We entered an immense hall, lighted by…[a] lustre…but diffusing a fragrant odor. The floor was in large tesselated blocks of precious metals, and partly covered with a sort of matlike carpeting. A strain of low music, above and around, undulated as if from invisible instruments…
In a simpler garb than that of my guide, [a figure] was standing motionless near the threshold. My guide touched it twice with his staff, and it put itself into a rapid and gliding movement, skimming noiselessly over the floor. Gazing on it, I then saw that it was no living form, but a mechanical automaton…Several [other] automata…stood dumb and motionless by the walls.
THE COMING RACE, EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON1
One of Tesla’s major inventions in terms of ingenuity, originality, and complexity of design was a remote-controlled robotic boat which he called the telautomaton. This device was unveiled at the Electrical Exposition held at Madison Square Garden during the height of the Spanish-American War in May 1898, but earlier precursors could be traced to wireless motors which he displayed before the Institute of Electrical Engineers in 1892.
This single invention not only established all of the essential principles of what came to be known a few years later as the radio; it also lay as the basis of such other creations as the wireless telephone, garage-door opener, the car radio, the facsimile machine, television, the cable-TV scrambler, and remote-controlled robotics. The precise nature of the invention, virtually its patent application, was published in most of the technical journals at the time of its inauguration.2
The telautomaton paralleled precisely a model developed by British novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1871, although Tesla insisted in a missive to Johnson, written two years after the invention’s inauguration, that he had not been inspired by this science-fiction tale.3
As Bulwer-Lytton was perhaps the most popular author next to Charles Dickens at that time, it is unlikely that Tesla was unaware of this story when he conceived of the invention. In The Coming Race, Bulwer-Lytton describes a concept which he called “vril power.” This was an energy transmitted from the eye and body of the fictional advanced species which was used to animate automatons.4 In essence, Tesla built a working model that substituted electricity for the novelist’s “vril.” The story begins when the protagonist falls into a hole in the earth and comes upon an advanced civilization: “In all service, whether in or out of doors, they [the people of Vril-ya] make great use of automaton figures, which are so ingenious, and so pliant to the operations of vril, that they actually seem gifted with reason. It was scarcely possible to distinguish the figures I beheld, apparently guiding…the rapid movements of vast engines, from human forms endowed with thought.”5 As we shall see, key aspects of Bulwer-Lytton’s story correlate quite closely with positions espoused by Tesla.
The electrical exhibition was organized by Stanford White, who worked with Tesla to fashion a rainbow room of neon lights at the entrance, and it was presided over by Chauncey Depew, another Tesla friend, who was also one of the principals of the New York Central Railroad and a U.S. senator from New York. It had been hoped that President McKinley would illuminate the exposition by means of telegraph lines from Washington, but something went awry, so Vice President Garret Hobart opened the proceedings instead. Representing the Marconi company was Tom Edison’s son, Tom Junior, who obtained the position through T. C. Martin. This liaison marked the beginning of a partnership between Marconi and Edison, as the Menlo Park wizard had wireless patents which the Italian wanted to own in order to boost his legal position on priority of discovery. The event also portended the upcoming break in the friendship between Tesla and Martin.
Animosities between Spain and the United States had run high for a number of years. Ever since 1895, when the Spaniards took repressive measures against rebelling Cubans, many Americans began to champion the cause of Cuban annexation.
The sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana harbor in February of 1898 eliminated any doubts, and war was officially declared two months later. Tesla had been meeting with John Jacob Astor throughout this period in his continuing attempts to woo the financier as Astor spelled out more clearly his position on relevant issues.6 While his wife played mah-jongg at home, the colonel jaunted along the deck of his mighty ship, the Nourmahal, which he had armed with four machine guns in order to protect against potential pirates. Labeled as insipid and henpecked by gossip columnists, Astor sought his freedom on the high seas.
Perhaps it was during an outing on Astor’s yacht that the inventor conceived of the idea of fashioning the teleautomaton in the form of a torpedo. “Come to Cuba with me where you can demonstrate your work upon the insufferable scoundrels,” Astor suggested.
Tesla may have been tempted, but in the midst of a whirlwind of invention, he graciously declined as he had been called “for a higher duty.”7
Tesla finalized construction of his remote-controlled boat and considered how to make amends as Astor conferred with President McKinley in Washington and then hastened to the front lines. The colonel had donated $75,000 to the U.S. Army to equip an artillery division for use in the Philippines and lent the Nourmahal to the navy for use in battle. The tall ship, nearly a hundred yards in length, was equipped with a corps of military seamen. Able to feed sixty-five at one sitting, the steam-driven three-masted schooner made a formidable warship. With his honorary rank stepped up to inspector general, Colonel Astor sailed his battalion down to Cuba, where he could “watch Teddy Roosevelt in the Battle of San Juan Hill through a pair of field glasses.”8
Beating the Spanish with modern instruments of destruction became the overriding theme of the exposition. Tesla would have far and away the most sophisticated construction, but he chose to portray it by deceptively emphasizing mysterious features: “In demonstrating my invention before audiences, the visitors were requested to ask any question, however involved, and the automaton would answer them by signs. This was considered magic at the time, but was extremely simple, for it was myself who gave the replies by means of the device.”9
The boat, approximately four feet in length and three feet high, was placed in a large tank in the center of a private auditorium, set up for special viewing for key investors like J. O. Ashton, George Westinghouse, J. Pierpont Morgan, and Cornelius Vanderbilt.10 By means of a variety of transmitters and frequencies, the inventor could start, stop, propel, steer, and operate other features, such as putting lights on or off. Tesla was also planning on constructing a prototype submersible, perhaps to compete in the mock battles that were staged between models of the American ships and the Spanish fleet, but it was never built.
Due to the lack of access the press had to this exclusive invention the newspapers featured Marconi’s wireless detonation system instead. By means of a bomb planted onboard the enemy frigate and a simple button placed in the hands of Tom Junior, “Spanish” ships were blown to smithereens. Marconi, however, had not solved the problem of tuning a frequency, and so, on one occasion, Edison’s son accidentally blew up a desk in a back room that had housed other bombs. Fortunately, no one was injured.11
It appears that the public appreciated the dramatic Marconi contraption, which appealed to baser instincts, as compared to Tesla’s masterwork, which was sixteen years ahead of its time operationally and at least a century ahead of its time conceptually, that is, as envisioned in final form. Only the scientific journals explained with any clarity the complexity of the device.12
Tesla’s coy portrayal kindled a blitzkrieg of epithets from the press. The following fantastic prognostication particularly upset them:
Torpedo Boat Without a Crew
My submarine boat, loaded with its torpedoes, can start out from a protected bay or be dropped over a ship side, make its devious way along the surface, through dangerous channels of mine beds…watching for its prey, then dart upon it at a favorite moment…discharge its deadly weapon and return to the hand that sent it…I am aware that this sounds almost incredible and I have refrained from making this invention public until I had worked out practically every detail.13
By allowing the following editorial to appear in his journal Electrical Engineer, T. C. Martin was, in a backhanded way, another to lead the assault.
Mr. Tesla and the Czar
Mr. Tesla fools himself, if he fools anybody, when he launches into the dazzling theories and speculations associated with his name…Just of late Mr. Tesla has been given publicity to some of his newest work…We should be glad personally to see him finish up some of the many other things that have occupied his energies these ten years past.
The editorial then went on to criticize Tesla’s oscillator and his method of “delivering large quantities of current…without wires, say from Niagara Falls to Paris [which has also yet to happen]…Mr. Marconi has already telegraphed from balloon to balloon without wires…over twenty miles, thus proving in advance the tenability of Mr. Tesla’s proposition.14
Discredit of the wireless torpedo followed. This was in reaction to Tesla’s suggestion that the ultimate weapons could be “devil automata.” Caught up in war fever, Tesla emphasized nefarious implications of his work: Automatons would fight while humans would live. He wrote, “The continuous development in this direction must ultimately make war a mere context of machines without men and without loss of life—a condition [which will lead]…in my opinion…to permanent peace.”15
This position was refuted by a number of individuals, the most eloquent by Frenchman M. Huart:
Like all inventors of destructive machines, [Tesla] claims that his [devil automata] will make the governments which are inclined to create international conflagrations hesitate. On this account Nikola Tesla claims a right to be called a benefactor of humanity. The genius of destruction would seem to have, then, two aims. It creates evil but mostly good. Through its help the abolition of wars may no longer be a utopia of generous dreamers. A blessed era will open up to the people, whose quarrels will be settled in view of the terror of the cataclysms promised by science. What contradictions of conception is the human mind subject to?16
Coincidentally, this view was espoused by Mark Twain, who wrote to Tesla from Europe wanting to sell the patents to cabinet ministers in Austria, Germany, and England, by Bulwer-Lytton, and by Czar Nicholas of Russia, whom Tesla himself was negotiating with.17 (And that was how “Nicholas” Tesla became associated with the czar.) In the modern era, Edward Teller, one of the inventors of the hydrogen bomb, and, more recently, President Ronald Reagan in his 1980s Star Wars speeches, have also expounded on this position. But Tesla (much like Einstein) came to regret his initial view of how the agents of Armageddon could lead humans to peace.
The brazen essay, which had appeared in Martin’s journal, continued as an introduction to Tesla’s “thoughtful” paper on electrotherapeutics and then concluded with the following convoluted backhand compliment:
It is not our desire to pose as apologists or publicists for Mr. Tesla. He needs no assistance of that kind; and so long as he commands freely whole pages of the Sunday papers, for which Mr. Wanamaker pays gladly his thousands of dollars, the scientific journals have little to do with the matter. All we wish to say is that it is not fair to condemn, as many do, Mr. Tesla as a visionary and impractical. No man has finished his work till he is dead, and even then there are long, long centuries in which his ideas can prove themselves true. The visionaries are thus often in the end the most sordid of realists—something Mr. Tesla will never be.18
As Martin had been, in a sense, Tesla’s advance man, his decision to allow this critique in his journal became a tacit sanction for other writers to unfurl their condemnation. For instance, another scathing review appeared in both The Scientific American and the more popular Public Opinion. The article appeared on the same page as the obituary of mountebank inventor John Worrell Keely.
Was Keely a Charlatan?
In the death of J. W. Keely of Keely Motor fame…the world has been robbed of one of its most unique and fascinating characters…[Keely] was always going to startle the world but never did. It is sincerely to be hoped that Keely’s alleged secrets have died with him.
Science and Sensationalism
…That the author of the multiphase system of transmission should, at this late date, be flooding the press with rhetorical bombast that recalls the wildest days of the Keely Motor mania is inconsistent and inexplicable to the last degree…The facts of Mr. Tesla’s invention are few and simple as the fancies which have been woven around it are many and extravagant. The principles of the invention are not new, nor was Tesla the original discoverer.19
This implication that Tesla was not the author of his system of wireless communication echoed previous charges that he was not the genuine inventor of the AC polyphase system. This was what particularly angered him, as it was essential that his work be original. “I wish I could lay upon the fellow all the forked lightning in my laboratory,” Tesla told the Johnsons at dinner at their home.20
“Perhaps it would be more effective if an outside person came to your defense,” Robert suggested.
“My dear Luka, I know that you are a noble fellow and devoted friend and I appreciate your indignation at these uncalled for attacks, but I beg you not to get involved under any condition as you would offend me. Let my ‘friends’ do their worst, I like it better so. Let them spring on scientific societies worthless schemes, oppose a cause which is deserving, throw sand into the eyes of those who might see. They will reap their reward in time.”21
“Then how can we redress such an outrageous individual?”
“Let us have a profound contempt for the creature,” Tesla concluded.
“I don’t see Commerford in this same category,” Katharine offered, trying to set the stage for a reconciliation.
“I know you and Luka want me to forgive your friend Martin for his disparaging editorial. It was well done, but not so painstakingly as many others before. He renders me more and more valuable services.”
“At least talk to him,” Katharine pleaded.
Tesla grabbed his hat, coat, and gloves and waved his hand. “Sorry for him. That is all,” he said as he departed.22
Tesla counterattacked with a spirited response to Electrical Engineer which they were forced to publish:
On more than one occasion you have offended me, but in my qualities both as Christian and philosopher I have always forgiven you and only pitied you for your errors. This time, though, your offense is graver than the previous ones, for you have dared to cast a shadow on my honor…Being a bearer of high honors from a number of American universities, it is my duty, in view of this slur, to exact from you a complete and humble apology…On this condition I will again forgive you, but I would advise you to limit yourself in your future attacks to statements for which you are not liable to be punished by law.23
Tesla, of course, was angry with the general tone of their editorial; but what particularly upset him was the implication that he had abandoned his mechanical and electrical oscillators and his cold lamps without filaments (fluorescent lights). He was in the midst of negotiating a large business transaction with a number of investors, particularly Astor. In no way did he want there to be any implication that these endeavors were being abandoned.
Martin’s rebuttal was published right after Tesla’s letter:
His Friends to Mr. Tesla
One foremost electrical inventor [unnamed—probably Elihu Thomson]…has been kind enough to say that the Electrical Engineer made Mr. Tesla.
This statement was disputed by Martin as “a person’s actions make the person”; however, the journal (i.e., Martin) did cite the fact that in the past it published Tesla’s articles and book of his inventions and lectures and, furthermore, that it was their editor who has “striven with all the ability possessed to explain Mr. Tesla’s ideas.” This is completely true. For an eight-year period, 1890-98, Electrical Engineer published 167 articles by or about Tesla, 40 more than Electrical Review and 70 more than Electrical World.24 Moreover, it was clearly Martin who choreographed the reclusive inventor’s entrée into the American electrical arena.
As Tesla often promised more than he delivered, the journal, as a “true friend,” felt an obligation to urge him to complete “a long trial of beautiful but unfinished inventions.” They (i.e., Martin) also took keen exception to the fantastic statements about Tesla’s remote-controlled flying machine that could change its direction in flight, “explode at will and…never make a miss.” Martin continued: “Our past admiration of Mr. Tesla’s real, tangible work is on record, and stands; but we draw the line at such things as these. We are sorry Mr. Tesla feels so keenly, but we cannot help it.”25
Given that this assault stemmed from one of Tesla’s closest allies, it bears careful consideration. However, from a historical perspective, we should also consider hidden agendas. For instance, in 1894, Tesla was freely distributing his collected works and not paying for additional copies.
“I made some money out of my Tesla book,” Martin confessed to Elihu Thomson many years later, “[but it was] promptly borrowed from me by the titular component, so that two years of work went for nothing.”26 The following year, in 1895, Tesla’s laboratory burned to the ground, and Martin wrote an admirable tribute.27 Perhaps that is why he did not insist Tesla repay him.
Martin had been placed in an awkward position, for he was also a good friend of Tom Edison’s, a powerful Tesla rival; and as a reporter he had to be objective in covering advances from other rivals, such as Marconi. Tesla’s irritating habit of living beyond his means and seeing projects completed before they actually materialized was forever a source of frustration to his longtime protector. And history has so proved, in many ways, that Martin was right. Tesla’s oscillators were never a commercial success; his wireless system of distributing light, information, and power (in its total form) was never realized; and for reasons difficult to understand, Tesla’s fluorescent lights were never marketed.
On the other hand, Tesla was extremely prolific. He did build working models of all of his inventions. For instance, the telautomaton was a fully functioning prototype. And it takes many years for one’s endeavors to come to fruition. Tesla had already proved himself in a variety of ways. That all of his projects never materialized is understandable given the great scope of his efforts.
Tesla’s telautomaton remains one of the single most important technological triumphs of the modern age. In its final form, it was conceived as a new mechanical species capable of thinking as humans do, capable of carrying out complex assignments and even capable of reproduction. The invention also comprised all of the essential features of wireless transmission and selective tuning. Here was a true work of genius.
Surprisingly, Tesla was an adherent of a stimulus-response model for explaining human behavior and consciousness rather than a proponent of a model espousing a creative unconscious. The rivalry between Ernst Mach and Carl Stumpf, Tesla’s philosophy teacher, discussed earlier, and the work of Descartes on the self-propelled automata correlate to a number of key positions Tesla took which influenced directly the development of his telautomaton. The mind, according to this proposition, was nothing more than a simple compilation of cause-and-effect sensations. What we call ideas were secondary impressions derived from these primary sensations.
Paradoxically, although Tesla’s achievement was highly original and although he touted himself as the “creator of new principles,” in no way did the inventor think that he had ever produced a new idea that did not stem from something external, for example, a mechanism present in nature or deriving from the work of others. A reader of great philosophers, Tesla fully understood what the adoption of his telautomaton would mean to the world. He saw clearly the implication in the “coming race.” Machines would not only replace laborers, they would think for themselves. Tesla’s genius, therefore, was not only in the appreciation of the advanced thinking of others but also and more important, in implementing on a practical basis their abstract ideas. Whereas others sought to change the world with thoughts, Tesla manifested on the physical plane real working models. He certainly was the father of remote-controlled electronic “beings,” but he would have been the last person to claim that he was the father of the idea.
In a famous article printed in the Century in 1900, Tesla explained the entire conceptualization behind his telautomaton: “I have, by every thought and every act of mine, demonstrated and do so daily, to my absolute satisfaction that I am an automaton endowed with a power of movement, which merely responds to external stimuli beating upon my sense organs, and thinks and acts accordingly. I remember only one or two cases in all my life which I was unable to locate the first impression which prompted a movement, or a thought, or even a dream.”28
Tesla neglects to mention that one of these two instances was the revelation he had in Professor Poeschl’s class: He had seen that the commutator could be eliminated in the DC machines. In other words, Tesla’s most successful invention, the AC polyphase system, was initiated from intuitive insight. Nevertheless, Tesla stubbornly clung to the “tabula rasa” premise. No inspiration, according to this pundit, began from within; self-directed responses were initiated only after external stimuli were received. This is a complex idea, as it seems from the first paragraph below that Tesla believes the reverse.
How Cosmic Forces Shape Our Destinies
Every living being is an engine geared to the wheelwork of the universe…There is no constellation or nebula, no sun or planet…that does not exercise some control over its destiny—not in the vague and delusive sense of astrology, but in the rigid and positive meaning of physical science.
More than this can be said. There is no thing endowed with life—from man who is enslaving the elements, to the humblest creature—in all the world that does not sway in its turn.29
At the time he conceived these ideas, that is, in the early 1890s, Tesla was studying Herbert Spencer and also Buddhist writings. He even gave his friend Johnson a copy of a book on Buddhism to read. Nevertheless, the influence of Mach’s principle and Newton’s laws concerning such correlates as the angular momentum of the earth, sun, and galaxy also figured into his cosmological paradigm. “The Buddhist expresses it one way, the Christian in another, but both say the same: We are all one…Science, too, recognizes this connectedness of separate individuals, though not quite in the same sense that it admits that the suns, planets and moons of a constellation are one body, and there can be no doubt that it will be experimentally confirmed in times to come.30
Having studied will psychology (occult psychological principles) as a youth, Tesla was a firm believer in self-determination and the incredible power of the will. Somehow, however, he reconciled this internal procedure, which the philosopher George Gurdjieff links to a direct expression of the soul, to his external-behavioristic paradigm. For Tesla, the spark of life is not only biological but also present in the structure of matter: “Even matter called inorganic, believed to be dead, responds to irritants and gives unmistakable evidence of a living principle within.”31
Such things as metals respond to stimuli (e.g., magnets). Tesla refuses to separate the motive forces involved in electromagnetic effects from reactions of “living” matter. This in essence was Bulwer-Lytton’s “vril power.” The energy that runs the universe directs life. “Thus, everything that exists, organic or inorganic, animated or inert, is susceptible to stimulus from the outside. There is no gap between, no break in continuity, no special and distinguishing vital agent. The momentous question of Spencer, What is it that causes inorganic matter to run into organic forms? has been answered. It is the sun’s heat and light. Wherever they are there is life.”32
As Tesla himself was a “self-propelled automaton entirely under the control of external influences,” he could use the model of himself to build his telautomaton. What we call memory, Tesla further stated, “is but increased responsiveness to repeated stimuli.” Creative thinking and also dreaming would be derived from secondary reverberations of these initial external stimuli.
Long ago I conceived the idea of constructing an automaton which would mechanically represent me, and which would respond, as I do myself, but of course, in a much more primitive manner to external influences. Such an automaton evidently had to have motive power, organs for locomotion, directive organs and one or more sensitive organs so adapted as to be excited by external stimuli…
Whether the automaton be of flesh and bone, or of wood and steel, it mattered little, provided it could provide all the duties required of it like an intelligent being.33
To Tesla, his remote-controlled boat was not simply a machine, it was a new technological creation endowed with the ability to think. In Tesla’s view, it was also, in a sense, the first nonbiological life-form on the planet. As a prototype, this first new life-form was “embodied,” in Tesla words, with a “borrowed mind,” his own! “[It will be able] to follow a course laid out or…obey commands given far in advance, it will be capable of distinguishing between what it ought and what it ought not to do…and of recording impressions which will definitely affect its subsequent actions.”34
Very few individuals could comprehend the magnitude of the creation in 1898, and so they lashed out at Tesla instead.
In November 1898, the examiner in chief of patents came to witness a demonstration of Tesla’s telautomaton before granting a patent, so “unbelievable” was the claim. “I remember that when later I called on an official in Washington, with a view of offering the invention to the Government,” Tesla wrote, “he burst out in laughter…Nobody thought then that there was the faintest prospect of perfecting such a device.”35