It was as if Behrend had opened one of those overhead hotel fire extinguishers and it had rained down vitriol instead of water.
22. THE GUEST OF HONOR
B. A. Behrend was an engineer of great distinction and was himself in line to receive the prized Edison Medal. But he also felt keenly the injustices done to Tesla.
It was outrageous, he believed, that the man who had created the modern age of electric power, with all its blessings to people and industry, towns and cities around the world, should now be struggling to keep a hotel roof over his head. It was outrageous that he was being deprived of reward and honor for his invention of radio while others commercialized it; that he had received little credit for lighting inventions that were profiting others; that electrotherapeutics, adapted by more practical men from his high-frequency apparatus, was growing into a field of medical technology that seemed to benefit almost everyone but the inventor. And just the year before, Dr. Edwin Northrup had gone back for inspiration to the old ideas and circuits of Tesla to devise his first high-frequency furnace, a debt that he at least had graciously acknowledged. Behrend the engineer enumerated to himself only the more prosaic of Tesla’s achievements and felt outraged.
He quickly found that persuading the AIEE to confer the Edison Medal upon Tesla was easy compared to getting the inventor to accept it. He did not want the Edison Medal. He would not receive it.
“Let us forget the whole matter, Mr. Behrend,” he said. “I appreciate your good will and your friendship but I desire you to return to the committee and request it to make another selection. . . . It is nearly thirty years since I announced my rotating magnetic field and alternating-current system before the Institute. I do not need its honors and someone else may find it useful.”1
The old wounds, reopened, bled bitterness. How indeed could the AIEE have been so remiss? More than three-quarters of the members of the Institute probably owed their own jobs to Tesla’s inventions.
Since the hostility between Edison and Tesla was well known, it probably had been assumed that he might feel a certain distaste for the medal’s name; but Behrend, knowing that the inventor both needed and deserved such acclaim at this period, insisted.
That brought down the rain of acid.
“You propose,” said Tesla, “to honor me with a medal which I could pin upon my coat and strut for a vain hour before the members and guests of your Institute. You would bestow an outward semblance of honoring me but you would decorate my body and continue to let starve, for failure to supply recognition, my mind and its creative products which have supplied the foundation upon which the major portion of your Institute exists.”2
It was rare for Tesla to reveal personal feelings toward Edison but now he pulled no punches. “And when you would go through the vacuous pantomime of honoring Tesla you would not be honoring Tesla but Edison who has previously shared unearned glory from every previous recipient of this medal.”
Behrend, however, refused to let the matter rest there. After several visits to Tesla’s office, he persuaded him to accept the honor.
Tesla passed the Engineers’ Club almost daily, but no longer went inside. The building stood, as it still does, directly across from Bryant Park, the rectangle of sooty grass and listless trees behind the public library where he went each day to feed his pigeons. Many engineers observed the strange tall figure, less magnificently dressed than in his prime yet still erect and proud, as he entered the park to be greeted by swirls of birds. Pigeons even then were considered socially unmeritorious. Their hunger seemed to touch only people who were, like them, in need. Pigeons appealed to quirky, lonely, unreliable, usually poor, and eccentric persons. Important engineers did not hang about in city parks feeding dirty birds.
Journalists too had noticed Tesla on his avian missionary work. Going home after midnight a reporter might find him standing in the darkness, lost in thought, with a bird or two taking food from his hands or lips, even though it was well-known that birds were blind at night and preferred to be in their roosts. At such times Tesla was apt to make it clear to the reporters that he did not care to talk with them. Later two of them would find out why.
Another journalist told of meeting him wandering about in Grand Central Station. When asked if he had a train to catch, he replied, “No, this is where I do my thinking.”
On the night of the Edison Medal presentation ceremony, a banquet was held in the Engineers’ Club. Afterward the members and guests were to reconvene across the alley in the United Engineering Societies building on 39th Street for speeches.
It was a splendid white-tie affair. The guest of honor was impeccable, the radiance of his personality shining forth as forcefully as in his youth. All eyes followed his tall, charismatic presence. Yet somehow between the banquet hall and the nearby auditorium, he vanished.
How such a flagpole figure managed to disappear, Behrend could not for the life of him understand. The committee was in a dither, and a search was begun for the guest of honor. Waiters peered into rest rooms. Behrend, thinking Tesla might have become ill, rushed into the street to take a taxi to Tesla’s hotel, the St. Regis. But following an impulse, he found his steps turning instead toward Bryant Park.
Making his way through the gathering dusk, Behrend reached the entrance to the park, only to find it blocked by a group of strollers watching something in the shadows. Behrend edged his way in, and there stood Tesla festooned from head to toe in pigeons. They perched upon his head, pecked feed from his hands, and covered his arms, while a living, gurgling carpet of birds swarmed over his black evening pumps. The inventor spotted Behrend and cautiously raised a finger to his lips, disengaging feathered friends in the process.
Finally, while Behrend stood anxiously by, Tesla dusted feathers from his finery and consented to be led back into the hall to receive his tribute.
Behrend’s formal testimonial to his old friend was eloquent and sincere:
“Were we to seize and eliminate from our industrial world the results of Mr. Tesla’s work,” he reminded his colleagues, “the wheels of industry would cease to turn, our electric cars and trains would stop, our towns would be dark, our mills would be dead and idle. Yes, so far reaching is his work that it has become the warp and woof of industry. . . . His name marks an epoch in the advance of electrical science. From that work has sprung a revolution….”
He closed by paraphrasing Pope’s lines on Newton:
“Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night;
God said, Let Tesla be, and all was light.”3
The guest of honor found himself warming to the assemblage. He was after all human, and it was right and proper that these words should be spoken. He was pleased when W. W. Rice, Jr., president of the AIEE, reminded the audience of the scientific progress that had flowed from Tesla’s research in oscillating currents.
“From his work followed the great work of Roentgen, who discovered the Roentgen rays,” said Rice, “and all that work which has been carried on throughout the world in following years by J. J. Thomson and others, which has really led to the conception of modern physics. His work . . . antedated that of Marconi and formed the basis of wireless telegraphy . . . and so on throughout all branches of science and engineering we find . . . important evidence of what Tesla has contributed….”4
The guest of honor rose at last with applause in his ears and found within him the power to speak graciously of Thomas Edison. He recalled his first meeting with “this wonderful man, who had had no theoretical training at all, no advantages, who did all himself, getting great results by virtue of his industry and application….”5
Moving on he spoke rather longer than the engineers had expected, describing his childhood and later life, telling humorous anecdotes, and revealingly explaining “why I have preferred my work to the attainment of worldly rewards. . . .” Tesla said that he was deeply religious, although not in the orthodox meaning of the word, and gave himself “to the constant enjoyment of believing that th
e greatest mysteries of our being are still to be fathomed and that, all the evidence of the senses and the teachings of exact and dry sciences to the contrary notwithstanding, death itself may not be the termination of the wonderful metamorphoses we witness.
“I have managed to maintain an undisturbed peace of mind, to make myself proof against adversity, and to achieve contentment and happiness to a point of extracting some satisfaction even from the darker side of life, the trials and tribulations of existence. I have fame and untold wealth, more than this, and yet—how many articles have been written in which I was declared to be an impractical unsuccessful man, and how many poor, struggling writers, have called me a visionary. Such is the folly and shortsightedness of the world! . . .”6
Some years later Dragislav Petković, visiting from Yugoslavia, would walk with the inventor to Bryant Park on his daily mission of mercy and hear a revealing comment.
“Mr. Tesla looked up at the [library] windows, which are fenced with the iron bars, that some pigeons did not fall down somewhere and got freezed,” he recalled. “In one corner he spotted one which was halfway frozen. He told me to stay here and watch that the cat does not come to get him while he look up for others. While I was watching, I tried to reach the pigeon, but could not do it because the bars were so close to one another. When Mr. Tesla returned, he quickly bended and pull him out.
“‘All things from childhood are still dear to me,’” he told Petković, as he began to pat the almost frozen pigeon, assuring it that it would recover.
“Then,” said Petković, “he took the package from my hand and started throwing the food all around in front of the library. When he distributed the food he told me: ‘These are my sincere friends.’”7
• • •
With the business of the Edison Medal over, Tesla entrained for Chicago and devoted the remainder of the year to efforts to develop a variety of inventions—not only in America but in Canada and Mexico. Thus he hoped to make up for his wartime losses of European royalties.8 The previous year a trial balance of the Nikola Tesla Company had shown capital stock worth $500,000, laboratory expenses of $45,000 and patent expenses of $18,938. Scherff, preparing his tax returns on a weekend, reminded the inventor that the government could now fine him $10,000 for failure to file. If there was a net profit that year, Scherff failed to mention it in his letter.9
From his headquarters at the Blackstone Hotel, Tesla went to work, offering not merely his inventions but himself as a consultant. A major offering was his bladeless fluid turbo-generator for lighting systems, small, simple, and unusually efficient, as the prospectus stated, an apparatus of “overwhelming superiority.”
He had licensed his automobile speedometer to the Waltham Watch Company, only to see auto manufacturing halted by the war. Nevertheless during 1917 he had an income of $17,000 in speedometer and locomotive-headlight royalties.
He struggled over a report for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, hoping to supply the government with a small aircraft motor one-fifth the weight of the Liberty motor then used. An exchange of correspondence with NACA (the predecessor of NASA) failed to result in a contract.
To Scherff, when he could spare a few moments from arduous days, he scribbled that his research on a new wireless transmitter that would render messages absolutely secret “will secure for the U.S. an overwhelming advantage in the great conflict as well as in peace. . . .”10 At the same time he was promoting the Tesla Nitrates Company, the Tesla Electro Therapeutic Company, and the Tesla Propulsion Company. The former, based on an electrical process for making fertilizer from nitrates (nitric acid) captured from the air (which he had alluded to in the Century magazine article of 1900) proved to be economically impractical.
Determined to escape from debt, he also maintained at long distance a laboratory for turbine work at Bridgeport, Connecticut. There he had contracted as well with the American & British Manufacturing Company to erect two wireless stations. Unfortunately these Wardenclyffe-type enterprises failed for lack of adequate capital.
No one could any longer claim that Tesla was not commercializing. He made money on some of these enterprises—not spectacular amounts but enough to begin paying off his debts to Scherff and to keep a staff.
To Johnson, now harried by creditors, he wrote: “Write your splendid poetry in serenity. I will do away with all your worries. Your talent cannot be turned into money, thanks to the lack of discernment of the people of this country, but mine is one that can be turned into carloads of gold. I am doing this now.”11
Johnson became ill. He wrote to remind Tesla of an old debt of $2,000, and the inventor at once sent a check for $500. Two weeks later Robert again wrote that he needed funds, this time for taxes, and Tesla sent another $500. Before the year was out Robert sent an SOS saying that he had only $19.41 in his bank account, with outstanding debts of $1,500. Once again Tesla reached for his checkbook.12
In his desk in New York lay a letter, some years old, from Katharine Johnson, one of the last that was kept, or perhaps written, by her to her “ever silent friend.” She had gone to Maine without her children or husband for part of the summer.
“I came here a month ago, quite alone,” she wrote, “to this hotel full, but empty for me, since it is a strange world. Here, I am as detached as if nothing belonged to me but memory. At times I am filled with sadness and long for that which is not—just as intensely as I did when a young girl and I listened to the waves of the sea, which is still unknown, and still beating about me. And you? What are you doing? I wish I could have news of you my ever dear and ever silent friend, be it good or bad. But if you will not send me a line, then send me a thought and it will be received by a finely attuned instrument.
“I do not know why I am so sad, but I feel as if everything in life had slipped from me. Perhaps I am too much alone and only need companionship. I think I would be happier if I knew something about you. You, who are unconscious of everything but your work and who have no human needs. This is not what I want to say and so I am Faithfully yours, KJ.”13
She added a postscript: “Do you remember the gold dollar that passed between you and Robert? I am wearing it this summer as a talisman for all of us.”
Money? Good fortune? A return to the happiness and excitement of earlier days? Would it be a talisman for the trio that had shared so much?
23. PIGEONS
People speak of decades as if they form natural endings, when in fact they seldom end anything cleanly. Human survivors are dragged into new slices of time with which they feel no harmony and in which they are often exposed to rasping change. So it was for Tesla in the Roaring Twenties.
The twenties brought the hypocrisy of Prohibition. A dignified man could no longer walk into his favorite bar and order a drink, but was instead forced to resort to illegal rotgut, bathtub gin, or worse. Speakeasies and gangsters flourished. Flaming Youth and bead-twirling flappers danced the nights away to the Charleston; the stock market alternately soared and dived, while speculators made and lost fortunes. James J. Walker, the Whoopee Mayor of New York, was one of those attuned to the times. Nikola Tesla, Victorian in manner and appearance, was not. He was, if anything, more estranged than ever from the world about him.
Hobson, who had been a Congressman and was soon to be honored with the Congressional Medal (carrying the rank of rear admiral) for his courage during the Spanish-American War, had lost his recent bid for the U.S. Senate. But he had not lost—to Tesla’s intense regret—his campaign against drink and had been instrumental in obtaining passage of the Eighteenth Amendment. To Tesla Prohibition constituted an intolerable bureaucratic invasion of personal liberty. He freely expressed his opinion that it would shorten lives, including his own. He no longer could foresee living until the age of 140. Without the divine ambrosia in modest but regular amounts, who would care to?
Yet when the Hobson family returned to Manhattan to live, Tesla was well enough pleased that he and the sometime hero could be close a
gain. Hobson took up the reins of other worthy campaigns, including leadership of an international commission on narcotics, but he always found time for his old friend. He began the habit of hunting Tesla up in his hotel once a month to attend a movie matinee. It was a curiously frivolous diversion for such a distinguished pair. They would emerge from stale darkness into the glare and clangor of a Times Square afternoon and move off to a favorite park bench. There they would talk of world politics and science, or reminisce about old times.
Now in his mid-sixties, Tesla was almost always hard up. At times strange illnesses troubled him. The businesses he had worked so hard to build up in Chicago were dwindling away. Wardenclyffe was no more than a sad memory, yet he never ceased to strive for the development of his world wireless system. In 1920 he again approached Westinghouse executives with a wireless proposal. Their rejection brought from him a tart reminder that, at the time of obtaining rights to his alternating-current system, the directors had promised him that “nothing will be turned down that you may put before the Westinghouse Company.” He had relied upon their assurance, he said, “knowing that men of that stature usually feel a sense of obligation to the pioneer who lays the foundations to their successful business….”1
He found the firm’s attitude doubly frustrating because they were in fact now entering the wireless field, and Tesla had heard that they planned to put up a broadcasting system. “In the first place I was astonished and keenly disappointed,” he wrote, “that the matter should have been put before your engineers. . . . I would never submit anything to them except complete plans, thoroughly worked out in every detail….” Westinghouse officials responded by offering him a temporary consulting job.
The following year Westinghouse inadvertently insulted him by writing that they had begun operation of a Radio-phone Broadcasting System at Newark, New Jersey, presenting news broadcasts, concerts, and crop and market reports; and inviting him as a guest to speak to their “invisible audience.”2 Haughtily he reminded them that he had long worked to develop a broadcasting system to encompass the globe: “I prefer to wait until my project is completed before addressing an invisible audience and beg you to excuse me.”3