Tesla, page 12
Tesla unveiled his telautomaton during the height of the Spanish-American War at Madison Square Garden in 1898 to a group of private investors. The main arena, filled with water, was used as a giant swimming pool. For the electrical show, prototype models of the Spanish Armada and American battleships were placed in the simulated sea, and Tom Edison’s son, Tom Jr., working for Marconi, who was not present, used remote control to detonate bombs planted on board the mock Spanish ships.
However, Marconi had yet to perfect selective tuning. Thus, when Tom Jr. pressed the button, not only did he destroy one of the Spanish ships, he also blew apart a desk in the back room where additional bombs were stored. Fortunately, no one got hurt.14 Tesla on the other hand, had a private showing of his telautomaton before such investors as John Oliver Ashton and his father, who was head of Okonite Wire and Cable, the largest cable company in America; Cornelius Vanderbilt; J. Pierpont Morgan; J. D. “Jack” Cheever, a Wall Street broker and principal from Okonite Wire and Cable; his associate Willard Lyman Candee; and also John Hays Hammond Sr., who, according to John O’Neill, invested $40,000 in the venture.15 Another major investor in Tesla’s work was John Jacob Astor. But “Colonel” Astor had armed his gigantic yacht, the Nourmahal, with a naval brigade and four machine guns. Having donated it to the war effort, he was down in Cuba at the time, protecting his property, overseeing aspects of the war.16
Along with Hilbourne Roosevelt, Candee and Cheever had organized the first telephone company in New York in 1877, installing five lines throughout the metropolitan area. A captain in the army and a crack marksman, Candee was also the vice president of the Electric Club of New York and the first to install a telephone line across the Brooklyn Bridge when it was erected in 1884. While running a lighting company in New Jersey and serving as director of the Franklin Avenue Railroad, along with Cheever and Frank Jones, Candee started Okonite Cable and Wire, making his real fortune when Okonite secured a mammoth contract with the Westinghouse Corporation to provide wire and cable for the Niagara Falls operation.17 One can only imagine the mixed emotions the wire and cable bigwigs must have had as they watched firsthand as Tesla inaugurated an entirely new technology that did away with their product.
Caught up in Spanish-American War fever, Tesla did not just promote his telautomaton as a remote-controlled boat or even, astonishingly, as a new race of thinking beings. No, Tesla’s boat was also conceived as a mechanism to end all war.
With plans to go down to Cuba to launch a telautomaton loaded with explosives to “annihilate” the Spanish Armada, Tesla proclaimed, “War will cease to be possible when all the world knows tomorrow that the most feeble of all nations can supply itself immediately with a weapon which will render its coast secure of the united armadas of the world. Battleships will cease to be built, and the mightiest ironclads and the most tremendous artillery afloat will be of no more use than so much scrap iron. And [thus these] irresistible . . . instrument of destruction . . . can be exerted at any distance by an agency of so delicate, so impalpable a quality that I feel that I am justified in predicting that the time will come, incredible as it may seem, when it can be called into action by the mere exercise of the human will.”
Lamenting that he would prefer to be remembered as the inventor who would abolish bellicose confrontations, the wizard of war nevertheless continued to expand on the possibilities. Applying “this system of control to any type of vessel” of any size, Tesla went on to describe the truly diabolical idea of loading a boat with hundreds of tons of explosives which could be detonated “even a mile or so away,” so that a monster wave would ensue that “would overwhelm even the biggest ship ever built.”18
Billed in the December 7, 1898, issue of Electrical Review as the “Genius of Destruction,” Tesla had claimed that his submarine boat, “loaded with torpedoes,” could set out without a crew, “make its devious way along a surface through dangerous channels and mine beds, watching for its prey . . . discharge its deadly weapon and return to the hand that sent it.”19 Commenting on this article, Electrical Review stated that “the Genius of Destruction” would seem to have, then, two aims: “It creates evil, but mostly good [because] it could hasten the utopian dream of the abolition of war.”20
As the forerunner to the now seemingly ubiquitous drone strikes occurring in this era in the Middle East, the promise of Tesla’s “devil automata” spread all the way to Europe, where articles on the invention were read by Mark Twain, who was staying with friends in Vienna.
November 17, 1898
Dear Mr. Tesla,
Have you Austrian and English patents on that destructive terror which you have been inventing?—And if so, won’t you set a price upon them and commission me to sell them?
I know cabinet ministers of both countries—and of Germany, too; likewise William II. I shall be in Europe a year, yet.
Here in the hotel, the other night when some interested men were discussing means to persuade the nations to join the Czar & disarm, I advised them to seek something more sure than disarmament . . . to contrive something against which fleets and armies would be helpless and thus make war impossible.
I did not suspect that you were already attending to that, and setting ready to introduce into the Earth permanent peace and disarmament in a practical and mandatory way.
I know you are a very busy man, but will you steal time and drop me a line?
Sincerely yours,
Mark Twain21
Tesla’s telautomaton was still in a very primitive state, and so the deal with Twain was never consummated. Nevertheless, Tesla’s view for ending human conflict was played out with his conclusion that machines would fight instead of men and, further, that if all countries had such advanced weaponry systems, war would become a suicidal venture and so no country would ever go to war. This was a controversial stance embraced by some and completely rejected as a cynical rationalization by others.
One way or another, this incredible paradigm-shifting invention contained within it not only the concepts of remote control, robotics, and artificial intelligence, but also selective tuning; the seeds of encryption and protected privacy; cell phone technology (that is, the ability to create an unlimited number of wireless channels); and such everyday devices as the garage door opener, wi-fi, and the TV remote.
THINK TANK
September 29, 1916
Dear Mr. Miessner,
In an article in The Century Magazine, a copy of which I am forwarding . . . I have related the circumstances which led me to develop the idea of a self-propelled automaton. My experiments were begun some time in 1892 and from that period on until 1895 in my laboratory at 35 South 5th Avenue, I exhibited a number of contrivances and perfected plans for several complete telautomata.
After the destruction of my lab by fire in ’95, there was an interruption in these labors which, however, were resumed in ’96 in my new lab at 46 East Houston Street where I made more striking demonstrations.... [Beginning the following year I constructed] complete automata in the form of a boat . . . described in my original patent specification #613,809 . . . [circa 1897] often exhibited to visitors who never ceased to wonder at the performances....
In that year, I also constructed a larger boat which I exhibited. . . in Chicago during a lecture before the Commercial Club [in 1898] . . . limiting myself to mechanisms controlled from distance but to machines possessed of their own intelligence. Since that time I have advanced greatly in the evolution of the invention and think that the time is not distant which I shall show an automaton which, left to itself, will act as though possessed of reason and without any willful control from outside. Whatever be the practical possibilities of such an achievement, it will mark the beginning of a new epoch in mechanics.
Tesla went on to describe the use of “individualized control; that is, one based on the co-operation of several circuits of different periods of vibration, a principle” that was developed in his patents #723,188 and 723,189 of March 1903. This device, Tesla stated, was “demonstrate[d] before the Chief Examiner, Seeley” in Washington, DC, in 1898.
In my . . . investigations in Colorado from 1899–1900, I developed, among other things, two important discoveries . . . described in my patents #685,953 and 119,732 . . . taken out at a later date. These two advances make it possible to supply an automaton great amounts of energy and also to control it with utmost accuracy when it is entirely out of sight at any distance.
During the past few years, I have devoted much of my time to the perfection of a small, high speed vessel [embodied] with certain new means of propulsion in an endeavor to produce a most effective weapon of defense, such as would seem to be at this time of paramount importance to the United States.
I may be able to respond to your request to furnish you one or two illustrations . . . for publication in your book which I hope will prove a complete success.
Yours very sincerely,
N. Tesla22
In 1911, Tesla formed a partnership with John Hays Hammond Jr., son of industrialist John Hays Hammond Sr. Jack, as he was called, had known Tesla since he was a boy, as his father had helped fund Tesla’s remote-controlled boat. Having worked in the patent office, Jack became a student of invention and would eventually compile hundreds of patents on everything from a microwave oven to musical instruments to radio-guidance systems.
A graduate of Yale University and a protégé of Alexander Graham Bell, Jack became enamored of Tesla’s 1903 patent on selective tuning. In 1909, during his senior year, he asked his father to arrange a meeting with the “Serbian High Priest of Telautomatics,” and in that way Jack, just twenty-one years old, took a train down from Yale to meet the venerated inventor at his offices at the Metropolitan Towers, at the time the tallest building in the city. Jack praised Tesla for his “prophetic genius patent” because it provided the means for creating an unlimited number of private wireless channels, and it is quite possible that Tesla reciprocated by traveling up to Gloucester, Massachusetts, where the Hammonds resided, to see Jack’s crudely built remote-controlled robotic dog on wheels.
Jack began working at the patent office and also talked Tesla into forming a company together called the Tesla-Hammond Wireless Company. “In thinking of this name,” Jack wrote, “I have followed Emersonian advice, and as you can see have hitched my chariot to a star.”23
Coming from a wealthy family, literally living like a prince, Jack would go on to commission a naked statue of himself with a fig leaf strategically placed, and, about a decade later, in the 1920s, erect a medieval castle as his home, complete with parapets, towers, and a drawbridge, a bulky entrance door dating from feudal times, narrow winding staircases made of stone, a central atrium shining down onto a swimming pool, secret passageways, and a basement auditorium that housed a gigantic organ—all of which overlooked the bay in Gloucester, Massachusetts. And it was there, at the castle, during the Roaring Twenties, that Jack invited the Hollywood glitterati for nights and weekends.
Initially, Tesla told Hammond that “the Tesla-Hammond combination looks good to me, but we should go at it with some circumspection.” Thus the partnership, sadly, ended up not in “telautomatics” but rather in the design and perfection of turbines. Tesla’s wireless patents were still controlled by Morgan, and that was a key problem, but Tesla was probably also reluctant to share all he knew in that capacity.24
In retrospect, this restricted arrangement by Tesla appears shortsighted as it ultimately monkey-wrenched the partnership. Nevertheless, torpedo engines were a sizeable market, and the duo had pending deals with the United States armed forces and foreign governments, particularly with the Germans and Japanese. Unfortunately, the impending war destroyed this foreign market, but also, Tesla was having difficulty perfecting his specialized engine.
Hammond, who over the course of a lifetime would amass over five hundred patents, proceeded simultaneously to set up a military think tank in Gloucester in radio-dynamics, and he hired Fritz Lowenstein, Tesla’s closest engineering acolyte, and also Benjamin Franklin Miessner (1890–1976), a fellow Yale graduate from the School of Engineering. Although Hammond continued to help Tesla develop the turbines, his real passion was in remote control, so it seems that his relationship with Tesla was hampered, to say the least.
Operating in secret for the military, the think tank worked on perfecting its equipment. In Lowenstein’s case, this meant further developing the radio tube known as the audion. And while this was happening, Hammond installed a more complex remote system in a sizeable boat that he named the Natalia, after his daughter.
Certainly, the development of an efficient motor to be placed in torpedoes had lucrative potential. In fact, Tesla had a pending contract to sell thousands of them to the Germans. Also working to reconfigure the motor to fit into airplanes and, on a much larger scale, to power ocean liners, Tesla kept attempting to expand the business. Since all of the correspondence between Tesla and Hammond concerns the motors, there is substantial reason to believe that their relationship unfortunately stayed clear of radio-dynamics.
Fearful of stepping on the toes of his partnership with Morgan, Tesla may have also understood that the perfection of radio-dynamic control was many years away, so it made more sense to deal with the nuts and bolts of developing his turbines.
One way or another, even that avenue was fraught with unforeseen difficulties. Tesla required enormous sums to perfect his turbines, and this caused a tremendous strain on their relationship. Jack, who had apparently kept his job at the patent office, was working on writing a thesis on the history of the radio and remote control. Yet, at the same time, his associate, Miessner, was putting together his own dossier on the same subject, so this would result in two separate treatises on essentially the same topic.
While still helping to fund Tesla’s turbines, Hammond also began working with Elmer Sperry to develop a reliable way to connect a Sperry gyroscope to a steering gear, a mechanism that came to be known as the autopilot. Sperry, who had attended Tesla’s famous 1891 lecture at Columbia College, and whose famous invention was, in fact, based completely on Tesla’s rotating magnetic field, provided the stabilizing compass while Hammond provided the radio-dynamic technology.
Since Hammond was working in secret for the military, this allowed “Fritz Lowenstein’s contribution in making the DeForest grid audion [radio tube] into an amplifier and oscillator” to stay out of the press and out of the eyes of competitors.25 Lowenstein’s receiving device or advanced audion, also known as a “controller,” was a real improvement on Hammond’s radio-guidance system, which, at the time, was being developed for the torpedo for the Navy. Although the work was top secret because of its military implications, Lowenstein was able to get this aspect released, and he later sold the patent to AT&T for $150,000. Lowenstein was so thrilled with the deal that he made a copy of the check and often showed it to disbelieving colleagues.26
After leaving Tesla’s employ, Lowenstein began in 1910 working for the Radio Telephone Company of Newark, on developing a wireless telephone. “When the Radio Telephone Company failed, Lowenstein started his own laboratory on Nassau Street in New York City,” but that enterprise failed and so he began working for Hammond.27 In 1911, Hammond traveled to Germany while Lowenstein held the fort in Gloucester. Two years later, Lowenstein returned to his home in the Czech Republic to confer with his family and probably check out the competition. Meanwhile, Hammond tried to tie up loose ends, so he invited Lee DeForest to Gloucester to discuss the invention. The meeting was short, and DeForest soon returned to the West Coast to perfect his version of the audion while seeking legal help to protect it from such interlopers as Lowenstein and the new kid on the block, Columbia University graduate Edwin Armstrong. DeForest approached AT&T with the help of John Stone Stone, another well known wireless inventor and president of the Institute of Radio Engineers. (Stone’s mother’s maiden name, by coincidence, was also Stone.)
Other big competitors included Reginald Fessenden (1866–1932), who attempted to set up a transatlantic wireless company only to have it collapse in a storm, and the growing German wireless behemoth Telefunken, which was operating in the United States under the moniker of Atlantic Communications Company. With offices located in the small tower of the Trinity Building at 111 Broadway, down by Wall Street, Telefunken hired, in 1909, Lloyd Espenschied (1889–1986), who stayed there for a year. Espenschied, who would amass over one hundred patents and go on to work for AT&T and Bell Telephone Laboratories, would, forty years later, pen a comprehensive article on the history of wireless communication and radio-dynamic control, “Discussion of History of Modern Radio-Electronic Technology.”
Competing against Telefunken, Hammond, now in a partnership with Tesla, provided wireless sets for the Navy in 1912 as he cultivated a way to create a plurality of carrier channels of intermediate frequencies. However, the Navy was still reluctant to get financially involved, particularly when war broke out, “as long as [it] raged only in Europe.” Meanwhile, Hammond continued to partner with Sperry to further develop the autopilot and at the same time continue to perfect means for directing said torpedoes from stationary sites such as crow’s nests or even blimps.28
Still collaborating with Lowenstein, Hammond continued to develop high-frequency tubes, which came to play a significant role in the perfection of the radio. In Hammond’s words, “This early work for radio-dynamics was conducted in secret in the same sense that the Manhattan Project in atomic energy was conducted in secret.... Parts of the work were kept from Congress by the military . . . [and] certain patent applications were placed in the secret archives of the Patent Office.” Military applications in the defense of the nation were the issue.29
