Dr. Trump’s evaluation and Swezey’s assessment of Tesla’s “secret weapons” have, however, received updated concurrence by Lambert Dolphin, assistant director of the Radio Physics Laboratory at SRI International, who has studied the inventor’s work and his ball-lightning research for two decades. He points out that the fields of knowledge of both physics and electrical engineering have grown exponentially since about 1930.
“Whole libraries are now required just to keep track of all the theory and experience that have unfolded since Tesla’s time,” he says. “Our mathematical and practical understanding of electricity, magnetism, electromagnetic theory, and radio communications has continued to grow explosively ever since 1950, or should I say 1970!”
Tesla, Dolphin believes, “may have had intuitive insight into lasers and high-energy particle beams as well as ultra-high voltage phenomena, but now that we understand all the physics much more, we can easily evaluate many of his extravagant later-life claims.”10
In fact, there is no good evidence to suggest that Tesla anticipated lasers. His “teleforce rays” seem to have been concerned exclusively with high-energy particle beams. We still do not know precisely how he intended them to work, although, says Dolphin, the available evidence suggests that Tesla may not have paid sufficient attention to how greatly such beams may be absorbed or dispersed by molecules and atoms in the air. In any case, even if we did understand Tesla’s intentions more clearly, we should be hard put to compare them to the current state of the art, much of which is hidden under high security classifications.
Nevertheless, Tesla’s work with high voltages to accelerate charged particles does seem to have been decidedly in what is now the mainstream of physical research. “In this field,” says Dolphin, “he anticipated modern linear and circular nuclear accelerators. Such machines today have energy levels of tens of billions of electron volts or at least 1,000 times greater energy levels than Tesla ever attained.
“I am sure his magnifying transmitters were spectacular. . . . He probably generated some interesting arcs and sparks that were what we now study as plasmas. The containment of plasmas is a huge area of modern physics. For example . . . to see if small amounts of matter can be turned into immense amounts of electrical power in carefully contained plasmas.” But Tesla’s early discoveries and inventions, he concludes, were indeed ingenious and ahead of their time.11
As this book goes to press, the Pentagon is studying the creation of a new branch of the armed services, to be known as the U.S. Space Command, whose primary arsenal will consist of laser and particle-beam weapons fired from “space battleships.” In prose not unlike Tesla’s own, a Department of Defense fact sheet compares particle beams to “directed lightning bolts”—although without explicitly admitting that such a weapon has in fact been developed.
It is difficult to assess the current state of the beam-weapons program because virtually everything about it is heavily classified. Apparently the technology involved has proved to be complex and difficult, raising questions about the project’s feasibility, but many experts nevertheless seem to be hard at work on the problem. At the same time, the activities of the other nations in this area have been monitored carefully by agencies of the federal government. Indeed the possibility of creating a family of particle-beam weapons has been a subject of serious discussion in this country for at least the past twenty-five years, and it is, in my opinion, of no little significance that as long ago as 1947 the Military Intelligence Service identified the writings about a particle beam among Tesla’s scientific papers as being “of extreme importance.”
Since he had no laboratory in the later years of his life, Tesla was unable to develop his ideas. But it is undeniable that he described in general terms half a century ago what may prove to be one of the main weapons of the Space Age. And to the end of his days, Tesla the pacifist hoped that such knowledge would be used, not for war among Earthlings, but for interplanetary communication with our neighbors in space, of whose existence he felt certain.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
Some of Tesla’s own writing—lectures, articles, patents, papers, and letters—is available in the United States. His most important lectures and his brief autobiography, in bound volumes, are listed in the prologue to the reference notes.
Citation of biographies of Tesla by O’Neill, Hunt, and Draper, and others may be found in the reference notes. The O’Neill manuscript and the Swezey Collection are to be found at the Smithsonian Institution, Dibner Library.
Serious Tesla scholars will wish to consult the annotated Dr. Nikola Tesla Bibliography by J. T. Ratzlaff and L. I. Anderson (San Carlos, California, Ragusan Press, 1979), for it contains some 3,000 sources of writings by and about Tesla. “Priority in the Invention of Radio, Tesla v. Marconi” by Leland Anderson may be obtained through the Antique Wireless Association, Monograph New Series No. 4.
A new means of analyzing Tesla’s inventions is provided in Dr. Nikola Tesla: Selected Patent Wrappers from the National Archives by J. T. Ratzlaff (Millbrae, Ca., Tesla Book Co., 1980). These “file wrappers” provide explanations and correspondence between the patentee and the Patent Office to overcome objections raised by the examiner.
Tesla’s Colorado Springs Notes, 1899–1900, published in 1978 by the Tesla Museum, is available through the Tesla Book Company of Mill-brae, California.
The Library of Congress Manuscripts Division contains microfilm correspondence between Tesla and George Scherff, Robert Underwood Johnson, Mark Twain, members of the Morgan family, George Westinghouse, and the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company.
In addition original correspondence and photographs may be found at the Butler Library, Rare Books and Manuscripts, Columbia University, including letters between Tesla and Johnson, Scherff, and others. The New York Public Library and the Engineering Societies Library, New York, have additional materials—the latter a large collection on legal proceedings for infringement of Tesla’s AC patents.
Insight into the heyday of American invention and scientific and industrial growth are available in many publications but perhaps most colorfully in Matthew Josephson’s Edison (New York, McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1959) and The Robber Barons (New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1934, 1962), Ronald W. Clark’s Edison (New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977), and Robert A. Conot’s A Streak of Luck (New York, Seaview Books, 1979).
See also Robert Silverberg’s Edison and the Power Industry, Princeton, N.J., D. Van Nostrand Co., Inc., 1967), The Electric Century 1874–1974, reprint from Electrical World, McGraw-Hill, 1973; “Edison-ian Vignettes,” IEEE Spectrum, Vol. 15, No. 9 (September 1978); Francis Jehl, “Menlo Park Reminiscences,” The Edison Institute, Dearborn, Mich., 1939, Vol. II, pp. 839–40; Alfred O. Tate, Edison’s Open Door (New York, E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1938); Daniel J. Kevles, The Physicists (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1978); W. A. Swanberg, Citizen Hearst (New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1961); Bernard Baruch, Baruch, My Own Story (New York, Henry Holt & Co., 1957); Margaret L. Coit, Mr. Baruch (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1957); and Henry G. Prout, A Life of George Westinghouse (New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922, 1971).
Rebecca West’s Black Lamb, Gray Falcon (New York, Viking, 1940, 1941) is a Westerner’s first-person classic among many works attempting to sort out the complex pre–World War II history of the Yugoslavs. For an intimate recent view of an immigrant’s life, read Slovene Immigrant History by Ivan Molek, translated from the manuscript Over Hill and Dale by Mary Molek (M. Molek, Inc., P.O. Box 453, Dover, Del., 19901). On the Communist revolution, Memoir of a Revolutionary by Milovan Djilas (New York, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973).
REFERENCE NOTES
Tesla’s lectures and his own writings are to be found in the following:
Nikola Tesla, Lectures, Patents, Articles, Nikola Tesla Museum, 1956, reprinted 1973 by Health Research, Mokelumne Hills, California 95245; lectures in part in Thomas Commerford Martin’s Inventions, Researches and Writin
gs of Nicola Tesla, originally published in 1894 in The Electrical Engineer, New York, and republished 1977 by Omni Publications, Hawthorne, California 90250. See also: “My Inventions,” Tesla’s autobiography (which appeared originally in the Electrical Experimenter, May, June, July, October, 1919), republished by školska Knjiga, Zagreb, Yugoslavia, 1977, with the Nikola Tesla Museum.
Included in the first two volumes are these important lectures: “A New System of Alternate Current Motors and Transformers,” American Institute of Electrical Engineers, New York, May 16, 1888, describing his polyphase system of alternating current; “Experiments with Alternate Currents of Very High Frequency and Their Application to Methods of Artificial Illumination,” AIEE, Columbia College, May 20, 1891; “Experiments with Alternate Currents of High Potential and High Frequency,” IEE, London, February 3, 1892; repeated before Royal Institution, London, February 4; and again February 19 in Paris before the Société Internationale des Electriciens and the Société Française de Physique. In these he introduces the Tesla coil for high-frequency, high-voltage research effects.
They also include “On Light and Other High Frequency Phenomena,” February 24, 1893, before the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, and again in St. Louis before the National Electric Light Assn., March 1. Here he covered the principles of radio communication. “Mechanical and Electrical Oscillators,” August 25, 1893, before the International Electrical Congress at the World’s Fair, Chicago. “On Electricity,” at the Ellicott Club, Buffalo, to commemorate Niagara Falls power, January 12, 1897. “On the Streams of Lenard and Röntgen, with Novel Apparatus for Their Production,” before the New York Academy of Sciences, April 6, 1897. “High Frequency Oscillators for Electro-therapeutic and Other Purposes,” before the Electrotherapeutic Association, Buffalo, September 13, 1898.
Tesla’s Colorado Springs Notes, 1899–1900, published in 1978 by the Tesla Museum in Yugoslavia, is available through the Tesla Book Company of Millbrae, California.
CHAPTER 1. MODERN PROMETHEUS
1. John J. O’Neill, Prodigal Genius, (New York, David McKay Co., 1944), pp. 93–95, 283; Inez Hunt and W. W. Draper, Lightning in His Hand (Hawthorne, Calif., Omni Publications, 1964, 1977), pp. 54–55.
2. Microfilm letters, Twain to Tesla, Library of Congress, n.d.
3. Chauncey McGovern, “The New Wizard of the West,” Pearson’s Magazine, London, May 1899.
4. O’Neill, Genius, p. 158.
CHAPTER 2. A GAMBLING MAN
1. Nikola Tesla, “My Inventions,” Electrical Experimenter, May, June, July, October 1919, republished by školska Knjiga, Zagreb, Yugoslavia, 1977, p. 30.
2. Ibid, pp. 30–31.
3. Ibid., p. 26.
4. Ibid., pp. 8–9.
5. Ibid., p. 17.
6. Ibid, p. 18.
7. Ibid., p. 9–10.
8. Ibid., p. 10–12.
9. Ibid., p. 12–13.
10. Ibid., p. 12.
11. Ibid., p. 13.
12. Ibid., p. 13.
13. Ibid., p. 14.
14. Ibid., p. 16.
15. Ibid., p. 14.
16. Ibid., p. 35–36.
17. Ibid.
18. O’Neill, Genius, pp. 36–37.
19. Tesla, “Inventions,” p. 41.
20. Nikola Trbojevich, Spomenica (Anniversary Booklet of the Serb National Federation), 1901–51, Pittsburgh, Pa., p. 172. Source: Immigrant Archives, University of Minnesota Library.
21. Tesla, “Inventions,” p. 18.
CHAPTER 3. IMMIGRANTS OF DISTINCTION
1. Tesla, “Inventions,” pp. 42–44.
2. Ibid., p. 43.
3. Ibid., p. 44.
4. Kenneth M. Swezey, “Nikola Tesla,” Science, Vol. 127, No. 3307 (May 16, 1956), p. 1148. O’Neill, Genius, pp. 48–51.
5. Tesla, “Inventions,” p. 46.
6. Ibid., p. 46.
7. Ibid., p. 48.
8. Ibid., p. 50.
9. Ibid., p. 50.
CHAPTER 4. AT THE COURT OF MR. EDISON
1. Matthew Josephson, Edison (New York, McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1959).
2. Ibid.
3. O’Neill, Genius, p. 60.
4. Tesla, “Inventions,” p. 51.
5. Ibid., p. 54.
6. O’Neill, Genius, p. 64.
7. Josephson, Edison, pp. 87–88.
8. New York Times, October 19, 1931.
9. Josephson, Edison.
10. O’Neill, Genius, p. 64.
11. Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons (New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1934, 1962).
12. Ibid.
13. O’Neill, Genius, p. 64; Electrical Review, New York, August 14, 1886, p. 12.
14. O’Neill, Genius, p. 66.
CHAPTER 5. THE WAR OF THE CURRENTS BEGINS
1.Electrical Review, May 12, 1888, p. 1; “Nikola Tesla,” Swezey, p. 1149; O’Neill, Genius, pp. 67–68. 359
2. O’Neill, Genius, p. 69.
3. B. A. Behrend, Minutes, Annual Meeting American Institute of Electrical Engineers, New York, May 18, 1917, Smithsonian Institution.
4. Josephson, Edison.
5. Ibid., p. 346.
6. Ibid., p. 346.
7. Ibid., p. 349.
8. Ibid., p. 347.
9. Ibid., p. 349.
10. Josephson, The Robber Barons.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. O’Neill, Genius, p. 84.
14. Ibid., p. 81.
15. Ibid., p. 82.
16. Speech, Institute of Immigrant Welfare, Hotel Biltmore, New York, May 12, 1938, read in absentia.
17. Letter to Tesla from Michael Pupin, December 19, 1891, Tesla Museum, Belgrade.
18. Hunt and Draper, Lightning.
CHAPTER 6. ORDER OF THE FLAMING SWORD
1. “Experiments with Alternate Currents of Very High Frequency,” a lecture at Columbia College by Tesla on May 20, 1891.
2. T. C. Martin, ed.: The Inventions, Researches and Writings of Nikola Tesla (Hawthorne, California, Omni Publications, 1977), pp. 200–201.
3. Ibid., p. 236.
4. Ibid., pp. 245–64; also O’Neill, Genius, pp. 150–54.
5. O’Neill, Genius, pp. 146–49.
6. Ibid., pp. 152–53.
7. Ibid., pp. 150–51. See also Tesla’s lecture of February 1892 before the Royal Society of Great Britain and the Society of Electrical Engineers of France, Paris.
8. Martin, Inventions, p. 261.
9.The Story of Science in America (New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1967).
10. Testimonial from Maj. Edwin H. Armstrong on Tesla’s seventy-fifth birthday, Tesla Museum, Belgrade, Yugoslavia, n.d.
11. Letter to Tesla from J. A. Fleming, 1892, Tesla Museum, Belgrade.
12. O’Neill, Genius, p. 88.
13. Nikola Tesla, “Massage with Currents of High Frequency,” Electrical Engineer, December 23, 1891, p. 697; Martin, Inventions, p. 394; O’Neill, Genius, p. 91; Nikola Tesla, Lectures, Patents, Articles, Nikola Tesla Museum, 1956; reprinted 1973 by Health Research, Mokelumne Hills, California 95245, p. L-156, Lecture to American Electro-Therapeutic Assn., Buffalo, September 13, 1898.
CHAPTER 7. RADIO
1. Tesla, “Inventions,” p. 69.
2. Ibid., p. 62.
3. Letter from Sir William Crookes to Tesla, March 8, 1892, Tesla Museum, Belgrade, Yugoslavia.
4. Tesla, “Inventions,” p. 80.
5. Ibid., p. 81.
6. Ibid., p. 82.
7. O’Neill, Genius, p. 264.
8. Tesla, “Inventions,” p. 62.
9. O’Neill, Genius, pp. 131–34; United States Reports, Cases Adjudged in the Supreme Court of the United States, Vol. 320, Oct. Term, 1942: Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America v. United States, pp. 1–80; L. I. Anderson, “Priority in Invention of Radio, Tesla v.Marconi,” Antique Wireless Assn., March 1980, monograph; see also abbreviated translation, Voice of Canadian Serbs, Chicago, July 16, 1980.
10.United St
ates Reports, “Transcript of Record,” p. 979. Also: Anderson, “Priority.”
11. Martin, Inventions, pp. 477–85.
12. Paper by Tesla for birthday press conference, around 1938. See also lecture by Tesla to American Electro-Therapeutic Assn., Buffalo, N.Y., Sept. 13, 15, 1898.
13. Martin, Inventions, pp. 486–93.
CHAPTER 8. HIGH SOCIETY
1. Bernard Baruch, My Own Story (New York, Henry Holt & Co., 1957).
2. Julian Hawthorne Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
3. Arthur Brisbane, “Our Foremost Electrician,” New York World, July 22, 1894, p. 17. Also Electrical World, August 4, 1894, p. 27.
4. O’Neill, Genius.
5. O’Neill, Genius, pp. 288–89.
6. Julian Hawthorne Papers.
7. Waldemar Kaempffert, “Electrical Sorcerer,” New York Times Book Reviews, February 4, 1945, pp. 6, 22.
8. O’Neill, Genius, p. 167.
9. Margaret Storm, Return of the Dove (Baltimore, Maryland, Margaret Storm Publication, 1959).
10. Tesla, “Inventions,” p. 78.
11. Swezey, “Nikola Tesla,” p. 1158.
12. Hunt and Draper, Lightning, p. 199.
13. O’Neill, Genius, pp. 302–03.
14. Ibid., p. 303.
CHAPTER 9. HIGH ROAD, LOW ROAD
1. Swezey, “Nikola Tesla,” p. 2. Also, O’Neill, Genius, pp. 103–06.
2. Swezey, “Nikola Tesla,” p. 3.
3. B. A. Behrend, “Dynamo-Electric Machinery and Its Evolution,” Western Electrician, September 1907.
4. Tesla, “Inventions,” p. 63.
5. O’Neill, Genius, pp. 238–43.
6. Martin, Inventions, p. 292.
7. Letter, Katharine Johnson to Tesla, February 1894, Tesla Museum, Belgrade, Yugoslavia.
8. Letter, Tesla to Katharine Johnson, May 11, 1894, Rare Books & Manuscripts, Butler Library, Columbia University.