Many of the investigations of the book apply to polyphase systems circuits [with chapters] on induction motors, generators, synchronous motors, [etc.]…A part of this book is original, other parts have been published before by other investigators…I have, however, omitted altogether literary references, for the reason that incomplete references would be worse than some, while complete references would entail expenditure of much more time than is at my disposal…I believe that the reader…is more interested in the information than in knowing who first investigated the phenomenon.
CHARLES STEINMETZ1
Three months after Tesla’s Columbia College lecture, in August 1891, two engineers, Charles Eugene Lancelot Brown, of the Swiss firm of Maschinenfabrik Oerlikon, and Michael von Dolivo-Dobrowolsky, representing the German firm Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG), galvanized the engineering community when they successfully transmitted 190 horsepower from a waterfall at a cement factory on the Neckar River in Lauffen to the International Electrical Exposition, which was being held at Frankfurt, Germany, 112 miles away. With the support of three different governments, the lines passed through Wurtemberg, Bavaria, and Prussia before arriving in Frankfurt.2
By using oil as an insulator, as Tesla had explained in his Columbia College lecture, Brown was able to generate as much as 40,000 volts on his equipment, 25,000 of which he transported along the wires, stepping them down to usable frequencies when they reached the exposition. The efficiency of 74.5 percent astounded his colleagues. Dobrowolsky, who suggested that the invention was his conceptualization, utilized a three-phase AC with a working frequency of 40 cycles per second (instead of the single-phase current, with a frequency of 133 cycles per second, that the Westinghouse people kept insisting on). The power was so great at the Frankfurt site that a large advertising sign with a thousand incandescent lamps was lit, and a motor pump powering an artificial waterfall was harnessed.3
On December 16, Michael Pupin delivered a talk before the AIEE on polyphase systems. Having given the same talk a week before at the New York Mathematical Society, Pupin was proud to advance abstract theories on this new field of polyphase systems. With his hair swept back, wearing wire-rimmed glasses, a brush mustache tapered at the ends, and a professorial three-piece suit, Pupin was fast readjusting to his return to the States. Now he was beginning to carve a name for himself. Dutifully, he had written Tesla before the talk to discuss his motors, but the inventor had eluded him.
In his opening remarks at the AIEE, with Arthur Kennelly, Elihu Thomson, Charles Bradley, and Charles Steinmetz present, Pupin referred to the “beautiful inventions of Nikola Tesla and the completeness of the success which Dobrowolsky and Brown obtained by the practical applications of these inventions,” but he also described the German operation in such a way as to imply that aspects of it were independently conceived.
It appears that Tesla did not attend the lecture. Instead, he wrote Pupin the day after; but it was not to offer congratulations or to extend an invitation to meet. Tesla suggested that Pupin obtain the original patent specifications; the German design was simply a copy of his work.
But Pupin shot back, “I don’t think that you ought to find fault with me for not having given your inventions a fuller discussion…In the first place, it was a little bit too soon to discuss the practical details…in a paper which treats of the most general fundamental principles of the polyphasal systems. Secondly, I know of your motors only by hearsay; I have not had the pleasure of being shown one by anybody…I looked you up twice at your hotel and wrote you once…but all my efforts were in vain.”4 Pupin tried at the end of the letter to set up a personal interview, but Tesla was not one who could easily forgive such naïveté, especially from a Serb who spoke the native tongue so poorly.5 To the hypersensitive Tesla, Pupin was a man who spread falsehoods. And his continual association with Thomson did not help. As Tesla was about to take a trip to Europe, a meeting of amelioration never took place.
Concerning the dispute over whose invention it really was, it is important to realize that obfuscation of the truth continues to this day.6 The problem began with Michael von Dolivo-Dobrowolsky himself, who was reluctant to admit that he got the idea from Tesla, and it was perpetuated by his friend Carl Hering, who wrote a prodigious number of articles on the episode in the journals as the event unfolded throughout 1891. Hering had been a professor of engineering at the university in Darmstadt, Germany, in the early 1880s. His protégé Dobrowolsky, a native of St. Petersburg and the son of a Russian nobleman, replaced Hering when he retired from the university at the end of 1883.
C. E. L. Brown, a Swiss native and son of a designer of steam engines, began successfully transmitting electrical power with AC dynamos he had constructed while working in Lucerne. Brown, who was a year younger than Dobrowolsky and seven years younger than Tesla, had received most of his training in Winterthur and Basel, where he worked for the Burgin machine shops. In 1884 he began his employment at Oerlikon and within two years became director of operations.7 On February 9, 1891, Brown delivered an address in Frankfurt on the subject of long-distance transmisssion of electrical power, and that is where he met Dobrowolsky. A partnership was formed between Oerlikon and AEG, and within seven months, their success between Lauffen and Frankfurt was achieved.8
Now, with Dobrowolsky’s claims and Hering’s one-sided reporting in the electrical journals,9 factions of the American engineering community that were locked out of the Tesla patents could extol the Lauffen-Frankfurt venture while at the same time continuing to imply that Tesla’s work was not intrinsic to its success. Ironically, the Westinghouse side wanted to downplay the event as well, not only because it proved Tesla right and them wrong but also because it dwarfed their success at Telluride. Thus, when perusing the Westinghouse literature, one is hard-pressed to find any mention of Lauffen-Frankfurt at all.
Pupin, in his lectures, did not support Tesla’s role, nor did Kennelly, Thomson, or Bradley. Charles Proteus Steinmetz, however, was in another category. Like Pupin, he had just emigrated from Europe, and also like Pupin, he was academically oriented, with no particular economic stake in the invention at that time.
Steinmetz, who had fled Germany in 1889 in order to escape imprisonment for being a revolutionary socialist, was a brilliant student of mathematics from the University of Breslau. A dwarf hunchback, with his head sunk into his shoulders and one leg shorter than the other, Steinmetz had to continually overcome his odd appearance and frail disposition by displaying an advanced intellect. Just twenty-six years old and still attempting to cultivate a mustache and beard, Steinmetz, who was gaining a reputation for his work on the law of hysteresis (which involved a mathematical explanation that explained the lagging of magnetic effects when electromagnetic forces are changed) recognized some flaws in Pupin’s talk. As this would be one of his earliest attempts to express himself before his peers in the difficult English language,10 he carefully bolstered the addendum by bringing along calculations and drawings. Working in Yonkers, Steinmetz had developed a single-phase commutator motor a year before, in the summer of 1890.11
With brazenly long shoulder-length hair, the gnome was dressed in a slightly wrinkled three-piece suit adorned with an opulent watch chain and a pair of pince-nez that hung distinctively from a strap attached to his right collar. Standing to his full height of four feet and reaching for his glasses to read off his calculations, Steinmetz noted in his German accent that “Ferraris built only a little toy.” He also went on to correct Pupin’s implication that the Dobrowolsky creation was the first to use a three-phase system. “I cannot agree with that in the least, for [that] already [exists] in the old Tesla motor.” Summing up, Steinmetz concluded, “I really cannot see anything new…in the new…Dobrowolsky system.”12
It would take a few months for Steinmetz to realize why his colleagues raised their eyebrows as he dashed all hopes for Dobrowolsky’s claims. Nevertheless, they were impressed with his analysis and mathematical expertise. Elihu Thomson returned to his firm of Thomson-Houston in Lynn, Massachusetts, with the knowledge that a new mathematical genius had arrived from Europe, and soon thereafter Thomson-Houston offered Steinmetz a job at Lynn.
Meanwhile, in Pittsburgh, unbeknown to Edison, Westinghouse had been surreptitiously meeting with Henry Villard, Edison’s financial backer, over a two-year period to discuss a possible merger. Villard, who had recently combined a number of smaller companies with Edison Electric to create Edison General Electric, was well aware that Edison did not get along with Westinghouse. Villard was an immigrant from Germany, the son of a Bavarian judge. Having tried in his earlier days to set up a “free soil” German settlement in Kansas, Villard was the individual who drove the golden spike in the Northern Pacific Railroad to link the West Coast with the East. He conferred with J. Pierpont Morgan, the real power behind the operation, and had Morgan send Edward Dean Adams, a longtime banking associate, to Menlo Park to try and get Edison to align with Westinghouse. Thriving on “beating the other guy,” Edison would hear none of it. “Westinghouse,” he said, “has gone crazy over sudden accession of wealth or something unknown to me and is flying a kite that will land him in the mud sooner or later.”13
Legal fees in trying to protect the Edison lightbulb patents had already cost Edison $2 million and Westinghouse the same. The Edison camp had decided to sue Westinghouse rather than Thomson-Houston, because the Pittsburgh company had purchased United States Electric, the concern that held the competing patents from Sawyer-Man and Hiram Maxim, while Thomson-Houston had only a lease agreement. Thus, while two giants fought each other in what Edison called “a suicide of time,” Thomson-Houston got rich.
On July 14, 1891, after many years of battles and appeals on priority of invention of the lightbulb, Judge Bradley ruled in favor of Edison. Although Westinghouse was caught with the wrong lightbulb patents, his Tesla AC power system was an asset worth attaining; but Westinghouse was proving difficult to negotiate with. Villard therefore began to make overtures to Tesla directly, but the inventor had to yield to Westinghouse’s decisions.
“Dear Sir,” Tesla wrote Villard in his tidiest penmanship, “I have approached Mr. Westinghouse in a number of ways and endeavored to get to an understanding…[but] the results have not been very promising…Realizing this, and also considering carefully the chances and probabilities of success, I have concluded that I cannot associate myself with the undertaking you contemplate.” Tesla reluctantly concluded the letter by wishing the financier “best success in [his] pioneer enterprise.”14
Villard switched tactics and approached Thomson-Houston with the thought of buying them out. He had gone up to Lynn, Massachusetts, in February and had continued secret negotiations with Charles Coffin, chief executive officer (CEO) of Thomson-Houston, throughout the summer. In December a meeting was held at 23 Wall Street, in Morgan’s office, to finalize plans for a merger. After Morgan looked over the financial records of both companies, he realized that Edison Electric, which was in debt for $3.5 million, had less revenue than the smaller and solvent Thomson-Houston. Morgan thereupon reversed himself and suggested that Thomson-Houston buy out Edison Electric. Either way, he created a monopoly. Simultaneously, Morgan maneuvered Villard out of the company altogether—he had to blame someone for the problems—and Charles Coffin took control of the new consolidation. They named the company General Electric (GE).
Because of the enormous debt of his company and the possibility that he was working with inferior DC equipment, Edison had lost his edge. The thought of working with that patent pirate Elihu Thomson and the removal of his own name from the marquee made the electrical wizard, for the time, a beaten man. Although he stirred the hornets’ nest before he left, Edison realized that a new age of electricity had arrived, one that would not countenance his commonsense, trial-and-error approach. Over a year before the actual merger was completed, he wrote Villard, “It is clear that my usefulness is gone…Viewing it from this light you will see how impossible it is for me to spur my mind, under the shadow of possible future affiliations…I would now ask you not to oppose my gradual retirement from the lighting business, which will enable me to enter into fresh and congenial fields of work.”15 And so Edison turned his interests to furthering the work of Edward Muybridge, a pioneer in motion pictures. In 1888 and 1891 he had his first patents on a device he called the kinetograph, and a few years later, he developed a fully working movie camera and projection system. In 1893, Edison could write to the elderly Muybridge16 that he now had a peep-show device that people would pay five cents to see.17
The “Morganization” of GE created an even greater foe for Westinghouse but also a critical problem for GE. Whereas Westinghouse was blocked from using an efficient lightbulb, GE was blocked from generating AC. As the Edison patents were only valid for another two years, certainly Westinghouse was in the better position. But in 1891-92 it was still too early in the game to realize this. From the point of view of the courts, it was still undecided as to who the author of the AC polyphase system really was, even though Westinghouse had the Ferraris patent trump card to back those of Tesla’s, and so, over the next few years, Westinghouse was forced to sue not only a number of subsidiaries of GE but also some independents, such as William Stanley, who were now producing polyphase systems on their own.
From GE’s point of view, there was a whole host of patents in AC that Thomson owned, but any others that they could obtain would undoubtedly help in the legal arena. Thus, they approached Charles Steinmetz with a scheme to work on improvements on AC designs in such a way that they would obscure Tesla’s role. Attracted to the intrigue, Steinmetz accepted the challenge.18
The fray between Westinghouse and GE took a new turn in the race to win the bid to light the upcoming Chicago World’s Fair and to harness Niagara Falls. In the courts, the suits switched from lightbulbs to power generation, and at their respective plants attention turned toward a way to compete with the success achieved by Brown and Dobrowolsky.
For Westinghouse Corporation, Schmid, Scott, and Lamme could confer with Tesla, while Stillwell and Shallenberger brooded, and the money men reluctantly agreed to dismantle the very lucrative but outmoded Gaulard-Gibbs machinery. For GE, the situation was more complex. They had hoped that someone like Steinmetz or Thomson could come up with a competing design, but they hadn’t realized that Tesla held all the fundamental patents. Quite simply, there was no other system. Tesla had understood the foundation. One couldn’t proceed without him.
Thomson and Steinmetz were reduced to figuring out ways to somehow bypass the patents by designing “teaser currents”19 or some other smokescreen device in order to pretend that they had created a separate invention. In a case of industrial espionage, Thomson-Houston apparently paid a janitor to steal the Tesla blueprints from the Westinghouse plant.20 Embarrassed to explain how the blueprints ended up at Lynn, Thomson said that he needed to study the Tesla motor designs to make sure that his were different.
The intrigue must have triggered a variety of emotions in Steinmetz. He had already lived a clandestine life in Germany; by editing a radical socialist newspaper under a pseudonym during the so-called Reign of Terror, he had learned to use secret passwords at radical meetings and write with invisible ink, as when he carried love notes between his leader, the charismatic revoutionary Heinrich Lux, who had been jailed for his activities, and Lux’s girlfriend. Although Steinmetz never renounced his affiliation with the socialist movement, he supported a rather unscrupulous capitalistic corporate structure that was motivated not only by the all-consuming profit motive but also by its ability to subvert the law to achieve its ends. This new situation thereby only served to heighten his contradictory nature.
His affiliation with the Machiavellian policies of GE induced Steinmetz to abandon his ideals. His opus on AC, Theory and Calculations of Alternating Current Phenomena, coauthored with Ernst Julius Berg, a colleague educated at the Royal Polytechnikum in Stockholm, and first published in 1897, just three years after Tesla’s own compendium, omitted any reference to Tesla at all. (By the turn of the century, Berg’s name on the cover, like Lux’s love notes, disappeared.)
At the time, Tesla’s book The Inventions, Researches and Writings of Nikola Tesla, edited by T. C. Martin, was a veritable bible for all engineers in the field. It included chapters on alternating-current motors, the rotating magnetic field, synchronizing motors, rotating field transformers, polyphase systems, single-phase motors, etc. That it does not appear in the bibliography of Steinmetz’s work is astounding.
In the foreword to Steinmetz’s second text, Theoretical Elements of Electrical Engineering, written in 1902, the author tries to explain why he omitted reference to the inventor of the AC polyphase system. “Of later years,” Steinmetz wrote, “the electrical literature has been haunted by so many theories, for instance of the induction motor, which are incorrect.”21 This was a natural opening that might have catapulted Steinmetz into a discussion which would set the record straight, but he chose a pusillanimous path instead. This decision not only aided in obfuscating the truth as to the origin of the invention; it also bolstered his own image in the corporate community.
As these texts on AC would serve as important templates for subsequent writers, it was quite common in the later years for engineers to obtain degrees, study AC, and even write textbooks on the topic themselves and never come across Tesla’s name.
Clearly, it was to GE’s benefit to pretend that Tesla never existed, and it was to Westinghouse’s benefit to pretend that the Lauffen-Frankfurt transmission had never occurred. The next generation of engineers, and those that followed, never realized that obfuscation had taken place; that is one of the main reasons why Tesla’s name practically vanished.
Perhaps the most blatant case of misrepresentation occurred a generation later, when Michael Pupin published his Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography From Immigrant to Inventor. Pupin was able to write long passages on the history of AC and ignore Tesla almost completely. Tesla’s name appears only once, in passing, in the 396-page book.22
In this work Pupin described “four historical events, very important in the annals of electrical science,” that is, the Lauffen-Frankfurt transmission, the harnessing of Niagara Falls, the formation of GE, and the lighting of the Chicago World’s Fair by AC. Mentioning the Westinghouse concern only once as a company that was interested in AC, Pupin concluded, “If the Thomson-Houston Company had contributed nothing else than Elihu Thomson to…[GE], it would have contributed more than enough…[Thus] the senseless opposition to the alternating current system…vanished quickly.23
In the preface Pupin had the audacity to write that “the main object of [my] narrative [is]…to describe the rise of idealism in American science, and particularly in physical sciences and the related industries…[As] witness to this gradual development,…[this] testimony has competence and weight.” Considering that Pupin is generally remembered fondly by the engineering world, it is my opinion that he failed to live up to the standards to which he aspired.
These attempts to alter the past turned the stomach of a number of key players, most notably C. E. L. Brown, of Oerlikon Works in Switzerland, and one of his top engineers, B. A. Behrend. A staunch man with a granite profile and hound-dog eyes, Brown, who, with Dobrowolsky, had been the first engineer to transmit electrical power over long distances with Tesla’s AC invention, had learned of Tesla’s work from British engineer Gisbert Kapp, who published Tesla’s 1888 talk in his magazine Industries. Kapp, who authored one of the most “brilliant” textbooks on induction motors, wrote Tesla on June 9, 1888, to request the use of his paper for the magazine.24
Based on Tesla’s treatise and Kapp’s refinements, Brown was able to construct “[before] Westinghouse…probably…the first successful motor…in 1890.”25 Brown’s succinct response, conspicuously placed in Electrical World, was directed specifically to Carl Hering, one of the first writers to imply that the invention was Dobrowolsky’s. “The three-phase current as applied at Frankfort,” Brown wrote, “is due to the labors of Mr. Tesla, and will be found clearly specified in his patents.”26
Hering’s first response was to continue the artifice. “I do not think,” Hering said, “[that] Mr. Brown does proper justice to the real inventor of this modification of the Ferraris-Tesla system, namely, Dobrowolsky.”27 But Tesla demanded a more clear-cut communiqué. After a discussion with W. J. Johnston, who would later allow Hering to take over the editorship of Electrical World, Tesla was able to obtain the following response: “We desire to state right here,” Johnston said, “that the Electrical World has over and over put itself on record as upholding Mr. Tesla’s priority.”28 The magazine was also able to extract from Hering the following: “Dobrowolsky, though he may have been an independent inventor, admits that Tesla’s work is prior to his.”29
Although Hering was loath to admit Tesla’s priority, at the same time he placed his finger on an important point: Tesla himself had not demonstrated physically that his system could be used for long-distance transmission. Certainly Westinghouse at that time was not aware of the vast benefits of the system. Had it not been for the success at Lauffen-Frankfurt, Tesla’s apparatus might have evolved differently in America. Hering did not have access to various details of the Westinghouse motors, and that was because the work was not in the public domain. Great amounts of money were spent to keep the work private. Had a Lauffen-Frankfurt type of transmission occurred in America without Westinghouse’s permission, it would have clearly been a case of patent piracy. Tesla issued patents in most of the industrialized countries, and it appears likely that Brown and Oerlikon licensed Tesla’s patents and paid him for the privilege of using them.
Coincidentally, Gisbert Kapp’s treatise, which was initially published in two installments in December 1890 in the Electrician in London, appears also to have been used extensively by Charles Steinmetz in 1891 and 1892, while he was constructing AC motors at a machine shop in New York before he was hired by Thomson, according to B. A. Behrend, author of one of the first definitive works on the AC motor. An émigré from Switzerland, Behrend came to work for the New England Granite Company, a division of GE, in 1896. Particularly upset by the tactics of such writers as Steinmetz in using other people’s work and leaving their names out of the bibliography, Behrend would later become one of Tesla’s most important allies. In the foreword of his book, Behrend stated: “The tendency to write books without references is due largely to the desire to avoid the looking-up of other writers’ papers. The reader is not benefited by such treatment, as he may frequently prefer the original to the treatment of the author whose book he is reading. Besides, a knowledge of the literature of our profession is essential to an understanding of the art and to an honest interpretation of the part played therein by our fellow workers.”30
Writing to Oliver Heaviside specifically about such authors as Steinmetz, Behrend quoted Huxley: “Magna est veritas et praevalebit!” translating and modifying the quote as follows, “Truth is great, certainly, but considering her greatness, it is curious what a long time she is apt to take about prevailing.” The body of his book began with this sentence: “The Induction Motor, or Rotary Field Motor, was invented by Mr. Nikola Tesla, in 1888.” Tesla’s picture also appeared as the frontispiece.
Throughout his life, Behrend sought to set the record straight as to who the real author of the AC polyphase system was. When Westinghouse sued New England Granite for patent infringements, Behrend was placed in “an embarrassing and disagreeable” position; the high command, which stemmed from Wall Street, wanted him to testify against Tesla.
On May 3, 1901, Behrend wrote back to the attorney Arthur Stem, “My dear sir…You will see that I am now, even more than I have been before, of the opinion that it is not possible for us to bring forth arguments that could go to show the invalidity of the Tesla Patents in suit…I cannot undertake this duty.”31