Keely has discovered that all sympathetic streams, cerebellic, gravital, magnetic, and electric, are composed of triple flows; this fact governing all the terrestrial and celestial orders of positive and negative radiation…He has discovered that the range of molecular motion in all quiescent masses is equal to one-third of their diameters, and that all extended range is induced by sound-force, set at chords of the thirds which are antagonistic to the combined chords of the mass of the neutral centres that they represent.
“Who Is the Greatest Genius of Our Age?”
REVIEW OF REVIEWS, 18901
Tesla left Pittsburgh in the autumn of 1889 to return to New York and start his second laboratory, now on Grand Street. There he would begin work on high frequency apparatus, wireless transmission, and theories on the relationship between electromagnetic radiation and light. In particular, the inventor wanted to replicate the findings of the German academician Heinrich Hertz, a student of Hermann Ludwig von Helmholtz’s who had recently published his landmark experiments in wave propagation. Tesla said that this work “caused a thrill as had scarcely ever been experienced before.”2 “I was not free at Pittsburgh,” he continued. “I was dependent and could not work…When I [left] that situation ideas and inventions rushed through my brain like a Niagara.”3
Before he set up shop, the inventor traveled to Paris to attend the Universal Exposition and witness the unveiling of a gargantuan architectural triumph, the Eiffel Tower. Returning to a city filled with fond memories, Tesla could say hello to old friends and tell them how far he had come. There the budding creator could stop once again at the Louvre to gaze upon the “marvels” of Raphael, his self-perceived counterpart in the fine arts.4 Nevertheless, Tesla also had mixed feelings, as he was traveling in the shadow of his nemesis, Thomas Edison, who not only attended the fair but who also provided a one-acre site for displaying his various inventions. In particular, the phonograph created a sensation, and Edison was received as a veritable demigod.
While Edison, who was accompanied by his new wife, Mina, just twenty-two years old, lunched with Alexandre Eiffel in his apartment at the top of the tower, Tesla met with Prof. Wilhelm Bjerknes at the fair to “witness the beautiful demonstrations [of his] vibrating diaphragms.”5 A Norwegian physicist from the University of Stockholm, Bjerknes had, along with Jules-Henri Poincaré, not only replicated the work of Heinrich Hertz on the propagation of electromagnetic waves through space; they had also, according to Hertz, discovered multiple resonance and had worked out the mathematics of the phenomena.6 Tesla was able to study Bjerknes’s oscillator, which provided a variety of electromagnetic waves and a resonator for augmenting them, and also discuss with him theoretical implications concerning the properties of the electromagnetic waves thereby produced.
And while the Wizard of Menlo Park met with Louis Pasteur at his laboratory in Paris and received the French Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor for his achievements, Tesla developed one of his most important discoveries, namely, that so-called Hertzian waves not only produced transverse oscillations, suggested by Bjerknes, but also longitudinal vibrations structured much like sound waves, “that is to say, waves, propagated by alternate compression and expansion…of the ether.”7 This conceptualization would come to play a pivotal role in the wireless transmitters Tesla would construct over the next decade.
As Tesla packed his bags for a brief visit to see his family,8 Edison continued on his tour. In Italy he was honored by Queen Marguerite of Venice and King Humbert of Rome, in Berlin he met with Helmholtz at his laboratory, and at Heidelberg, Edison displayed his phonograph before a “monster meeting” of fifteen thousand people at which the machine “delivered a speech in good German.”9 Edison’s favorite moment, however, was when he attended a large dinner given by Buffalo Bill, who was touring Europe with his Wild West Show. And as Tesla left for New York, Edison continued on to London, where he could visit his central stations but also learn firsthand that the new use of the Tesla AC was here to stay.10 In Deptford, for instance, in this year, an engineer by the name of Ferranti installed probably the first-ever working single-phase generating station; with a Tesla system, he was able to transmit 11,000 volts seven miles away to London.11 Although a truly epoch making achievement, this plant, for some unknown reason, received virtually no publicity.
This was a complex time in the history of the electrical industry; those electrical experts in Europe and America who took the time to study the Tesla creation saw its benefits immediately. In Switzerland and Germany polyphase induction motors were being constructed by C. E. L. Brown and Michael von Dolivo-Dobrowolsky, and in America Elihu Thomson of Thomson-Houston and William Stanley did the same. As in any branch of science, it was customary to study and replicate the work of others, but in electrical engineering success ensured not only a place in history but also a substantial profit. Thus, there would be many, such as most of those mentioned above, who would try and claim the polyphase system as their own.
There was another motor invention, however, called the hydropneumatic pulsating vacuo engine, which was on much safer ground; nobody could replicate the intricacies of its machinery, and nobody but the inventor, John Ernst Worrell Keely, knew how it worked. Keely had gotten the idea for the motor after reading the treatise “Harmonies of Tones and Colours, Developed by Evolution,” by Charles Darwin’s niece Mrs. F. J. Hughes, which discussed the structure of the ether and various theoretical harmonic laws of the universe.12 Hailed as a virtual perpetual-motion machine, the Keely motor never ceased to intoxicate the public, for Keely had the uncanny ability to keep the secret going, but continually achieve abstruse results. “In the opinion of Madame Blavatsky, [Keely] has discovered Vril, the mysterious force of the universe in which Lord Lytton drew attention in his ‘Coming Race’…Keely calls it sympathetic negative attraction.”13
Rivaling snake-oil salesmen in the ability to “humbug” the public, Keely, a former “circus sleight-of-hand performer,” had formed a company in 1874, capitalized with $100,000 of stock in order to sell his motor, and had been successfully doing so for nearly fifteen years, until 1889, when his work was questioned.
Public Opinion wrote that, “Engineers, scientific men, and capitalists made frequent pilgrimages to Keely’s Philadelphia laboratory to see the ‘Keely motor mote.’ Sometimes it moted and sometimes it didn’t, but Keely always had a great tale to tell. Keely’s chief accomplishment was a ready use of jargon of scientific and unscientific terms. He talked about ‘triune currents of polar flow of force,’ the ‘reflex action of gravity,’ ‘chords of mass,’ ‘sympathetic outreaches of distance,’ ‘depolar etheric waves’ and a lot of other things which didn’t mean anything, but [he] never told why his motor moted and [why he] never took a patent” (although he did have them drawn up).14
T. Carpenter Smith, writing in Engineering Magazine described an eyewitness account with the “inventor” at work: “Mr. Keely proceeded to produce the force by striking a large tuning-fork with a fiddle-bow and then touching the generator with the fork. After two or three attempts, which he said failed by reason of not getting the ‘chord of the mass,’ he turned a small valve on the top of the generator. When a slight hiss was heard, loud cheers greeted his announcement that he had ‘got it.’…The state of mind of the audience may be imagined when the shout of one enthusiast ‘Keely, you are next to God Almighty!’ seemed only a natural expression.”15
This mountebank inventor headlined the New York dailies with his newest creations and also the accompanying cry of fraud. Factions of the public demanded he be jailed, the court giving Keely sixty days to “divulge his secret,”16 but Keely held fast. Threatening to stop work on his inventions unless the court dropped its suit,17 Keely was held in contempt of court and in November of 1888, he was placed in jail.18
Shortly thereafter, through his counsel, Keely revealed that the “missing link” was a “copper tube in the form of a hoop,” and he was released on bail a few days later. He argued that he had indeed “obeyed all orders of the court” in explaining his invention in detail and the suit against him was overturned!19
Like Edison, who promised and gave the world the “Lamp of Aladdin,” and Tesla, who discovered and harnessed a purported alternating current perpetual-motion machine, Keely billed his own invention as the “greatest scientific discovery of the century.”
Apparently vindicated, Keely proceeded with his deception. In 1890 the world celebrity and palmist Count Louis Hamon, better known as Cheiro, visited the Keely lab; and by 1895, John Jacob Astor became an investor.
Unfortunately for Tesla, however, like Keely, he, too, was gaining a reputation for making outlandish claims. For instance, Tesla said that his system could “place 100,000 horse-power on a wire” and send it hundreds of miles with almost no loss of power when the prevailing technology could only send a few hundred volts one mile, and in that case, with power dropping off markedly with distance.20 Never mind that this prognostication came true just a few years later; Tesla’s style was that of a visionary, and the claim seemed ridiculous. To the unimaginative, the uninformed, or people who listened only to the opposition, he was little different from Keely, and so he suffered through guilt by association.21
As far back as 1884, Scientific American had published an exposé on the Keely motor, speculating that its source of power was a secret chamber of compressed air. This was confirmed in 1898, after Keely’s death, in an investigation of his laboratory conducted by Mrs. Bloomfield-Moore’s son Clarence. Having waited for his mother, an ardent Keely admirer, to pass on before he tore the place apart, Moore discovered in the cellar a large tank and a series of pipes leading up through the floor above where the demonstrations took place. Keely’s “‘etheric force’ was nothing more than compressed air [released by]…the pressure of his foot tapping on a concealed spring valve.”22
Other bogus inventors of the day included Gaston Bulmar, who tried to sell General Electric (GE) special pills that turned water into gasoline; Walter Honenau, who derived free energy from an H2O “hydro-atomizer” and “King Con,” Victor “the Count” Lustig, who was eventually arrested for devising and selling a special money machine that cranked out crisp twenty-dollar bills from inserted white paper.23
In an age of new marvels that almost daily transformed society in irreversible ways, the public was “ripe for picking”; naive investors were often bilked by promises of impossible schemes. Thus, the inventor was perceived in contradictory ways, as executioner or light bearer, con man or wizard.
When Tesla returned from Europe, he wanted nothing better than to have his AC invention placed in the hands of its new rightful owner so that he could proceed with other burgeoning interests. Naturally, he would continue to aid Westinghouse in any way that he could, by continually offering advice to Scott, Schmid, or Lamme or stopping by at Pittsburgh to provide hands-on expertise. Throughout the 1890s, whenever the opportunity presented itself, Tesla would also introduce eminent prospective clients to the Westinghouse concern. As was his custom and style, Tesla never considered a commission for this service, although he did obtain vital equipment for his laboratory, which at first was provided without cost.
And as with Keely, Bulwer-Lytton’s electrical-like energy called “vril power” had also been attached to Tesla by this time as well, via a letter from a lady in 1890, who “dreamed that if I [Tesla] would read the ‘Coming Race’ of Bulwer, I would discover great things which would advance [my work considerably].” But Tesla would not pursue the mystical treatise for a decade, and therefore it appears that although the inventions discussed in the story bore great similarities to some of Tesla’s later creations, the reader must not say afterward that “the beautiful things which I shall invent were suggested by Bulwer.”24 Nevertheless, the similarities remain, and one wonders whether or not Tesla actually read the book at the time or knew of its contents.