Tesla, page 21
The United States government, through Roosevelt, knew that Marconi had infringed on Tesla’s fundamental patents. In fact, it was Tesla’s proven declaration that was the basis and central argument that the government had against Marconi when Marconi sued in the first place. However, rather than deal in the midst of war with the truth and with a difficult genius whose present work appeared to be in a realm above and beyond the operation of simple radio telephones and wireless transmitters, Roosevelt, Daniels, President Wilson, and the U.S. Navy took no interest in protecting Tesla’s tower.56
In July of 1917, Tesla packed his bags and said good-bye to the Waldorf-Astoria. Having lived there for two decades, he talked George Boldt Jr. into allowing him to keep a large percentage of his personal effects in the basement until he found a suitable place for transferring them. “I was sorry to hear about your father,” Tesla told the new manager, whose father, George Boldt Sr., had died just a few months before.
Preparing to move to Chicago to work on his bladeless turbines, Tesla was invited to the Johnsons’ for a farewell dinner. Soon to become the ambassador to Italy, Robert was now directing the affairs of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an organization that counted among its ranks Daniel Chester French, Charles Dana Gibson, Winslow Homer, Henry James and his brother William, Charles McKim, Henry Cabot Lodge, Teddy Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson. Taking a weekend train, Tesla moved into the Blackstone Hotel, alongside the University of Chicago, as Wardenclyffe waited silently for its ignoble end.
It was an unusual winter, with both rainstorms and snowstorms and a long cold snap that froze the ponds and also created a sheet of ice atop the cupola at Wardenclyffe. Local kids had been sneaking onto the property for years, challenging each other to climb to the top, which rose eighteen stories above the flat land that was Long Island.
On a day for the ages, Dave Madison called on his girlfriend and told her to bring her ice skates.
“Where we going?” Dorie wanted to know.
“It’s a surprise,” Dave said. Sneaking onto the property, he took her to the base of the tower. She looked way up and then agreed to accompany him on the climb.
When they hit the tenth “floor,” Dorie had had enough. She wanted down. It was scary up there, but Dave egged her on. “Trust me,” was all he said, an amazing gleam in his eye.
Eight “floors” later, they reached the top, and there it was, a perfect ice skating rink, nearly twenty stories up, high above the landscape, a full fifty-eight feet across.
The young couple put their skates on and undertook this breathtaking experience, one unparalleled in the annals of ice skating lore. From atop this soaring edifice, they could look down to Tesla’s mysterious laboratory, still filled with electrical paraphernalia including lathes and broken parts of motors; they could look east or west to the occasional church or hamlet and the hundreds of acres of potato fields, or they could look north, out over the Sound all the way to the Connecticut shores. It was a magical moment skating up there, one they would remember for the rest of their days. Dave wanted to take her again the following weekend, but Dorie’s legs were still wobbly, and then it was too late to return.57
On Monday morning, the inventor hired a limousine to drop him at the headquarters of Pyle National Corporation. Having already shipped prototypes to Chicago to give workers a head start, now Tesla could work at an intense pace in an entirely new setting, his goal being the perfection of his revolutionary bladeless turbines.
At night, the elder wizard liked to walk across the street from his hotel to the Museum of Arts and Sciences, the only building remaining from the World’s Fair of 1893. There, he could stand by the great columns and think back to a time when, daily, hundreds of thousands would stream into this enchanted city powered by his vision. One Saturday, in the heat of summer, he took the mile walk along Lake Michigan, past the Midway to a series of small lakes and a park where once stood the Court of Honor. There, at the entranceway to a spot near Lake Michigan, Tesla learned that the Statue of the Republic, which had been destroyed in a fire, was to be replaced. Although the replica would be nowhere near as high, it was still gratifying to know that the great Chicago Fair would get more of the recognition it deserved. With him was a letter from George Scherff.
August 20, 1917
Dear Mr. Tesla,
I was deeply grieved and shocked when I read the enclosed, but I have the supreme confidence that more glorious work will arise from the ruins.
I trust that your work in Chicago is progressing to your satisfaction.
Yours respectfully,
George Scherff 58
It was during the height of the world conflagration, when the Smiley Steel Company’s explosives expert circled the gargantuan transmitter to place a charge around each major strut, and nail the coffin shut on Tesla’s dream. With the Associated Press recording the event and military personnel apparently present, the magnifying transmitter was leveled, the explosion alarming many of the Shoreham residents.
And with the death of the World Telegraphy Center came the birth of the Radio Broadcasting Corporation, a unique conglomerate of private concerns under the auspices of the U.S. government. Meetings were held behind closed doors in Washington between President Wilson, who wanted America to gain “radio supremacy;” Navy Secretary Daniels; his assistant Franklin Roosevelt; and representatives from General Electric, American Marconi, AT&T, and the Westinghouse Corporation. With J. P. Morgan and Company on the board of directors and the Marconi patents as the backbone of the organization, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) was formed. It would combine resources from these megacorporations, all who had cross-licensing agreements with each other and all who co-owned the company. Here was another entente cordiale reminiscent of the AC polyphase days, which was not so for the originator of the invention. It was a second major time that Tesla would be carved from his creation, with a secret deal probably concocted that absolved the government from paying any licensing fee to Marconi in lieu of them burying their Tesla archives. David Sarnoff, as managing director, would soon take over the reins of the entire operation and morph it, over the next twenty years, into NBC, the National Broadcasting Radio and TV Company. The New York Sun inaccurately reported:
U.S. BLOWS UP TESLA RADIO TOWER
Suspecting that German spies were using the big wireless tower erected at Shoreham, L.I., about twenty years ago by Nikola Tesla, the Federal Government ordered the tower destroyed and it was recently demolished with dynamite. During the past month several strangers had been seen lurking about the place. The destruction of Nikola Tesla’s famous tower . . . shows forcibly the great precautions being taken at this time to prevent any news of military importance of getting to the enemy.59
At the end of the war, President Wilson returned all remaining confiscated radio stations to their rightful owners. American Marconi, now RCA, of course, was the big beneficiary. Seeing an opportunity, France decided to give up their wireless plant at Tuckerton and sold it to RCA for a quick profit.
After the true demise of the Wardenclyffe dream, Tesla made several efforts over the next few years to manufacture equipment that he hoped to sell to generate the capital he needed to resurrect the operation. He had a dozen or more other projects and a revenue stream from foreign patents, but in terms of generating the kind of money he needed to rejuvenate his precious tower, ultimately, he failed. At the same time, because the place had been ransacked, the aging wizard lost a large percentage of his records and equipment that had been on site.
In 1920, the Westinghouse Corporation was granted the right to “manufacture, use and sell apparatus covered by the [Marconi] patents.” Westinghouse also formed an independent radio station that became as prominent as RCA. At the end of the year, Tesla wrote a letter to E. M Herr, president of the company, a man he had known for a quarter century, about the new developments in the radio industry. “It will probably be news to you that, with the exception of non-essentials, nothing is employed in the art except devices of my invention. But the plants are ridiculously inefficient owing to the fact that the experts are completely misled by the Hertz-wave theory.. . . If you are desirous to inaugurate a wireless system a century ahead of that in use at present, I can put you in a position to do so, provided that your company is willing to come to an understanding with me on terms decidedly more generous than those under which they acquired my system of power transmission thirty years ago.”60
Unfortunately, Herr wrote back with “regret that under the present circumstances we cannot proceed further with any developments of your activities. I thought it best to let you know this frankly so that you would not be under a misapprehension of our position,” signing the letter, “Yours very truly, E.M. Herr, President.”61
However, this did not stop the Westinghouse Corporation, a few months later, from requesting the lone inventor to “speak to our ‘invisible audience’ some Thursday night in the near future [over our] radiotelephone broadcasting station.”62
November 30, 1921
Gentleman,
Twenty-one years ago I promised a friend, the late J. Pierpont Morgan, that my world-system, then under construction . . . would enable the voice of a telephone subscriber to be transmitted to any point of the globe....
I prefer to wait until my project is completed before addressing an invisible audience and beg you to excuse me.
Very truly yours,
N. Tesla63
11
Tesla’s Mysterious 1931 Pierce-Arrow
The transmission of power by wireless will do away with the present necessity for carrying fuel on the airplane or airship. Th[eir] motors. . . will be energized by the transmitted power, and there will be no such thing as limitation of the radius of action, since they can pick up power at any point on the globe . . . just as trains on tracks are now supplied with electrical energy through rails on wires.1
—NIKOLA TESLA,
Reconstruction,
July 1919
During the Roaring Twenties and right up until the time of the Great Depression, Tesla began work on several top secret devices. One of the most controversial was an electric car, a Pierce-Arrow that supposedly derived its power from a distant source.
Tesla’s interest in electric cars went all the way back to the 1890s, when he studied Jean Jacques Heilman’s steam-driven electric vehicles. Heilman was moving in the direction of creating locomotives for railroads, but the same principle would also apply to automobiles.
In 1904, Tesla wrote a portentous letter to the editor for Manufacturer’s Record wherein he noted that, except for Heilman, steam-driven locomotives and automobiles “are still being propelled by the direct application of steam power to shafts or axles.” In other words, steam is created to power the axle and that causes the wheels to turn. What Tesla suggested was that the steam generated should be used to power a dynamo instead and that this dynamo, in turn, would be hooked up to an induction motor to power the car electrically, which would result in a gain in efficiency of somewhere between 50 to 100 percent. “It is difficult,” he concluded, “why a fact so plain and obvious is not receiving more attention from engineers.”2
Almost one hundred years to the day of this letter, Martin Eberhard and his partner Marc Tarpenning started Tesla Motors, and their inspiration was precisely the substance of this letter to the editor, namely that cars could be run by electric motors instead of gasoline. The big difference between Eberhard and Tarpenning’s roadster and the substance of Tesla’s letter is the source of power. In Eberhard and Tarpenning’s case, their roadsters would run on lithium batteries, whereas Tesla is suggesting here to run the car on steam. In honor of this modern electric car, Eberhard and Tarpenning named the company Tesla Motors, and shortly thereafter they sold the enterprise to Elon Musk, who inherited and decided to keep the name.
At this juncture, Tesla was talking about a steam-driven electric car; however, he was well aware that electric cars could also be powered by batteries. One of the first battery-powered electric vehicles can be traced back to the Austrian inventor Franz Kravogl, who displayed a two-wheeled contraption at the World Exposition in Paris in 1867. By the early 1900s, there were many battery-operated electric automobiles, and Thomas Edison even drove one as late as 1913. However, there were two main problems: limitation in range and the lack of recharging stations. So over time, electric vehicles tended to be restricted to gated communities and golf courses. The great efficiency and attractive price of Henry Ford’s Model T changed the dynamics considerably, particularly when the Machiavellian iconoclast bought up and pulverized the mass-transit railways, as he did in Los Angeles. Having perfected mass production, low-cost gasoline-powered automobiles became the mainstay.
However, Tesla never abandoned the idea of using an induction motor to propel a car, and he talked frequently of the idea of running such vehicles by means of wireless power derived from broadcasting towers much like Wardenclyffe. In 1927, Tesla traveled up to Niagara Falls to confer with Francis Fitzgerald of the Niagara Power Commission to discuss with him the creation of a wireless transmission tower to be set up at the Falls with the backing of the Canadian Power Commission.3 According to legend, three years later, Tesla met with Heinz Jerbens, director of the Inventor’s House from Hamburg, Germany, on the director’s trip to New York. Jerbens had taken an ocean liner to the States to meet with Edison. “On board ship. Heinz Jerbens met a former Serbian-Austrian officer Peter Savo, who introduced himself as a relative of Nikola Tesla. During a dinner at a restaurant on the ship, Peter Savo insisted that the German director should meet Nikola Tesla, claiming he was the greatest inventor in America. Thus, after meeting with Edison, Jerbens apparently hooked up with Tesla on November 26, 1930 [in the lobby of the] Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York.”4
Sworn to secrecy, Jerbens was taken by Tesla to Buffalo to see his top secret vehicle, a standard Pierce-Arrow. From an email from Jerbens’s son to the author, we learn that the original motor was removed and, instead, the car was “installed with an 80 HP-electric motor” that replaced the “fuel engine.”5 The new motor possessed a six-foot-tall aerial that somehow drew power as the car moved along. Tesla attached a converter box comprising a dozen radio tubes, “24 resistors and diversified cables,” which, it must be assumed, derived its energy from a secret transmitter he had supposedly set up near Niagara Falls. After “inserting two rods into the engine,” the car was ready to roll, achieving, according to Jerbens, speeds in excess of ninety miles per hour.
If the story is to be believed, it would mean that Tesla had to have installed a wireless transmitter, most likely close to the power station by the Falls, and the transmitter would have had to be turned on during the demonstration and, of course, turned off afterwards. Also, the vehicle would have had to be housed in some nearby location and a driver hired to take them out on a test run.
There are two key problems with the story. Assuming Jerbens really came to America in 1930, it would have been impossible for him to meet Tesla in the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria, as the building was torn down in 1929 to make way for the Empire State Building, and the new hotel was constructed in 1931. There was no Waldorf-Astoria in 1930. It’s certainly possible that if indeed Jerbens met Tesla at a posh hotel, through the years, the actual hotel could have morphed into the Waldorf. However, this is a clear aspect to the story that could not be true. The second problem concerns the actual car. According to the story, Tesla would have had to replace the combustion engine with a powerful induction motor along with some type of receiving device that would pick up the power from the transmitter. It was certainly within Tesla’s wheelhouse to undertake this venture; however, Buffalo is quite a distance from New York City and thus it would have undoubtedly taken several trips to the Niagara Falls region for Tesla to construct the transmitter and install the equipment necessary inside the automobile. So far, no evidence has arisen that suggests that Tesla commuted to the Buffalo region at this time. In addition, since this vehicle has never been located and since no one in the Buffalo region has ever come forward to confirm the story, tremendous doubt remains as to whether or not this wireless experiment with the automobile ever took place.
12
Telephotography
1931
Greetings to Professor Tesla,
Sending you my . . . heartiest congratulations for the great achievements due to you in the fields of physics and electrotechnics. I hope you will be pleased by my pointing out anew how Tesla currents were useful in the first stage of phototelegraphy. An evacuated tube, nowadays neon tubes [was] made luminescent by Tesla currents sent as rays through a small window on the receiving photographic paper, and the Tesla currents were modulated by the signals arriving from the transmitting station.
The first photo ever sent over a telegraphic line (MunchenNurnberg-Munchen) by the aid of a photoelectric cell in the transmitting station was received in 1904 in this manner.
This was the beginning of modern phototelegraphy.
Yours very truly,
Arthur Korn1
A side from the idea of wirelessly sending faxes of typed copy, such as the reproduction of a newspaper to ocean liners, Tesla also planned to transmit photographs and, it seems, even color reproductions. Drawing inspiration from the structure of the eye and his work from the mid-1890s in projecting X-ray images of skeletal tissue, Tesla described in 1901 the basis for transmitting faxed images and the precursor to television. Tesla’s idea was to create two similar plates, one for transmitting and one for receiving the image.
On May 30, 1901, Tesla wrote, “When an image is projected upon . . . these cells, the corresponding transmitter will . . . produce variations of density in the oscillations proportionate to the action on the cells. The image must resemble the picture projected . . . because the receiver plate is composed of elements arranged in the same manner. Effect of color . . . is [also] certainly practicable.” 2
