In his desk lay another letter unanswered from Katharine Johnson: “Sometimes I hope you will make me tell you what I know about thought transference,” she wrote. “One would need to feel herself en rapport to speak of such things. I have had such a wonderful experience the past three years, so much of it is already dim, that I sometimes fear it will all pass away with me and you of all persons ought to know something of it for you could not fail to have a scientific interest in it. I call it thought transference for want of a better word. Perhaps it is not all that. I have often wished and meant to speak to you of this but when I am with you I never say the things I had intended to say, I seem to be capable of only one thing. Do come tomorrow, Saturday.”16
21. RADAR
The humiliating news of Tesla’s financial distress following his loss of Wardenclyffe was further advertised in March 1916 when he was summoned to court in New York for failure to pay $935 to the city in personal taxes.1 Scherff had lain awake nights worrying about his former employer and his taxes, and now it had happened. Every local newspaper carried the story. The misfortune seemed unjustly cruel, coming at a time when Edison had just been appointed to an important defense research post in Washington, while Marconi, Westinghouse, General Electric, and thousands of lesser firms were thriving on the profits from Tesla’s patents.
He was now forced to confess in court that he had lived for years on credit at the Waldorf-Astoria, that he was penniless and swamped with debts. The land on which Wardenclyffe stood was taken from him and sold to a New York attorney, and it was even reported that the inventor might go to jail for contempt in connection with his tax debts.
Yet somehow in this time of turmoil and heartsickness he polished and published the basic principles of what would be known—almost three decades later—as radar.
German U-boats were sinking almost a million tons of Allied shipping a month when America entered World War I in April 1917, and the search for a way to detect submarines was of the highest priority. But there was as yet no such urgency about finding a means of predicting air attacks, although long-range German planes and Zeppelins had begun to raid central France and England with some regularity. Although it was predictable that aerial bombardment would eventually become horribly destructive, it was not yet so; and anyway, the air war was still thought to be romantic and dashing, bringing out a latent propensity for heroism even among its victims.
When German planes dropped the first bombs on Paris, Parisians stood in the open streets to watch. When London was attacked from the air, Londoners trampled primroses and hedgerows racing to the scene. An airship brought down in flames was described by a newspaper as “beyond doubt the greatest free show that London has ever enjoyed.”
Even the bombing victims showed few signs of stress, said The Lancet, so unique and stimulating was the experience. In fact the English welcomed the chance to show what the reporter described as “a fundamentally important factor, that of race, [which] is seen par excellence in the response of the crowd to stimuli of the character that we have become familiar with since the outbreak of the War. . . .” War made the English feel more English.
In the circumstances, it is not surprising that when Tesla first began to speculate about military applications of radar, it was with respect to locating ships and submarines rather than to detecting enemy bombers. Tesla had predicted the general concept of radar in his sweeping article for Century magazine of June 1900: “Stationary waves . . . mean something more than telegraphy without wires to any distance. . . . For instance, by their use we may produce at will, from a sending station, an electrical effect in any particular region of the globe; we may determine the relative position or course of a moving object, such as a vessel at sea, the distance traversed by the same, or its speed….”
In The Electrical Experimenter of August 1917 he described the main features of modern military radar: “If we can shoot out a concentrated ray comprising a stream of minute electric charges vibrating electrically at tremendous frequency, say millions of cycles per second, and then intercept this ray, after it has been reflected by a submarine hull for example, and cause this intercepted ray to illuminate a fluorescent screen (similar to the X-ray method) on the same or another ship, then our problem of locating the hidden submarine will have been solved.
“This electric ray would necessarily have to have an oscillation wave length extremely short and here is where the great problem presents itself, i.e., to be able to develop a sufficiently short wave length and a large amount of power….
“The exploring ray could be flashed out intermittently and thus it would be possible to hurl forth a very formidable beam of pulsating electric energy….”
What he had described were the features of atmospheric pulsed radar that would finally be practically developed in a crash program only months prior to the beginning of World War II.* Tesla intended it to be used as underwater radar, however, which later proved impracticable because of the great attenuation of electromagnetic waves in water. Despite much recent research, no means have yet been found of propagating light, high-frequency radio beams, or radar through the ocean. But Tesla’s extra-low-frequency (ELF) waves will penetrate the seas and may serve a different purpose (see chapter 30), that of communication.†
Even if Tesla’s radar could not be used to locate submerged objects, it was curious that no one could then imagine any other use for it. At least as far as the Navy was concerned, Edison may have had a hand in shunting radar aside. Now a white-haired elder statesman of invention, he had been named to direct the new Naval Consulting Board in Washington, with the primary job of finding a way of spotting U-boats. Tesla’s idea, if even brought to Edison’s attention, would almost certainly have been discounted as mere dream stuff.
In any event Edison had his hands full feuding with the Navy bureaucracy and cold-shouldering the “perfessers” who had begun clamoring for a piece of that new taste treat, the federal research pie. Edison’s own ideas were repeatedly chopped down by the Navy brass while he suffered frustration. As it turned out, the negative ramifications of his appointment were to prove more important to history than anything positive he was able to do in the post.
At the time that Edison went to Washington, rumpled but rich, and Tesla remained in New York, poor but dapper, both men were aware that a gap as broad as the Hudson River was widening between them and the new generation of atomic physicists. The latter could talk of nothing but Einstein. The new people were specialists, although the splintering of minds was still in the infancy of its glory. They joined the American Physics Society and believed little that failed to appear in their journal.
Michael Pupin had gone to the trouble of carving out a section for engineers in the National Academy of Sciences, which previously had refused to admit even Edison. The line between practical men (engineers) and theoreticians (physicists) caused artificial distinctions to be drawn that were handicapping the war effort. Those who were inventors, scientists, and engineers, like Pupin and Tesla, or chemists and inventors like Edison, were almost by definition passé.
The new physics boiled with debates over waves versus particles and about Einstein’s special theory of relativity, which Tesla—with strong cosmic theories of his own—rejected outright. When Einstein’s general theory of relativity was published in 1916, even its creator had been unable to accept fully the dynamic universe that it implied. So disturbed was Einstein by this that he built into his calculations a “fudge factor” that preserved the possibility that the universe might after all prove to be stable and unchanging. To Tesla this was just added proof that the relativists didn’t know what they were talking about. He himself was working on a theory of the universe to be disclosed in good time, and he had long ago propounded (but not published) his own dynamic theory of gravity.
He believed and had often stated, that atomic power would be 1. a dud, or 2. impossibly dangerous to control. In this he had illustrious company. Einstein too had grave doubts about it. As la
te as 1928 Dr. Millikan said, “There is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom. The glib supposition of utilizing atomic energy when our coal has run out is a completely unscientific Utopian dream. . . .”2 And even in 1933 England’s Lord Rutherford could say, “The energy produced by the breaking down of the atom is a poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine.”3
Perhaps it rankled Tesla to hear one of the “new physics” quips being attributed to Professor Sir William Bragg, co-winner of the 1915 Nobel Prize that for a time he had thought to be his. God runs electromagnetics on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday by the wave theory, said Bragg; and the devil runs it by quantum theory on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.
Tesla’s thoughts in later life were tending more and more toward a unifying physical theory. He believed that all matter came from a primary substance, the luminiferous ether, which filled all space, and he stoutly maintained that cosmic rays and radio waves sometimes moved more swiftly than light.
The younger scientists, most of whom were affiliated with universities, were just beginning to perceive what a garden of earthly delights government-sponsored research could be. Oddly enough it was to be Edison, creator of the modern industrial research laboratory, who threw a spanner into their dreams.
His first utterance as head of the Naval Consulting Board was that he did not think “scientific research would be necessary to any great extent.” After all, he said, the Navy already had access to a vast “ocean of facts” in the Bureau of Standards. What the Navy needed was practical men to produce the technology, not theoreticians. And although the board was to have included civilian experts, he made it clear that he wanted no physicists—although a mathematician or two might be of some use.
The scientifically ambitious naval officers were as disconcerted as the university scientists. What about submarine detectors? they wanted to know. Wouldn’t this take intensive research?
Edison, unperturbed, said he thought the whole idea of a Navy research laboratory too exotic. But if the Navy insisted upon it, he believed it should know how he handled things in his laboratories: “We have no system; we have no rules, but we have a big scrap heap.” And inventors who circled around the scrap heap long enough usually came up with inventions. He did not mention that his own staff routinely referred to his laboratory as “the dungyard.”
This was enough to drive the university scientists to action. They formulated a scheme that began with bypassing the Navy and aiming straight for the top. Through the National Academy of Sciences they appealed to President Wilson. The academy, they argued compellingly, could provide “an arsenal of science” for the country.
Soon the National Research Council, the ancestor of all subsequent research agencies, the fountainhead of science grants, was quietly formed. The NRC was to include leading scientists and engineers from universities, industry, and the government, with the goal of encouraging both basic and applied research. The second unerring move of the professors—which also set a precedent—was to establish headquarters in Washington, D.C., only blocks from the White House and Congressional purse strings.
The value of a National Research Council to corporate America was obvious. The group at once drew support from business and industry. A powerful pattern for the future had been delineated, the incestuous triumvirate of government, industry, and academe that would shape every aspect of American life in the twentieth century. And, ironically, it got started mainly as a tactic for circumventing “the old curmudgeon.”
The government at once assigned the NRC the job and funds for discovering a way to detect marauding U-boats—the same job Edison’s board was already working on. An Allied mission was also formed, with French and American scientists both racing to invent submarine-listening devices.
Tesla, his description of the future radar officially ignored, could not be bothered with such petty concerns as listening devices. Guided missiles and doomsday machines were more in his line. He gave The New York Times a provocative peek at his latest patent applications for a new device “like the thunderbolts of Thor,” capable, he said, of destroying whole fleets of enemy warships, not to mention armies.4 “Dr. Tesla insists there is nothing sensational about it,” reported the Times, “that it is but the fruition of many years of work and study.”
He described the device as a missile that would zoom through the air at 300 miles per second, an unmanned craft with neither engine nor wings, sent by electricity to drop explosives at any point on the globe. Tesla said he had already constructed a wireless transmitter sufficiently powerful to perform this feat, but that it was not yet the time to disclose the details of his guided missile.
Nor had he given up on his scheme for creating fleets of robot warships. Just the year before he had urged the government to “install along both of our ocean coasts, upon proper strategic and elevated points, numerous wireless controlling plants under the command of competent officers and that to each should be assigned a number of submarine, surface, and aerial craft. From the shore stations these vessels… could be perfectly controlled at any distance at which they remained visible through powerful telescopes. . . . If we were properly equipped with such devices of defense it is inconceivable that any battleship or other vessel of an enemy ever could get within the zone of action of these automatic craft. . . .”
Washington could not have been less interested. All ears, it seemed, were cupped to the rather primitive listening devices being produced by NRC scientists, multiple-tube arrangements with electrical amplifiers designed for the hulls of submarine-detecting craft. These worked to a certain degree. Much later, when sonar was developed, the basic principles would be closer to Tesla’s unsung concept of radar, for it would detect the presence of subs, mines, and the like by means of inaudible, high-frequency vibrations reflected back to the sending device from the targets.
By the war’s end Edison, like Tesla, was thoroughly disillusioned with what he deemed the blindness and lack of creativity of the defense bureaucracy. Of the many projects that he had proposed, not one had been approved by the Navy Department.
Long after World War I, and fifteen years after Tesla’s description of radar had been published, both American and French teams were diligently working to develop such a system according to his principles. Lawrence H. Hyland and Leo Young, two young scientists in the Naval Research Laboratory, rediscovered the potential application of high-frequency beams of short pulses of energy, this time with both aircraft and surface shipping in mind.
The military development of radar in America was to be impeded even further by interservice secrecy, but in time both the Army and Navy developed crude long-wave radar sets (one to two meters as opposed to microwaves). Meanwhile, in 1934, a French team under Dr. Emil Girardeau built and installed radar on both ships and land stations, using “precisely apparatuses conceived according to the principles stated by Tesla,” says the Frenchman. “On the subject of Tesla’s recommendation concerning the very great strength of the impulses,” he added, “one must also recognize how right he was”; but the technology had been unavailable and “the most difficult thing was to succeed in enormously increasing the strength.”5
In America the first seagoing radar tests were made in 1937 on the USS Leary, an old destroyer of the Atlantic fleet and their success led to development of the model XAF. A later model was in service on nineteen ships by 1941 and made an excellent wartime record.
Simultaneously an English team was struggling with this problem, for by now Hitler threatened England with invasion in World War II. The early pre-microwave radar installations used by the British Home Chain had very large antennae transmitting radio waves some 10 meters in length. Even so, these primitive sets were credited with winning air battles. Finally a sufficiently powerful magnetron was built which became the basis of all the generators established for modern radar starting with the 1940s.
German scientists also developed a form
of radar. It was thus an international achievement inspired by the mind of Tesla, although the English scientist Robert A. Watson-Watt was officially credited with the invention in 1935.
The long race was won just in time to help save Britain from destruction by Nazi bombers in the Battle of Britain. Radar became the basic defensive tool of almost every country in the world. After the war it was eagerly employed by commercial airlines and shipping and would soon become essential to space exploration.
Dr. Girardeau says that at the time Tesla was formulating his principles, “he was prophesying or dreaming, since he had at his disposal no means of carrying them out, but one must add that if he was dreaming, at least he was dreaming correctly.”6
At the time when his description of this invention appeared in print in 1917, Tesla was in Chicago. Broke but undefeated, he had again resolved to concentrate on developing his more practical inventions. Just before he left on this prosaic and arduous mission—painful for him, since it meant both dealing with engineers for a long period of time and being away from his friends—he was asked by one of his oldest admirers, B. A. Behrend, to accept what any other engineer in America would have deemed a high honor—the Edison Medal of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers.