11
FATHER OF THE WIRELESS (1893)

The day when we shall know exactly what “electricity” is, will chronicle an event probably greater, more important than any other recorded in the history of the human race. The time will come when the comfort, the very existence, perhaps, of man will depend upon that wonderful agent.

NIKOLA TESLA¹

Tesla disembarked from the August Victoria in the last week of August 1892.² The trauma associated with the death of his mother was alleged to have caused a shock of hair on his right temporal lobe to temporarily turn white.³ Whether this occurred cannot be determined; however, what is clear from studying photographs taken before and after the excursion is that a qualitative alteration in his appearance took place, the virginal look of adolescence supplanted by the cocksure demeanor of manhood.

After three years at the Astor House, Tesla moved on to the Hotel Gerlach. Set up on the “European plan” by Charles A. Gerlach, its manager, the Gerlach was equipped with “elevators, electric lights and sumptuous dining rooms.” The establishment was family oriented and fireproof.⁴

Located on Twenty-seventh Street, between Broadway and Sixth Avenue, the Gerlach was just a few blocks from the new, magnificent Madison Square Garden, a modern galleria with shops, theaters, restaurants, a thirty-story tower, and a coliseum with a seating capacity of seventeen thousand. The Garden, which was still under construction, was financed by banker J. Pierpont Morgan, who was funding Edison at the time; and it was designed and managed by Stanford White, the flamboyant architect of the prestigious firm of McKim, Mead & White, who would later become an important associate of Tesla’s.

Having unpacked his bags and cache of missives at the new hotel, on he went to South Fifth Avenue to his lab, which he had been away from for so long. In long strides, the inventor weaved his way through “Washington Square, [to] the heart of that picturesque neighborhood known as the French quarter. [The streets were] teeming with cheap restaurants, wine shops and weather-beaten tenements,” establishments Tesla would never frequent himself. To his surprise, he noticed shop owners waving, whispering among themselves; some even displayed awe. Having been elected to the Royal Society of Great Britain, now he had become a célébrite internationale and the neighborhood had been awaiting his return. He came upon what one reporter described as the “uninviting…huge yellowish brick building of some half-dozen stories”⁵ which housed his lab. Eagerly, the “murky interior” was entered as Tesla traversed the stairs, taking two at a time. He climbed past the oily, smelly lower floors, which were devoted to a pipe-cutting factory, even managed a smile for the owners of the dry-cleaning service on the third floor, and then entered his secluded haven on the fourth.

The inventor had brought a number of books which he had purchased abroad, and he placed them in his library before proceeding into the machine room, where he spent some time removing dust and cobwebs. Tesla’s prime concern was to exploit his advances in fluorescent lighting and wireless transmission of power. Over the next few weeks he hired several workers and a secretary and began by dictating an article on experiments he had conducted with Hertzian frequencies and their relationship to the surrounding medium.⁶ He refined his oscillators and designed an experiment whereby one of the terminals of a sizable transmitter was attached to one of the city’s water mains, and he recorded electrical vibrations at different positions around town. “By varying the frequency,” he said, “I was able to watch for evidence of resonance effects at various distances…I think that beyond doubt it is possible to operate electrical devices in a city through the ground or pipe system by resonance from an electrical oscillator located at a central point.”⁷ Using vacuum tubes and other tuned circuits as detectors, Tesla began to study the principles of harmonics and standing waves, noting that his instruments would respond at certain points along the pipes but not at other positions.

There was also mail to answer and equipment to order. In September correspondence was begun with Mr. Fodor, a German scientist who, with Tesla’s help, translated his world-famous discourses into German.⁸ Shortly thereafter, Thomas Edison sent an inscribed photograph “To Tesla from Edison.”⁹ Tesla also conferred with Professor R. H. Thurston, a physics teacher from Cornell who had expertise in thermodynamics.¹⁰

At the end of the month George Westinghouse stopped by with Albert Schmid to welcome the inventor home and discuss the fate of the Tesla AC system.¹¹ In May of that year, Westinghouse had won the bid to furnish the power for the upcoming Columbian Exposition, which was going to be held in Chicago, and he reportedly had taken a million dollar loss in order to secure the contract. But even at this juncture he was still not convinced that the Tesla system would prove to be more useful than compressed air and hydraulic power for long-distance transmissions.¹² Although Tesla had great respect for the descendent of Russian noblemen, he still had difficulty hiding his dissatisfaction. Schmid was relieved that the burden of convincing Westinghouse had shifted.

“My conviction, Mr. Westinghouse, is that a motor without brushes and commutator is the only form which is capable of permanent success. To consider other plans I consider a mere waste of time and money.”¹³

Westinghouse asked for Tesla’s help, particularly in aiding Schmid, Scott, and Lamme, and Tesla agreed.

Having been assured once again that the Tesla system was all that it promised to be and more, Westinghouse returned to Pittsburgh with a new sense of purpose. “In the early part of 1893,” Lamme wrote, “much entirely new and novel apparatus was built for our Chicago World’s Fair Exhibit.”¹⁴ Tesla would commute to and from Pittsburgh during this hectic time to guide the workers on the construction of the large dynamos, or Lamme, Schmid, or Scott would stop by in New York for advice. They were also helping Tesla construct his own exhibit, which would appear under the Westinghouse banner. Scott was in charge of resurrecting Tesla’s ingenious spinning egg, a device which not only aptly displayed the principles of the rotating magnetic field but also paid homage to Christopher Columbus, the explorer whose accomplishments were being honored on this 400th anniversary of his transatlantic journey. Hence the title of the fair: the Columbian Exposition. The fair was slated to open in May, and this gave them only a few months to complete what was truly a Herculean task.

Westinghouse may have won the right to light the fair, but Edison would not allow him a license to produce his lightbulb. Fortunately for Westinghouse, he did have a viable patent on a Sawyer-Man “stopper lamp,” which had a rubber bottom where the filament was attached in place of the Edison all-glass evacuated construction. Although less efficient, the Sawyer-Man lamp worked. With less than six months left until opening day, he had to produce 250,000 of these inferior bulbs. Coupled with the costs of legal disputes, the company was involved in a great risk venture. However, the prize, if all went successfully, would be the right to harness Niagara Falls. Potential revenues from such a contract would be immense.

Tesla arranged for Mr. Luka of the Helios Company of Cologne, to come to Pittsburgh to discuss supplying the German concern with AC equipment for their contract in Germany. “He has been sent here to gather information about railway, steam and other motors,” Tesla told Westinghouse. “I believe they would be ready to make a small cash payment and pay a moderate royalty, and I have done what I could to facilitate an understanding.”¹⁵ Tesla had also secured other European connections, and soon revenues from abroad began to roll in.

Nevertheless, there remained a good deal of animosity toward Tesla by some other members of the Westinghouse organization, partially because Tesla was paid so handsomely for an invention that they considered had also been conceived by Shallenberger and partially because they simply did not like the pompous foreigner. There were also great financial costs incurred in dismantling the hundreds of profitable Gaulard-Gibbs power stations which were dotted across the nation.

In November 1892, Grover Cleveland, former hangman and sheriff of Buffalo, running on an antilabor ticket, was re-elected president of the United States. Cleveland’s second inauguration inflamed many segments of the population and no doubt helped trigger the Panic of 1893.

The calamity began in 1892 with the financial collapse of four major railroads. Then banks failed, and tens of thousands of people became unemployed;¹⁶ and the Westinghouse Company was just beginning a decade-long course of incurring enormous debt. Westinghouse realized that he had to back Tesla unconditionally as the sole inventor of the AC polyphase system. Had there been any ambiguity in the matter, competitors could seize an advantage by obscuring the origins of the invention, and thus they would be able to produce Teslaic technology without royalty payments to Westinghouse.

On January 16, 1893, Westinghouse came out with an announcement touting the Tesla multiphase, or polyphase, system which was circulated to the electrical magazines and major competitors. Having “secured exclusive right to manufacture and sell apparatus covered by [Tesla’s] patents” the Westinghouse company promised to use such apparatus to economically harness the many waterfalls which were wasting so much energy.

Now that the problems in Pittsburgh were somewhat alleviated, Tesla could devote more time to his upcoming lectures, which were going to be held at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia at the end of February and again, the following week, in March at the annual meeting of the National Electric Light Association in St. Louis. He was met in Philadelphia by Prof. Edwin Houston, formerly the partner of Houston’s former student, Elihu Thomson.

Tesla began his lecture in Philadelphia with a discussion of the human eye, “nature’s masterpiece…It is the great gateway through which all knowledge enters the mind…It is often said, the very soul shows itself in the eye.”¹⁷

The study of the eye suggested a number of different and distinct lines of inquiry. For instance, it enabled Tesla to envision the precursor to television, with its numerous transfiguring pixels corresponding to the light-sensitive receiving cells of the retina. In another vein, in conjunction with instruments such as microscopes and telescopes, the eye also opened up new vistas for scientific inquiry. Alluding to the concept of the plurality of worlds, Tesla would say, “It was an organ of a higher order.”¹⁸

“It is conceivable,” Tesla continued, “that in some other world, in some other beings, the eye is replaced by a different organ, equally or more perfect, but these beings cannot be men.”¹⁹

Obtaining information from all corners of the universe, at the same time, the eye interacted with that elusive realm called the mind. Furthermore, this organ was also a perfect analog of Tesla’s Aristotlean worldview, as the eye had to be triggered from an external source in order to function.²⁰

If we go back to one of Tesla’s earlier experiments with the “brush phenomena,” that is, the creation of a brush or stream of light generated within an insulated vacuum bulb that responded to the faintest electromagnetic reverberations, we see that to Tesla this precursor to the radio tube was actually based on the principles inherent in the construction of the human eye. The brush, we remember, not only reacted to magnetic influences but also to the approach of a person and to the torque of the earth, just as the eye also reacts to faint impulses from near or far. It is “the only organ capable of being affected directly by the vibrations of the ether.”²¹

The ether was a nineteenth-century theoretical construct of an all-pervasive medium between the planets and stars. In 1881, Michelson and Morely unsuccessfully tried to measure the ether in their famous experiment with light beams and mirrors. The ramifications of their findings did not become evident until after the turn of the century, a full decade after Tesla’s lecture, when Einstein used the Michelson-Morley experiment to suggest that, by its nature, “the ether cannot be detected,”²² and further, that it was unnecessary for explaining how light could travel through space.

Physics professor Edwin Gora, of Providence College, whose mentors included Arnold Sommerfeld and Werner Heisenberg, stated that the ether could not be detected with nineteenth-century techniques and that Einstein replaced the old ether with a new non-Euclidean space-time construct. This new more abstract ether had such unusual properties as allowing space to curve around gravitational bodies.

Completely disagreeing with Einstein, and never abandoning the concept of the all-pervasive either, Tesla said that space cannot be curved because “something cannot act upon nothing.” Light, according to Tesla, bent around stars and planets because they were attracted by a force field.²³ Gora agreed that the two concepts of curved space and force field may actually be different viable ways of describing the same thing.

Returning to the 1893 lecture, for Tesla, the relationship of electrical phenomena to the structure of the ether appeared to be an important key to understanding how it could be transmitted without wires in an efficient manner.

The problem of the transmission of electromagnetic energy through space was discussed in all three of his lectures on high-frequency phenomena. One question he considered was whether the ether was motionless or in motion. When vibrations were transmitted through it, it appeared to act like a still lake, but at other times, the ether acted like “a fluid to the motion of bodies through it.” Referring to the investigations of Kelvin, Tesla concluded that the ether must be in motion. “But regardless of this, there is nothing which would enable us to conclude with certainty that, while a fluid is not capable of transmitting transverse vibrations of a few hundred or thousand per second, it might not be capable of transmitting such vibrations when they range into hundreds of million millions per second.”²⁴

Tesla would later claim spectacular results in wireless transmission never duplicated by any other researcher; he states that his system was not bound to the inverse-square laws, and it appears that his success, if indeed it was a success(!), was based on the premise that above certain frequencies the ether revealed novel and heretofore unknown features. Perhaps threshold values were involved.

Tesla continued his discussion on the structure of the ether and its relationship to electromagnetic phenomena by making two observations: (1) “that energy [could be transmitted] by independent carriers” and (2) that atomic and subatomic particles whirled around each other like little solar systems.²⁵ These two concepts, which were tied to the mystery of the structure of the ether, predated similiar ideas proposed by quantum physicists Ernest Rutherford, Niels Bohr, and Albert Einstein by at least a decade.

In Rutherford’s case, he is often credited as the first physicist to view the atom as structured somewhat like a solar system. It is evident, however, that Rutherford referred to Tesla’s high-frequency lectures in 1895, when he constructed high-frequency AC equipment for conducting long-distance wireless experiments.²⁶

Tesla stated that he could create electromagnetic oscillations that displayed transverse and also longitudinal wave characteristics. The first (transverse) case corresponds to the concept of the ether as a medium for propagating wavelike impulses; and the second (longitudinal) case corresponds to what today is known as a quantum of energy analogous to the way sound waves travel through air. Tesla maintained, against all opposition, even to this day, that his electromagnetic frequencies traveled in longitudinal, bulletlike impulses, and thus they carried much more energy than can be ascribed to Hertzian transverse waves. In fact, as alluded to before, Hertz wanted to eliminate the idea of mass from the Maxwellian electromagnetic equations.

A drawing depicting Nikola Tesla displaying wireless experiments at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893.

Tesla’s idea of longitudinal waves in the ether appear to be a direct outcropping of the research undertaken by Ernst Mach, who was still at Prague at the time. Mach’s radical views on the relationship between consciousness, space and time, and the nature of gravity were beginning to alter greatly the thinking of a number of key individuals. His idea, which came to be known as “Mach’s Principle,” hypothesized that all things in the universe were interrelated, for example, the mass of the earth, according to this theory, was dependent on a supergravitational force from all stars in the universe. Nothing was separate. This view, which Mach realized corresponded to Buddhist thinking, paralleled closely views espoused by Tesla. Although the following quote was written almost a quarter of a century later, its link to Tesla’s 1893 lecture is clear: “There is no thing endowed with life—from man, who is enslaving the elements, to the nimblest creature—in all this world that does not sway in its turn. Whenever action is born from force, though it be infinitesimal, the cosmic balance is upset and universal motion results.”²⁷

This idea was extended and interlinked between living organisms and inert matter by Tesla. All are “susceptible to stimulus from the outside. There is no gap between, no break of continuity, no special and distinguishing vital agent. The same law governs all matter, all the universe is alive.”²⁸ The source of power which runs the universe is that found within “the sun’s heat and light. Wherever they are there is life.” As these processes were electrical in nature, to Tesla, the secret of electricity held the secret of life.

Looking at the world around him, Tesla realized that it was a finite place and that the natural resources which gave humans the fuel to produce electricity would eventually run out. “What will man do when the forests disappear, when the coal deposits are exhausted?” he asked his Philadelphia audience. “Only one thing, according to our present knowledge, will remain; that is to transmit power at great distances. Man will go to the waterfalls, [and] to the tides,” Tesla speculated, because these, unlike coal and oil reserves, are replenishable.²⁹

Having set up the premise that it could be possible to derive inexhaustible amounts of energy with properly constructed equipment, that is, “to attach our engines to the wheelwork of the universe,” Tesla described, for the first time ever, his invention of wireless transmission. Cloaking his true goals in more palatable language, he announced, “I…firmly believe that it is practicable to disturb by means of powerful machines the electrostatic conditions of the earth and thus transmit intelligible signals and perhaps power.” Taking into consideration the speed of electrical impulses, with this new technology, “all…ideas of distance must…vanish,” as humans will be instantaneously interconnected. “First, we must know what capacity the earth is, and what charge it contains.” Tesla also speculated that the earth was “probably a charged body insulated in space and” and thus had a “low capacity.” The upper strata, much like the vacuum created in his Geissler tubes, would probably be an excellent medium for transmitting impulses.³⁰ We see here the precursor to the discovery by Heaviside and Kennelly of the ionosphere. Tesla had already thrust large amounts of electrical energy into the earth to try to measure its period of frequency, but he had yet to come up with a figure that appeared accurate. Nevertheless, he knew the size of the earth and the speed of light and thus was already at this time formulating optimum wavelengths for transmitting impulses through the planet.

During his talk, Tesla demonstrated impedance phenomena by turning on and off a lightbulb by placing it at various positions along an electrified metal bar. Based somewhat on the work of Hertz, this experiment demonstrated the concepts of wavelength and standing waves. He constructed circuits with two or three bulbs independently connected in a row and placed metal bars at various points along the way, thereby illuminating or extinguishing one or another of these bulbs by impeding or not impeding the electrical flow. He also displayed electric lamps illuminated with only a single wire and therefore was able to establish that the wire itself could be replaced by connecting the lamp directly to the earth, which also was a conductor, as no return circuit (as found in the Edison bulbs) was necessary. As before, Tesla also displayed lamps illuminated with no connections whatsoever.

With pure resonance, Tesla suggested, wires become unnecessary, since impulses can be “jumped” from sending device to receiver. Naturally, the receiving instruments would have to be tuned to the frequency of the transmitter. “If ever we can ascertain at what period the earth’s charge, when disturbed [or] oscillates with respect to an oppositely electrified system or known circuit, we shall know a fact possibly of the greatest importance to the welfare of the human race.”³¹

Tesla proceeded to present a diagram which depicted how to set up the aerials, receivers, transmitter, and ground connection. The son of one of his assistants described the apparatus:

In the transmitter group on one side of the stage was a 5-kva high-voltage pole-type oil filled distribution transformer connected to a condenser bank of Leyden jars, a spark gap, a coil and a wire running up to the ceiling. In the receiving group at the other side of the stage was an identical wire hanging from the ceiling, a duplicate condenser bank of Leyden jars and a coil—but instead of the spark gap, there was a Geissler tube that would light up…when voltage was applied. When the switch was closed, the transformer grunted and groaned, the Leyden jars showed corona sizzling around their foil edges, the spark gap crackled with a noisy spark discharge, and an invisible electromagnetic field radiated energy into space from the transmitter antenna wire [to the receiver antenna wire].³²

Tesla elaborated: “When the electric oscillation is set up,” he said, “there will be a movement of electricity in and out of [the transmitter], and alternating currents will pass through the earth…In this manner neighboring points on the earth’s surface within a certain radius will be disturbed.” Although Tesla’s main goal was to transmit power, he also noted that “theoretically,…it [w]ould not require a great amount of energy to produce a disturbance perceptible at great distance, or even all over the surface of the globe.”³³

In Tesla’s autobiography, written a quarter of a century later, the inventor informs the reader that there was such opposition to his discussion of wireless telegraphy at that time that “only a small part of what I had intended to say was embodied [in the speech]…This little salvage from the wreck has earned me the title ‘Father of the Wireless.’”³⁴ Tesla stated that it was Joseph Wetzler who told him to deemphasize his work in wireless in this lecture. Wetzler probably edited out a number of key passages which, in the long run, could have helped Tesla establish more easily his priorities in the field. Nevertheless, the entire Philadelphia speech runs a hundred typeset pages and covers numerous other topics as well. What is important to realize is that for the first time ever, a major inventor announced bold possibilities in the field of wireless communication; simultaneously, he explained in step-by-step fashion all of the major components that would be needed for success.

The question of who invented the radio is complex, for there was no single developer. Experiments in wireless can be traced back to Joseph Henry, who, in 1842, transmitted electrical energy across a thirty-foot room between magnetized needles and sensitive Leyden jars, and to Samuel Morse, who sent messages in 1847 by means of induction across an eighty-foot-wide canal by using something called “current leakage.”³⁵

The first individual to transmit messages over long distances using aerials (in the form of kites) and a ground connection was Mahlon Loomis. A dentist and experimentalist who also used electricity to stimulate growth in plants, Loomis not only received a patent on the device in 1872 but also successfully introduced the “Loomis Aerial Telegraphy Bill” before the U.S. Congress. Loomis made such an impact that $50,000 was appropriated to help him in his pursuit. In 1886, Loomis sent wireless messages fourteen miles between two mountains in Virginia, and a few years later, he also sent messages between ships two miles apart in Chesapeake Bay. There is little doubt that Tesla was aware of Loomis. For one thing, his patent was registered, and Tesla always made it a practice to study the work of his precursors. Also, it should be noted that some of the wording from Loomis’s patent applications and published writings sound eerily like the wording in some of Tesla’s discourses. For instance, Loomis discusses the passing of “electrical vibrations or waves around the world,” and principles of harmonics and resonance, and he also refers to harnessing “the wheelwork of nature,” a favored term of Tesla’s.³⁶

In 1875, Thomas Edison, while working with Charles Batchelor, noticed an unusual sparking effect emanating from the core of an electromagnet which leaped to noncharged bodies several feet away. By using an electroscope, he was unable to distinguish a charge.³⁷ In actuality, he had created a high frequency that could not be detected by his equipment. “By charging a gas main, Edison was able to obtain sparks from the fixtures in his house several blocks away…Edison thought that since energy can take various forms, and it was possible to change electricity to magnetism, magnetism might be transformed into something else.”³⁸ Edison therefore announced to the scientific community that he had discovered a new “unknown force.” Possibly, Tesla’s ideas of connecting an oscillator to the water mains of a city may have been influenced by this research.

In the early 1880s, William Preece, electrical engineer for the British Post Office, began directing experiments in wireless communication by means of an inductive apparatus. He was probably also the first inventor to realize that the earth itself was an integral component in the successful implementation of any wireless system. After isolating the role of the earth as either a primary or secondary circuit, Preece utilized telephone receivers as detecting devices and concluded that “on ordinary working telegraph lines the disturbance reached a distance of 3,000 feet, while effects were detected on parallel lines of a telegraph 10 to 40 miles apart in some sections of the country.” Preece’s work of detecting earth currents, which was duplicated by Western Union engineers in the United States, significantly influenced the theories expounded by Tesla.³⁹

Preece had displayed a long-standing interest in wireless communications. He had visited Edison in the mid-1880s, just after Tesla emigrated to America, to witness firsthand Edison’s latest invention, which he called the “grasshopper telegraph,” a device for jumping messages from dispatch stations to moving trains. By means of induction or resonance, a metal strip attached to a telephone receiver on a moving railroad car would send or receive messages from a similar strip strung parallel to the track at the station. Although the invention never evolved beyond this primitive early stage, the patent would later have important legal significance in priority battles over the invention of the wireless.

Thus, Edison is clearly one of the fathers of wireless transmission, as are Henry, Morse, Loomis, and Preece. Concerning the history of radio tubes, Edison also had an important invention, discussed above, of a dualfilament lightbulb which displayed a flow of current between them, Preece having named it the “Edison effect.” J. J. Thomson used it to help in his discovery of the electron, and Tesla combined information from this device with Crookes’s work on radiation effects inside evacuated glass tubes to invent his “brush phenomena,” which was the first such vacuum tube explicitly created for wireless transmission of intelligence.

Other precursors to Tesla included Heinrich Hertz, Oliver Lodge, and Edouard Branly. A French professor of physics, Branly, perhaps influenced by the knowledge of the Edison effect, noticed that the gap of Hertz’s tuned circuits could be replaced by a glass-enclosed tube which contained finely scattered metallic particles. When current passed through the tube by means of wireless induction, the particles aligned themselves along the path of the gap and closed the circuit. A light tapping on the tube opened the circuit once again until transmission occurred. Lodge perfected Branly’s 1890 discovery of particle cohesion and labeled it the “coherer.”⁴⁰

These scientists were not thinking about “wireless telegraphy” at the time of their initial work. They were explorers in a new field of electromagnetic induction, and it was not until 1894, by Lodge’s own calculation, that he thought in terms of utilizing the equipment as a means of conveying information.⁴¹ On the other hand, we remember that Crookes, writing in 1892, at the very time he was meeting with Tesla in England, noted that he had experimented in the wireless transmission of Morse code from one end of a house to another at about the same time as Hertz and Lodge were experimenting in the late 1880s, but he never publicized his work or furthered the invention beyond this casual experiment.

Tesla realized, as did Hertz, that the Hertzian frequencies through space were not conductive for long-range communication, but unlike Hertz, Tesla sought a way around this limiting factor. Therefore, he devised not only the means of securing more powerful transmitters but also “concatenated tuned circuits,” which were, in essence, sensitive radio tubes for receiving information.⁴² During this speech in Philadelphia, Tesla also introduced the concept of using both an aerial and ground connection and a single wire as a return for the operation of “all kinds of devices.” This system of wireless transmission was outlined in detail in highly visible articles which appeared in 1891, during his first public demonstrations of wireless Geissler tubes at Columbia College, in 1892 in Europe, and were explicitly delineated in 1893. It would be another full year before a high school boy by the name of Guglielmo Marconi would begin his first tinkerings in the field.