He had made a similar offer of his “particle beam” to Westinghouse that spring, to which Vice-President S. M. Kintner had replied that he had discussed with a research specialist “the general proposal of creating rays of the kind you mention.” But the specialist had been skeptical, “so much so in fact that I hesitate to propose to Mr. Merrick your suggestion of a six months’ advance payment to enable you to file patents.”10
Although it is always tempting to cast Tesla in the role of prophet without honor, it is conceivable that the research specialist was correct about the “particle beam.” Tesla was perfectly capable of going off half-cocked, as his forays into metallurgy (in part the result of his dissatisfaction with the metals available for use in his turbine) suggest.
He formulated a process for degasifying copper (removing the bubbles to produce a superior metal) and interested the American Smelting and Refining Company (ASARCO) in it. Dr. Albert J. Phillips, then superintendent of the central research department of ASARCO, recalls meetings with Tesla on the project. In the depths of the Depression he would arrive at the firm’s laboratories in Perth Amboy from the Hotel McAlpin in New York where he then lived, in a spendid chauffeur-driven limousine. He usually wore a frock coat, gray striped trousers, gray spats, and carried a cane with a gold knob.
“Dr. Tesla was a fine distinguished gentleman whom I liked very much,” Dr. Phillips told me. “He was probably the world’s greatest electrical theorist of the time. However, he was not a metallurgist and failed to realize that there was a great deal known about metals that he did not know. His experiments in the field of copper metallurgy were poorly planned and completely unsuccessful. Nevertheless I learned a great deal from my association with him and recall fond memories of his idiosyncrasies.”11
The inventor’s theory was that gas bubbles dispersed in a liquid were under pressures much higher than those computed by accepted theories, and he believed that such pockets of air or nitrogen, if small enough, would have the same density as copper in the liquid form. He arrived at the plant with complete drawings of an apparatus he wished built to prove his theory.
“I immediately informed him,” recalls Dr. Phillips, “that the apparatus he had so carefully designed would not melt copper and could not possibly subject liquid copper to bombardment under vacuum to remove the hypothetical gas bubbles from it. I also told Dr. Tesla that there was plenty of evidence to prove that these hypothetical gas bubbles could not exist in molten copper to any great extent.”
The two discussed their differences in a friendly scientific manner, “but [Tesla] was not swayed from his beliefs by my objections. . . .” So they proceeded to build the apparatus exactly as Tesla had designed it. And the results were just as the research superintendent had predicted. At last, liquid copper that had been melted elsewhere was poured into the equipment, subjecting the stream of metal to high vacuum and bombardment against a “Lava” target before it issued from the bottom into a mold.
“We finally obtained several samples of copper through the machine,” Phillips recalls, “which instead of being densified were quite gassy and were in no way different from copper that had not been subject to the Tesla treatment.”
And then, since the budget was badly overrun, the experiments were ended. To the best of Dr. Phillips’ recollection, ASARCO had initially approved $25,000 for the venture (“In 1933 that was a lot of money and hard to come by”) and may have extended it later by a similar amount.12
A curious detail emerged from these recollections. Tesla showed Dr. Phillips “a photograph of a cancelled check for $1 million, if I remember correctly, that he had received from the Westinghouse Electric Company for one of his patents or inventions.” Since there is no record anywhere else of this check, the mystery of the payment for his alternating-current patents remains unresolved.
With occasional consulting jobs Tesla managed to survive the Depression and even lent small sums to friends in greater need. In one especially tight spot he went to Westinghouse and, for old times’ sake, was given a job that brought in $125 a month for a brief period. Another time he turned to Robert Johnson and received help in his “temporary financial fainting spell,” the latter replying from Stockbridge, Massachusetts, “I have in the bank $178. So I send you herewith $100. I hope that will do. Heaven bless you!”
Some time later Johnson fell ill. In his new “old” hand, he wrote: “At 83 I have just published my book, ‘Your Hall of Fame.’… I shall not live to see your bust placed there . . . but there it will be, never doubt, my great and good friend…
“My heart is still yours for of all the years of friendship every day is dear.
“I am told that I am on the mend but the recovery is a long time coming…”13
Mend he did, however temporarily, for he was soon issuing an invitation to Tesla with a flash of the old gaiety: “Our ladies will wear their prettiest gowns and the gentlemen will dress in your honor tomorrow, and I suggest that you run true to form and look beautiful in evening dress for the ladies! I want them to see you at your handsomest….
“Yours ever with remembrance of the happy old times, Luka J. Filipov.”14
Then it was Tesla’s turn to be ill. He had grown gaunt and gray, seldom leaving his hotel, subsisting on milk and Nabisco crackers. In his suite enameled empty cracker canisters, all neatly numbered, were stacked in rows on shelves. He used them as storage for odds and ends, as Swezey noted on his frequent calls. The latter was alarmed by the deterioration in the inventor’s condition.
Johnson wrote: “God bless you and help you dear Tesla and may you recover to normal and to this end, do let us come to you. Agnes will be of great use. You have only to telephone. Do this in memory of Mrs. Johnson….”15 But he himself had suffered a relapse and realized that the end was near. “Neither of us can count on many years,” he wrote. “You have few friends besides the Hobsons and us to look after you. Do let Agnes come to you. I cannot. Not to do this will be suicide, dear Nikola.”16 Soon, however, the inventor had mended.
The year 1937 was to be one of sad losses for Tesla. Hobson, his staunch friend of many years, died suddenly on March 16 at the age of sixty-six.
Robert Johnson died on October 14, following recurring illnesses.
Shortly afterward, on a cold midnight, Tesla left the Hotel New Yorker on his regular rounds to scatter feed for his pigeons. Only two blocks from the hotel he was struck by a taxi and hurled to the street. Refusing medical care, he asked to be returned to his hotel room.
Although in a state of shock, he telephoned a Postal Telegraph messenger, William Kerrigan, to call for the pigeon feed and finish his errand. For the next six months, Kerrigan went daily to feed the flocks at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Bryant Park.
It was discovered that Tesla had sustained three broken ribs and a wrenched back. Complications from pneumonia followed, and he lay bedridden until the spring. Although he recuperated, his health remained even more frail thereafter, and he was subject to periods of irrationality.17
From old friends at the Westinghouse Company came word that the Tesla Institute, which had been founded two years earlier at Belgrade, Yugoslavia, was seeking information about his early inventions. Tesla agreed to have his photo taken beside his original split-phase alternating-current motor for the research laboratory that was being equipped in his honor at the institute.18
An endowment had been underwritten for this purpose by the Yugoslav government and individual Slavs, and it would include an honorarium for Tesla of $7,200 per year. Thanks to his native countrymen, “the greatest inventive genius of all time” would at least not be destitute in his final years.
27. COSMIC COMMUNION
One hears many strange things about him,” said Agnes J. Holden, the daughter of Robert and Katharine Johnson. “It’s not right to judge a man who has passed eighty by what he did in his eighties. I remember Tesla when he was thirty-five years old, young and gay, and full of fun.”
But the inventor at
eighty still enjoyed life and was in fact still formulating his far-reaching statement on the universe. Looking forward to his birthday parties, he prepared papers for them months ahead and planned stunning headlines for his friends of the press. Increasingly, the parties were occasions for refuting Einstein, defending Newton, and advancing the cosmic theories that Tesla himself had long mulled over.
The ten-page statement he issued on his eightieth birthday in 1936 was never published in its entirety. Both in it, and in letters to the Times, he waged a continuing debate with leading physicists as to the nature of cosmic rays.1
He alluded often to his own dynamic theory of gravity, which he said would explain “the motions of heavenly bodies under its influence so satisfactorily that it will put an end to idle speculations and false conceptions, as that of curved space.” In his considerable writing on astrophysics and celestial mechanics, however, this theory of gravity was never elucidated.
The curvature of space, he stated, was entirely impossible since action and reaction are coexistent. A curve would be counteracted by straightening. Nor would any explanation of the universe be possible without recognizing the existence of ether and its indispensable function. The Einsteinian revolution notwithstanding, he remained convinced that there was “no energy in matter other than that received from the environment.” And this, he held, applied rigorously to molecules and atoms as well as to the largest heavenly bodies.
In short, he was quite wrong.
For the occasion of his eightieth birthday he spoke of yet more inventions for interstellar communication and energy transmission.
“I am expecting to put before the Institute of France an accurate description of the devices with data and calculations and claim the Pierre Guzman Prize of 100,000 francs for means of communication with other worlds, feeling perfectly sure that it will be awarded to me,” he said. “The money, of course, is a trifling consideration, but for the great historical honor of being the first to achieve this miracle I would be almost willing to give my life.”2 Years later, however, the Institute of France denied that it had ever received an entry from Tesla. In fact, the Guzman Prize is still awaiting a successful claimant.
“My most important invention from a practical point of view,” Tesla continued, “is a new form of tube with apparatus for its operation. In 1896 I brought out a high potential targetless tube which I operated successfully with potentials up to 4 million volts…. At a later period I managed to produce very much higher potentials up to 18 million volts, and then I encountered insurmountable difficulties which convinced me that it was necessary to invent an entirely different form of tube in order to carry out successfully certain ideas I had conceived. This task I found far more difficult than I had expected, not so much in the construction as in the operation of the tube. For many years I was baffled . . . although I made a steady slow progress. Finally… complete success. I produced a tube which it will be hard to improve further. It is of ideal simplicity, not subject to wear, and can be operated at any potential, however, high…. It will carry heavy currents, transform any amount of energy within practical limits, and it permits easy control and regulation of the same. I expect… results undreamed of before. Among others, it will [make possible] the production of cheap radium substitutes in any desired quantity and will be, in general, immensely more effective in the smashing of atoms and the transmutation of matter.” He cautioned that it would not, however, open up a way to utilize atomic energy since his research had convinced him that this was nonexistent.3
He confessed to a certain annoyance because some newspapers had announced that he was prepared to give a full description of his remarkable tube. This would be impossible.
Because of “some obligations I have undertaken regarding the application of the tube for important purposes,” he explained, “I am unable to make a complete disclosure now. But as soon as I am relieved of these obligations a technical description of the device and of all the apparatus will be given to scientific institutions.”
No patents were ever filed nor was a prototype displayed. The second discovery he wanted to announce at his party consisted of “a new method and apparatus for the obtainment of vacua exceeding many times the highest heretofore realized. I think that as much as one-billionth of a micron can be attained. What may be accomplished by means of such vacua… will make possible the production of much more intense effects in electron tubes.”*
There was a pause while wine was poured for his guests and glasses raised. Then the old man explained that he did not agree with ideas currently held regarding the electron. He believed that when an electron left an electrode of extremely high potential and in very high vacuum, it carried an electrostatic charge many times greater than normal.
“This may astonish some of those who think that the particle has the same charge in the tube and outside of it in the air,” he said. “A beautiful and instructive experiment has been contrived by me showing that such is not the case, for as soon as the particle gets out into the atmosphere it becomes a blazing star owing to the escape of the excess charge….”†
Tesla may have been on to something. Four decades later, the returns are still not in on the electrical charge of the electron. Physicists have been trying for years to calculate the charges of subatomic and larger particles. Despite confusing results, no one but Tesla had been willing to suggest that an electric charge could exist that was not equal to the charge of an electron, or of integral multiples thereof—no one, that is, until 1977 when three American physicists reported that they had discovered “evidence for fractional charge.”
The result, if confirmed, “is likely to stand as one of the most important results in physics of this or any century,” reported Science News.4Whether or not subparticles called “loose quarks” are involved in this esoteric mystery may prove to be at the heart of the matter. Tesla, although he did not know a quark from a gluon and lacked the elaborate research equipment of contemporary scientists, had at his service what Hobson had once described as his “cosmic intuition.”
The eighty-first birthday party was a replay of the year before in terms of the inventions announced by the guest of honor, but it brought more international recognition.
His old friend Ambassador Konstantin Fotić presented the Grand Cordon of the White Eagle, the highest order of Yugoslavia, in behalf of young King Peter II through the Regent Paul. Then the Minister from Czechoslovakia, not to be outdone, presented to Tesla the Grand Cordon of the White Lion in the name of President Eduard Beneš. With this came an honorary degree from the University of Prague.
On this occasion the reporters questioned Tesla closely on his repeated claim of having perfected an interplanetary communication system. Once more he alluded to his intention of seeking the Pierre Guzman prize for this achievement.
The invention, he said, was “absolutely developed.”
“I couldn’t be any surer that I can transmit energy 100 miles than I am of the fact that I can transmit energy 1 million miles up,” he said. He spoke of a “different kind of energy,” as he had in the past, that would travel through a channel of less than one-half of one-millionth of a centimeter.5
Life on other planets was a “certitude.” One problem that troubled him, he said, was the danger of hitting other planets with his “needle-point of tremendous energy,” but he hoped that astronomers would help to solve this problem.
His point of energy, said the inventor, could easily be aimed at the moon, and Earthlings would then be able to see the effects, “the splash and the volatilization of matter.” He suggested that advanced thinkers on other planets might even mistake the Tesla energy beam for some form of cosmic ray.
Once again he alluded to his atom-smashing electronic tube with which cheap radium could be produced. “I have built it, demonstrated, and used it. Only a little time will pass before I can give it to the world.”
Were these merely the ramblings of an old man clinging to youthful dreams? The professors poo
h-poohed them, but science writers as usual took him seriously. The world was on the verge of global war. William L. Laurence of The New York Times quoted Tesla in 1940 on the potential of erecting a “Chinese Wall” of his “teleforce” rays around the United States, which could melt airplanes at a distance of 250 miles. With $2 million to build a projection plant (was this the “limitless” market for steel Tesla had spoken of?), he claimed this could be done in three months. Laurence proposed that the government take him up on it. The War Department, as usual, made no overture to the inventor.
Teleforce, said Tesla, was based on four new inventions, of which two had already been tested: 1. a method of producing rays in the free air without a vacuum; 2. a method of producing “very great electrical force”;
3. a method of amplifying this force; and 4. a new method for producing “tremendous electrical propelling force.”6
For years Tesla’s biographers would be unable to find evidence to support the existence of working papers on these inventions. United States security agencies would consistently disavow knowledge of such matters; which was curious, because biographer O’Neill declared that federal agents removed from his home even nonsensitive papers of Tesla’s, and he was never afterward able to discover who had actually “borrowed” his files.
Both O’Neill and (finally) Swezey were to conclude that Tesla’s so-called secret weapons were “so much nonsense.” O’Neill said, “The only knowledge I had was a firm belief that his theories, never adequately revealed to form a basis for judgment, were totally impracticable.” At the same time, however, he admitted that he was never privy to any of Tesla’s unpublished papers and that trying to get information from the inventor had always caused him to clam up in a direct ratio to the effort exerted.
A further curious fact was that even Tesla’s proposals for his turbine and aircraft appeared to vanish from the federal archives.