problems, Tesla had trouble with his former employee, Fritz Lowenstein, in this period. Ever since the days of his secret research in Colorado, the inventor had worried about Lowenstein’s loyalty. He was reassured when the German engineer returned to work for him at Wardenclyffe, but within a few years this relationship was terminated for financial reasons. Lowenstein went on to become a successful inventor of radio devices.
In 1916 he was called as a key witness for the defendants in the case of the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America v. Kilbourne and Clark, having agreed to testify that in his opinion the Tesla radio patents held sway over the Marconi patents. At the last moment, however, Lowenstein switched sides and testified for Marconi. Many questions were raised about his veracity, and charges were made but nothing was ever proved. As a result of this, however, he incurred Tesla’s lasting enmity. It appeared that in the period 1910 to 1915 Tesla had lent substantial sums of money to the German radio engineer. Three years later Tesla brought suit against him, but did not go to trial.11
Anne Morgan, now famous in her own right, reappeared in his life tangentially after her father’s death. Tesla had written to her of his deep admiration for the elder Morgan, which had outlasted his disappointments over money: “All the world knew him as a genius of rare powers, but to me he appears as one of the colossal figures of the ages… which mark epochs in the evolution of human thought and endeavor….”12
Like Tesla’s turbine, Anne had become a powerhouse, her life crowded with humanitarian activities in education, children’s affairs, women’s working conditions, and immigrant welfare—not to mention fashion and the servant problems of the wealthy. Fresh from the pleasures of touring Europe, she would turn up in Women’s Night Court in Manhattan to befriend a wayward girl. An early Frances Perkins– without-portfolio, she traveled about America, speaking before women’s clubs in behalf of her causes, which now included a vacation savings fund for working women. She conferred with judges about the problems of homeless, exploited young women, which were real and appalling, and sometimes she ranged as far as Topeka, Kansas, where Governor W. R. Stubbs once admiringly described her as an “insurgent.”
Although she had all but forgotten her youthful infatuation with Tesla, they kept in touch. “I have hopes to see you this winter,” she wrote, “and am indeed sorry that a whole year has passed since we last met. Have t
he months done much for you in your work, and do you now, at last, feel you are advancing… ?”13
Tesla, glad for the opportunity to renew their friendship, bragged a little: “The progress since our last pleasant meeting was steady and most gratifying. My ideas come in an uninterrupted stream as ever before. I see them grow and develop and am achieving happiness and, in a degree, success in the worldly sense.” He praised her own “noble work” and sent warm regards to Mrs. Morgan.14
The Triangle Factory Fire of March 25, 1911, in which 145 shirtwaist workers, most of them young immigrant women, leaped to their death from a New York high-rise sweatshop, caused an outpouring of anger that led to more rapid unionization and ultimately to widespread reform of working conditions. Many additional workers had been injured in this fire, which resulted from a flagrant disregard for safety regulations. From this pivotal catastrophe much that Anne had worked for as a young woman was materializing.
She was seen marching with strikers and had become a writer of formidable letters in behalf of her causes. In her tailored suits she was what journalists described as “full-figured,” a chainsmoker, fast talker, and much sought after as a fund raiser. It was said that her energetic presence “charged the atmosphere like an electrical disturbance.”
One biographer has speculated that Anne’s androgenic characteristics and Tesla’s putative asexuality might have formed the basis of their friendship. Undoubtedly, however, money and social position formed a stronger magnetism.
In view of the many pleas for capital that Tesla made to her father and brother over the years, there is a certain turnabout humor in the fact that Anne did not scruple to tap him for her causes and that she appealed shrewdly to his snobbishness in doing so. In a long letter to Tesla while a fund raiser for the Women’s Department of the National Civic Federation, she grouped her subjects under such headings as “Almshouses” and “Citizenship,” reporting indignantly that the proponents of compulsory State Old Age Pensions had declared the almshouse “a relic of barbarism, a useless evil.” No flaming liberal despite her support of the downtrodden, she believed that the government must save and improve the almshouses. In sly conclusion she asked, “Will you be one of thirty to contribute $100 towards the amount still needed this year? . . .”15 There is no record that Tesla responded. He often had trouble paying his hotel rent.