In 1976, while involved in research at the New York Public Library, I stumbled upon a strange text entitled Return of the Dove which claimed that there was a man not born of this planet who landed as a baby in the mountains of Croatia in 1856. Raised by “earth parents,” an avatar had arrived for the sole purpose of inaugurating the New Age. By providing humans with a veritable cornucopia of inventions, he had created, in essence, the technological backbone of the modern era.1
His name was Nikola Tesla, and his inventions included the induction motor, the electrical-power distribution system, fluorescent and neon lights, wireless communication, remote control, and robotics.
Tesla—who’s he? I said to myself. Because my father had been a TV repairman for several years in the early 1950s and I had spent part of my childhood accompanying him on house calls, helping put up antennas, test and buy radio tubes, play with oscilloscopes, and watch him build TVs, I was amazed that I had never heard of this man.
I remember vividly an event from my grade-school years on Long Island that prepared me for my latter-day interest. It was a Saturday, circa 1959, and I was working on a Boy Scout assignment when I came upon a design for a crystal radio set. My father and I gathered a glass jar and a set of headphones, a crystal detector for changing the ambient AC radio waves into audio DC pulses, some thin copper wire to be wrapped around the jar, a metal switch that was scraped across this coil for the “dial,” a small plank to hold the contraption together, and a hundred feet of normal rubbercoated wire for the antenna, which we strung out a second-story window. There was no plug; all energy was derived from the broadcast signals from the nearby radio stations. However, after hooking it all together, the reception was faint; I became discouraged.
My father paced the room, considering the problem, muttering, “Something’s wrong.” After a few moments of deep thought, he made a motion which said, “I’ve got it.” Walking over to our radiator and dragging another wire, which he had hooked up to the jar, Dad attached a ground connection. Suddenly, all the stations began to come in loud and clear, and I marked each of them on the jar along the coil. It was apparent to me then that electrical power was being transmitted from these stations by wireless means and that the earth somehow was intrinsically linked to this system.
And now, here I was, nearly twenty years later, two years out of graduate school with a master’s degree, well-read and somewhat knowledgeable about electronics, yet I had never heard of the principal inventor of the very device I had spent endless hours with as a kid. This astonished me in a way difficult to describe. Moreover, when I asked my father about Tesla, he barely knew of him.
Because I believe in seeking original sources, I began to research Tesla’s life, starting with the two existing biographies, John O’Neill’s classic Prodigal Genius and Inez Hunt and Wanetta Draper’s Lightning in His Hand. Soon after, I began tracking down numerous turn-of-the-century references and also the weighty Nikola Tesla: Lectures, Patents, Articles, produced by the Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Thus, I was able to ascertain, by following his actual patents, that indeed Tesla existed and that his work was fundamental to all these creations.
That Tesla’s name was so little known puzzled me, so in 1980, three years after writing my first article on him, I began a doctoral dissertation on his life. My major purpose was to address the question of name obscurity.
During the writing of my dissertation, several notable Tesla works were compiled. These included the comprehensive and encyclopedic Dr. Nikola Tesla Bibliography, by Leland Anderson and John Ratzlaff; Tesla’s 1919 autobiography, republished by Hart Brothers; Margaret Cheney’s biography Tesla: Man Out of Time; two compendiums of Tesla’s writings by John Ratzlaff; Colorado Springs Notes, produced by the Tesla Museum; and most recently, Leland Anderson’s edition of Tesla’s private testimony to his lawyers on the history of wireless communication.
Even with all this new material, however, no comprehensive, all-embracing treatise had been achieved. In fact, after studying all these texts, a number of contradictions and glaring mysteries remained. These included not only Tesla’s obscure early years, tenure at college, and relationship to such key people as Thomas Edison, Guglielmo Marconi, George Westinghouse, and J. P. Morgan but also the worth of Tesla’s accomplishments and his exact place in the development of these inventions.
This book attempts to solve the mysteries. Because there have been significant gaps in the record, a clear chronology of Tesla’s life is presented. Also addressed are such issues as why his name dropped into obscurity after being a page 1 subject in newspapers around the world at the turn of the century, why he never received the Nobel Prize, even though he was nominated for one, what Tesla did during the world wars, and whether his plan for transmitting electrical power by wireless was feasible.
Using a psychohistorical perspective, the text discusses not only those factors that led to Tesla’s genius, but also quirks that led to his undoing. In this vein, it delineates Tesla’s relationship to many of his well-known associates, such as John Jacob Astor, T. C. Martin, J. P. Morgan Sr. and Jr., John Hays Hammond Sr. and Jr., Michael Pupin, Stanford White, Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, George Sylvester Viereck, Titus deBobula, and J. Edgar Hoover. Many of these people are barely touched upon or are not discussed at all in other treatises.
Because Tesla’s life is so controversial and complex, I also examine such questions as whether Tesla received impulses from outer space, why he ultimately failed in his partnership with J. P. Morgan in constructing a multifunctional global wireless system for distributing power and information, what his exact relationship to Robert and Katharine Johnson was, and what exactly happened to his particle-beam weaponry system and secret papers. Since I’ve based the text largely on firsthand documents rather than on the existing biographies, this book offers an essentially new view of Tesla’s life. The most recent biography, Tesla, by Tad Wise, an admittedly fictionalized version of the inventor’s life, was not referred to herein, as the goal of the enclosed is to separate out the myth and uncover who Tesla really was. However, one of Wise’s most prominent stories, that Tesla was responsible for the peculiar explosion that devastated Tunguska, Siberia in June of 1908, is addressed in a new appendix for this second edition.
I have visited all major Tesla archival centers such as at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.; Columbia University, in New York City; and the Tesla Museum, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. And because I have also utilized the Freedom of Information Act and accessed the arcane network of Tesla researchers, I have been able to compile hundreds of documents that have never been discussed before by any Tesla biographies. In addition, because I am a handwriting analyst, I have also utilized that expertise to analyze a number of the key personalities involved. Through this means, and as a total surprise, I have also been able to discover a heretofore unreported emotional collapse that the inventor suffered in 1906, at the time of the failing of his great wireless enterprise.
Since Tesla lived until the age of eighty-six, the story spans nearly a century. Revered as a demigod by some in the New Age community, Tesla has, at the same time, been relegated to virtual nonperson status by influential segments of the corporate and academic communities. Often billed as a wizard from another world who drew thunderbolts from the skies, Tesla himself helped support the supernatural persona by comparing himself to the Almighty and by frequently grabbing headlines with his sensational talk of interplanetary communication. Because his accomplishments are prodigious, fundamental, and documented, the elimination of his name from many history books is not forgivable. Only by understanding why this occurred can we, as a modern people, hope to rectify the historical record for future generations.
Curiously, the further away we have moved from Tesla’s death, the more material on his life has come to the fore. In particular, we must thank John O’Neill, the Tesla Memorial Society, the Tesla Museum in Belgrade, and the International Tesla Society (ITS) for this occurrence and the many Tesla researchers who have written so much about him of late and have participated in the various ITS conferences held every other year, since 1984, at the site of some of his most spectacular experiments, in Colorado Springs.
Because Tesla’s eye was always on the future, it seems appropriate to conclude this introduction with the opening lines from his autobiography. They are as true today as we enter the twenty-first century as they were three generations ago, when they were written:
The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention. It is the most important product of his creative brain. Its ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of the forces of nature to human needs. This is the difficult task of the inventor who is often misunderstood and unrewarded. But he finds ample compensation in the pleasing exercises of his powers and in the knowledge of being one of that exceptionally privileged class without whom the race would have long ago perished in the bitter struggle against pitiless elements. Speaking for myself, I have already had more than my full measure of this exquisite enjoyment, so much that for many years my life was little short of continuous rapture.2