February
4, 2013
Nikola Tesla. Image courtesy of
LIbrary of Congress
By the end of his brilliant and
tortured life, the Serbian physicist, engineer and inventor Nikola Tesla was
penniless and living in a small New York City hotel room. He spent days in a
park surrounded by the creatures that mattered most to him—pigeons—and his
sleepless nights working over mathematical equations and scientific problems in
his head. That habit would confound scientists and scholars for decades after
he died, in 1943. His inventions were designed and perfected in his
imagination.
Tesla believed his mind to be
without equal, and he wasn’t above chiding his contemporaries, such as Thomas Edison,
who once hired him. “If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack,” Tesla once
wrote, “he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw
after straw until he found the object of his search. I was a sorry witness of
such doing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety
percent of his labor.”
But what his contemporaries may have
been lacking in scientific talent (by Tesla’s estimation), men like Edison and George
Westinghouse clearly possessed the one trait that Tesla did not—a
mind for business. And in the last days of America’s Gilded Age, Nikola Tesla
made a dramatic attempt to change the future of communications and power
transmission around the world. He managed to convince J.P.
Morgan that he was on the verge of a breakthrough, and the financier
gave Tesla more than $150,000 to fund what would become a gigantic, futuristic
and startling tower in the middle of Long Island, New York. In 1898, as Tesla’s
plans to create a worldwide wireless transmission system became known,
Wardenclyffe Tower would be Tesla’s last chance to claim the recognition and
wealth that had always escaped him.
Nikola Tesla was born in modern-day
Croatia in 1856; his father, Milutin, was a priest of the Serbian Orthodox
Church. From an early age, he demonstrated the obsessiveness that would puzzle
and amuse those around him. He could memorize entire books and store
logarithmic tables in his brain. He picked up languages easily, and he could
work through days and nights on only a few hours sleep.
At the age of 19, he was studying
electrical engineering at the Polytechnic Institute at Graz in Austria, where
he quickly established himself as a star student. He found himself in an
ongoing debate with a professor over perceived design flaws in the
direct-current (DC) motors that were being demonstrated in class. “In attacking
the problem again I almost regretted that the struggle was soon to end,” Tesla
later wrote. “I had so much energy to spare. When I undertook the task it was
not with a resolve such as men often make. With me it was a sacred vow, a
question of life and death. I knew that I would perish if I failed. Now I felt
that the battle was won. Back in the deep recesses of the brain was the
solution, but I could not yet give it outward expression.”
He would spend the next six years of
his life “thinking” about electromagnetic fields and a hypothetical motor
powered by alternate-current that would and should work. The thoughts obsessed
him, and he was unable to focus on his schoolwork. Professors at the university
warned Tesla’s father that the young scholar’s working and sleeping habits were
killing him. But rather than finish his studies, Tesla became a gambling
addict, lost all his tuition money, dropped out of school and suffered a
nervous breakdown. It would not be his last.
In 1881, Tesla moved to Budapest,
after recovering from his breakdown, and he was walking through a park with a
friend, reciting poetry, when a vision came to him. There in the park, with a
stick, Tesla drew a crude diagram in the dirt—a motor using the principle of
rotating magnetic fields created by two or more alternating currents. While AC
electrification had been employed before, there would never be a practical,
working motor run on alternating current until he invented his induction motor
several years later.
In June 1884, Tesla sailed for New
York City and arrived with four cents in his pocket and a letter of
recommendation from Charles Batchelor—a former employer—to Thomas Edison, which
was purported to say, “My Dear Edison: I know two great men and you are one of
them. The other is this young man!”
A meeting was arranged, and once
Tesla described the engineering work he was doing, Edison, though skeptical,
hired him. According to Tesla, Edison offered him $50,000 if he could improve
upon the DC generation plants Edison favored. Within a few months, Tesla
informed the American inventor that he had indeed improved upon Edison’s
motors. Edison, Tesla noted, refused to pay up. “When you become a full-fledged
American, you will appreciate an American joke,” Edison told him.
Tesla promptly quit and took a job
digging ditches. But it wasn’t long before word got out that Tesla’s AC motor
was worth investing in, and the Western Union Company put Tesla to work in a
lab not far from Edison’s office, where he designed AC power systems that are
still used around the world. “The motors I built there,” Tesla said, “were
exactly as I imagined them. I made no attempt to improve the design, but merely
reproduced the pictures as they appeared to my vision, and the operation was always
as I expected.”
Tesla patented his AC motors and
power systems, which were said to be the most valuable inventions since the
telephone. Soon, George Westinghouse, recognizing that Tesla’s designs might be
just what he needed in his efforts to unseat Edison’s DC current, licensed his
patents for $60,000 in stocks and cash and royalties based on how much
electricity Westinghouse could sell. Ultimately, he won the “War of the
Currents,” but at a steep cost in litigation and competition for both Westinghouse
and Edison’s General Electric Company.
Wardenclyffe Tower. Photo: Wikipedia
Fearing ruin, Westinghouse begged
Tesla for relief from the royalties Westinghouse agreed to. “Your decision
determines the fate of the Westinghouse Company,” he said. Tesla, grateful to
the man who had never tried to swindle him, tore up the royalty contract,
walking away from millions in royalties that he was already owed and billions
that would have accrued in the future. He would have been one of the wealthiest
men in the world—a titan of the Gilded Age.
His work with electricity reflected
just one facet of his fertile mind. Before the turn of the 20th century,
Tesla had invented a powerful coil that was capable of generating high voltages
and frequencies, leading to new forms of light, such as neon and fluorescent,
as well as X-rays. Tesla also discovered that these coils, soon to be called
“Tesla Coils,” made it possible to send and receive radio signals. He quickly
filed for American patents in 1897, beating the Italian inventor Guglielmo
Marconi to the punch.
Tesla continued to work on his ideas
for wireless transmissions when he proposed to J.P. Morgan his idea of a
wireless globe. After Morgan put up the $150,000 to build the giant
transmission tower, Tesla promptly hired the noted architect Stanford
White of McKim, Mead, and White in New York. White, too, was smitten
with Tesla’s idea. After all, Tesla was the highly acclaimed man behind
Westinghouse’s success with alternating current, and when Tesla talked, he was
persuasive.
“As soon as completed, it will be
possible for a business man in New York to dictate instructions, and have them
instantly appear in type at his office in London or elsewhere,” Tesla said at
the time. “He will be able to call up, from his desk, and talk to any telephone
subscriber on the globe, without any change whatever in the existing equipment.
An inexpensive instrument, not bigger than a watch, will enable its bearer to
hear anywhere, on sea or land, music or song, the speech of a political leader,
the address of an eminent man of science, or the sermon of an eloquent
clergyman, delivered in some other place, however distant. In the same manner
any picture, character, drawing or print can be transferred from one to another
place. Millions of such instruments can be operated from but one plant of this
kind.”
White quickly got to work designing
Wardenclyffe Tower in 1901, but soon after construction began it became
apparent that Tesla was going to run out of money before it was finished. An
appeal to Morgan for more money proved fruitless, and in the meantime investors
were rushing to throw their money behind Marconi. In December 1901, Marconi
successfully sent a signal from England to Newfoundland. Tesla grumbled that
the Italian was using 17 of his patents, but litigation eventually favored
Marconi and the commercial damage was done. (The U.S. Supreme Court
ultimately upheld Tesla’s claims, clarifying Tesla’s role in the invention of
the radio—but not until 1943, after he died.) Thus the Italian inventor was
credited as the inventor of radio and became rich. Wardenclyffe Tower became a
186-foot-tall relic (it would be razed in 1917), and the defeat—Tesla’s
worst—led to another of his breakdowns. ”It is not a dream,” Tesla said,
“it is a simple feat of scientific electrical engineering, only
expensive—blind, faint-hearted, doubting world!”
Guglielmo Marconi in 1903. Photo:
Library of Congress
By 1912, Tesla began to withdraw
from that doubting world. He was clearly showing signs of obsessive-compulsive
disorder, and was potentially a high-functioning autistic. He became obsessed
with cleanliness and fixated on the number three; he began shaking hands with
people and washing his hands—all done in sets of three. He had to have 18
napkins on his table during meals, and would count his steps whenever he walked
anywhere. He claimed to have an abnormal sensitivity to sounds, as well as an
acute sense of sight, and he later wrote that he had “a violent aversion
against the earrings of women,” and “the sight of a pearl would almost give me
a fit.”
Near the end of his life, Tesla
became fixated on pigeons, especially a specific white female, which he claimed
to love almost as one would love a human being. One night, Tesla claimed the white
pigeon visited him through an open window at his hotel, and he
believed the bird had come to tell him she was dying. He saw “two powerful
beans of light” in the bird’s eyes, he later said. “Yes, it was a real light, a
powerful, dazzling, blinding light, a light more intense than I had ever
produced by the most powerful lamps in my laboratory.” The pigeon died in his
arms, and the inventor claimed that in that moment, he knew that he had
finished his life’s work.
Nikola Tesla would go on to make
news from time to time while living on the 33rd floor of the New Yorker Hotel.
In 1931 he made the cover of Time magazine, which featured his inventions on
his 75th birthday. And in 1934, the New York Times reported that Tesla
was working on a “Death Beam” capable of knocking 10,000 enemy airplanes out of
the sky. He hoped to fund a prototypical defensive weapon in the interest of
world peace, but his appeals to J.P. Morgan Jr. and British Prime Minister
Neville Chamberlain went nowhere. Tesla did, however, receive a $25,000 check
from the Soviet Union, but the project languished. He died in 1943, in
debt, although Westinghouse had been paying his room and board at the hotel for
years.
Sources
Books: Nikola Tesla, My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola
Tesla, Hart Brothers, Pub., 1982. Margaret Cheney, Tesla: Man Out of
Time, Touchstone, 1981.
Articles: “The Problem of Increasing Human Energy With Special
References to the Harnessing of the Sun’s Energy,” by Nikola Tesla, Century
Magazine, June, 1900. “Reflections on the Mind of Nikola Tesla,” by R.
(Chandra) Chandrasekhar, Centre for Intelligent Information Processing Systems,
School of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering, Augst 27, 2006,
http://www.ee.uwa.edu.au/~chandra/Downloads/Tesla/MindOfTesla.html”Tesla: Live
and Legacy, Tower of Dreams,” PBS.org,
http://www.pbs.org/tesla/ll/ll_todre.html. ”The Cult of Nikola Tesla,” by
Brian Dunning, Skeptoid #345, January 15,
2003. http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4345. “Nikola Tesla, History of Technology,
The Famous Inventors Worldwide,” by David S. Zondy, Worldwide Independent
Inventors
Association, http://www.worldwideinvention.com/articles/details/474/Nikola-Tesla-History-of-Technology-The-famous-Inventors-Worldwide.html.
“The Future of Wireless Art by Nikola Tesla,” Wireless Telegraphy &
Telephony, by Walter W. Massid & Charles R. Underhill,
1908. http://www.tfcbooks.com/tesla/1908-00-00.htm
Read more: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/history/2013/02/the-rise-and-fall-of-nikola-tesla-and-his-tower/#ixzz2LpaDgd8U
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