Besides machinery for producing vibrations of the required power, we must have delicate means capable of revealing the effects of feeble influences exerted upon the earth. For such purposes, too, I have perfected new methods. By their use we shall likewise be able, among other things, to detect at considerable distance the presence of an iceberg or other object at sea. By their use, also, I have discovered some terrestrial phenomena still unexplained. That we can send a message to a planet is certain, that we can get an answer is probable: man is not the only being in the Infinite gifted with a mind.
—Nikola Tesla
TESLA ARRIVED IN COLORADO SPRINGS on May 18, 1899. Ostensibly, Astor had invested in him to pursue improvements in fluorescent lighting. Instead of adhering to Astor's wishes, Tesla was well into his plans for setting up a massive experiment on the wireless transmission of energy, light, and communication.
With an auspicious welcome from the town's elite, Tesla settled into Room 207 at the Alta Vista Hotel. He promptly instructed the staff to deliver 18 fresh towels to his room each morning. Both the room number and number of linens were in keeping with his obsession that they be divisible by three.
Colorado Springs presented Tesla the opportunity to conduct his transmission tests at 6,000 feet above sea level in a dry climate, atmospheric conditions that befitted his experiments. He would be away from the social obligations and prying press of New York. Indeed he would be able to work in secrecy. Upon arriving, he sent a request to his assistant back East, George Scherff to ship electrical equipment and glass blown tubes from the New York laboratory.
Not only did Leonard E. Curtis provide Tesla with the means to set up the lab; he also secured free electricity for the inventor. The actual plans for the building had been kept secret until only a few days before Tesla arrived in Colorado. Outside town, in a pasture with a view of Pikes Peak, Tesla's odd-looking experimental facility was being constructed under the auspices of local carpenter Joseph Dozier. Tesla and Dozier shared an inclination to discuss paranormal behavior and interplanetary communication.
The main wooden lab measured 50-60 feet by 70-80 feet, and approximately 18 feet high, with a roof that opened to the sky. A smaller space that served as an office jutted out from the front of lab. At first Tesla had planned to fly balloons to lift the wires for sending signals, but the balloons proved incapable of lifting such heavy weight.
As an alternative, he erected a large wooden tower on the roof platform, with a telescopic copper pole through the center. This retractable device, topped by a copper ball 3 feet in diameter, measured nearly 200 feet when fully extended. The pole, which he referred to as his magnifying transmitter, rose from the lab's enormous Tesla coil, which he called his magnifying transformer. Over time, these two terms came to be used interchangeably to describe the entire system.
Tesla's lab looked extremely out of place on the prairie. Fencing was erected with signs that admonished, “KEEP OUT – GREAT DANGER.” This was no idle threat, as Tesla would soon be generating enough electrical power to kill an errant trespasser instantly.
Inside the main laboratory, all manner of transformers and condensers were set up upon their arrival from New York. Together with assistant Fritz Lowenstein, who also came out from New York, Tesla assembled what was then the world's largest Tesla coil. The coil was basically a 6-foot outside circular wall that was approximately 50 feet in diameter. Straddling the top of the wall were a couple of interwoven thick cables, or windings. Taken together, this served as the primary winding for his transformer. Within this ring were a number of secondary coils, wound with differing amounts of turns. At any given time, one end of a secondary coil could be sent into the earth and the other end could be attached to the transmitting pole. In this fashion, Tesla could send different wavelengths to his various receivers. By the time construction of the Tesla coil was completed in mid-June, he could begin experimenting.
Tesla wrote in his Colorado Springs diary that he had come to accomplish three main goals:
Through months of experimentation, he made a number of discoveries that led to the realization of these goals. He was able to discover the Earth's electrical properties, send messages through the ionosphere, and transmit energy great distances in three manners:
With his magnifying transmitter, Tesla could conduct experiments in wireless communication and energy to any point on the globe. He would begin by measuring lightning discharges during storms and set up oscillations from his coil that were in harmony with the sparks of lightning. By varying his oscillations, he could produce varying wavelengths that could be transmitted and received at different frequencies. His apparatus thus led to the discovery of “stationary” waves in July 1899, which he explained as follows:
When we raise the voice and hear an echo in reply, we know that the sound of the voice must have reached a distant wall, or boundary, and must have been reflected from the same. Exactly as the sound, so an electrical wave is reflected, and the same evidence which is afforded by an echo is offered by an electrical phenomenon known as a “stationary' wave – that is, a wave with fixed nodal and ventral regions [i.e. a sine wave]. Instead of sending sound-vibrations toward a distant wall, I have sent electrical vibrations toward the remote boundaries of the earth, and instead of the wall the earth has replied. In place of an echo I have obtained a stationary electrical wave, a wave reflected from afar. (“The Problem of Increasing Human Energy”)
The discovery of stationary waves and utilizing the conductive properties of the Earth meant that Tesla would be able to send messages much farther than his competitor Marconi could. He was tapping into the Earth's geomagnetic pulse. The ionosphere would become Tesla's electrical highway for carrying energy from a transmitting tower to a receiving plant.
In the process of make that discovery, Tesla's highly sensitive equipment also began picking up rhythmic beeps. In a 1901 article for Collier's Weekly titled “Talking with Planets,” he would write:
The changes I noted were taking place periodically, and with such a clear suggestion of number and order that they were not traceable to any cause then known to me. I was familiar, of course, with such electrical disturbances as are produced by the sun, Aurora Borealis and earth currents, and I was as sure as I could be of any fact that these variations were due to none of these causes.... It was some time afterward when the thought flashed upon my mind that the disturbances I had observed might be due to an intelligent control. Although I could not decipher their meaning, it was impossible for me to think of them as having been entirely accidental. The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another.... I have never ceased to think of those experiences and of the observations made in Colorado. I am constantly endeavoring to improve and perfect my apparatus, and just as soon as practicable I shall again take up the thread of my investigations at the point where I have been forced to lay it down for a time. (“Talking With the Planets”)
In 1955, rhythmic one-two-three beeps were discovered to be emanating from the planet Jupiter. Perhaps these were the sounds that Tesla had attributed to signals from Mars, as suggested by research in the 1990s by electrical engineer James F. Corum and his brother, physicist Kenneth L. Corum.
Having paved the way for wireless communication, Tesla embarked on experiments to transmit electricity wirelessly. He would take his receivers a considerable distance from the lab, with Lowenstein left behind to throw the switch on the transmitter at varying intervals. Tesla would report back when the receivers detected energy. However, since Lowenstein was back in the lab, unable to witness what Tesla reported, there is no actual confirmation of these experiments.
Sometime in early fall 1899, Lowenstein left for Europe. Tesla then summoned another assistant from New York, Kolman Czito, who would remain with him well into old age for both men. Tesla would prepare Czito for some of his boldest experiments.
Wanting visual proof that his experiments were proving fruitful, Tesla contacted Robert Underwood Johnson to write an article for The Century, with photos to demonstrate his achievements in Colorado Springs. In late December 1899, photographer Dickenson Alley arrived from New York to shoot an astonishing set of photographs. One iconic image was achieved through the technique of multiple exposures. The photo depicts a seated Tesla reading a book amid hundreds of streamers of electricity streaking around him. If the photograph were shot in real time, Tesla would have been electrocuted on the spot.
For the boldest of experiments, Tesla and Czito planted numerous incandescent lamps in the fields beyond the laboratory. Upon Tesla's command, Czito threw the transformer switches for a brief moment while Tesla stood in the lab doorway, observing huge bolts of electricity issuing from the top of the transmitting tower. The sound of millions of volts of streaming electricity was thunderous—then everything went silent. Tesla's experiment had short-circuited the power at the Colorado Springs Electric Company's generating station, plunging the surrounding community into complete darkness.
The disaster contributed to Tesla's departure from Colorado Springs. He was once again in debt, with a stack of outstanding bills. The Johnsons entreated him to return to New York for the Christmas holidays. Tesla was anxious to do so but was not be able to depart until January 7, 1900.
Ironically, when Tesla arrived back in New York, Marconi was also there soliciting funds for his wireless system. Marconi's confidant was the Serbian physicist Michael Pupin, who had worked with Edison in challenging Tesla's AC patent. Now, in early 1900, Pupin succeeded in bringing Tesla and Marconi together for an uncomfortable meeting at Tesla's lab to pick each other's brains. Tesla was confident that he possessed the ability to transmit messages around the globe. Marconi didn't believe him. The upshot of the meeting was that Pupin gained an understanding of Tesla's theories and pirated the principles in order to gain employment with Marconi. Pupin and Marconi's machinations would play out negatively against Tesla in the years ahead.
Tesla was less concerned with Marconi's current experiments than with the need to secure investments for a massive broadcast and power transmitter that would capitalize on his Colorado Springs experiments. He faced the same conundrum as he had with his invention of the AC induction motor. Without the support system and acumen of previous patronage, he would have to go it alone—devise his own strategy for filing patents, promote his wireless transmission system, and garner interested investors. Years earlier it was sufficient to produce working motors that introduced his AC ideas to the world. Now in 1900 his theories were on a global scale. The stakes were much higher, and the dollar amount would have to be much higher as well.
In order to protect his Colorado Springs findings, Tesla set about drawing up and filing a set of four important patents between mid-May and mid- July, 1900. The first one was easily the most brilliant, in which Tesla set forth his discovery and utilization of stationary waves to transmit power and send messages through the earth (Patent 787,412 – ART OF TRANSMITTING ELECTRICAL ENERGY THROUGH THE NATURAL MEDIUM).
Tesla's efforts to interest the U.S. Navy in the teleautomation torpedo and wireless communication systems met with bureaucratic rejection. His repeated attempts to obtain new investments from John Jacob Astor were greeted by a wall of stony silence. George Westinghouse was uninterested in wireless projects but did extend Tesla a few thousand dollars in credit. Even Tesla's appeals to the New York elite at his usual haunts—the Player's Club, Delmonico's, and the like—failed to rouse backers.
With no practical inventions to show for his Colorado Springs experiments, Tesla was hard-pressed to find financial backers for future development in wireless transmission. The lack of anything practical to demonstrate was problematic. The years between Tesla's initial AC-driven motors and the turn of the century gave rise to a host of well-trained electrical engineers and a myriad of inventors who profited greatly from Tesla's initial discoveries. Less apparent to investors in 1900 were the benefits to be gained from a system that would transmit energy wirelessly.
While filing his wireless patents, therefore, it was important for Tesla to decide how to promote his theories in order to attract potential investors. Thomas Commerford Martin, who had been instrumental in arranging earlier presentations to the electrical engineering community, no longer could be relied on, as he was skeptical of Tesla's grand predictions. The other alternative was for Tesla to appeal directly to the public in the hope of luring investors. Gambling on the latter approach, he wrote a long article in florid language that described the global implications of his magnifying transmitter. It was designed, he declared, to solve all the world's energy needs. After much give and take, Tesla convinced Robert Underwood Johnson to publish his treatise, “The Problem of Increasing Human Energy,” in the June 1900 issue of Century Magazine. Running more than 70 pages, the article was accompanied by startling photographs of Colorado Springs and Tesla's automaton.
Tesla's treatise in Century Magazine, interwoven with his ramblings on lasting peace, harnessing the sun's energy, and interplanetary communication, proved highly provocative. Members of the public greeted his idea of a World Wireless System as visionary, but the scientific community was less than enthusiastic. The lengthy essay failed to attract investors, though it might have piqued the interest of the richest man in America, J. Pierpont Morgan. Among the ideas that intrigued him was a magnifying transmitter capable of locating ships at sea and transmitting their position back to the mainland. The prospect appealed to Morgan, who was a yachtsman. Indeed his own negotiations with Marconi for a secure system had failed.
Tesla and Morgan both had close social ties with the Robert and Katharine Johnson, at whose social gatherings the inventor and industrialist appeared together over the ensuing months. Morgan, who had invested in the Niagara project, was well aware of Tesla's success with it. No doubt Tesla got Morgan's ear about the telegraphy system he proposed that would broadcast securely over multiple wavelengths, compared with Marconi's single-wavelength system. The series of discussions and entreating letters from Tesla finally moved the tycoon to hand Tesla a check for $150,000. In return, Morgan received a 51% share of Tesla's lighting and wireless patent rights.
Morgan's $150,000 was little more than pocket change for an industrialist whose net worth in the steel industry alone ran into a billion dollars. Tesla was excited that he could move ahead with his plans to build a wireless telegraphy system, but perhaps he misconstrued the arrangement with Morgan as the beginning of a bigger, longer-term partnership. With the thousands of dollars it took to light the Chicago Exposition and the millions of dollars it took to complete the Niagara project, Tesla could hardly have expected to accomplish his goal of a wireless telegraphy system with the initial funding from Morgan. His grandiose plans for a completely wireless world broadcasting transmission system would require much more.
Morgan's commitment enabled Tesla to negotiate with banker and lawyer James S. Warden for a 200-acre tract of Warden's land on Long Island, New York. Portraying the yet-to-be-built transmission system as the centerpiece of Warden's utopian real-estate enterprise, Tesla convinced him to deed over the parcel of land. Today this part of Long Island is known as East Shoreham; back then the projected development was named Wardenclyffe.
Tesla was able to enlist the services of his architect friend Stanford White, the designer of the power plant at Niagara Falls, to draw up architectural plans for a two-story laboratory and powerhouse that still stands on the site today. The tower itself was designed and constructed by White's associate, W.D. Crowe of East Orange, New Jersey. Construction began in September 1901. Tesla would describe the tower as
187 feet high, having a spherical terminal about 68 feet in diameter. These dimensions were adequate for the transmission of virtually any amounts of energy.... The transmitter was to emit a wave-complex of special characteristics and I had devised a unique method of telephonic control of any amount of energy. (My Inventions)
Theoretically, the transmission tower would send signals wirelessly through the Earth, which acts as a conducting body, to a receiver anywhere around the globe.
During construction, Tesla would commute by railroad each day from his residence at the Waldorf Astoria, along with a servant who carried a lavish lunch prepared by the hotel's staff. They would arrive at 11:00 A.M. and depart at 3:30 P.M. after Tesla's supervision of the day's construction.
As the laboratory neared completion and equipment arrived from the Houston Street lab, Tesla took up residence in a nearby bungalow for a year. Outfitting the lab was particularly stressful for him, with delays in the manufacture and shipment of machinery and irregular intervals in the receipt of money from Morgan.
The proposed tower would be located 350 feet from the laboratory in order to protect its occupants from errant streams of lightning emanating from the mushroom-shaped top. The new tower posed a number of design and engineering problems. First, no wooden structures of this height that employed minimal metal had ever been built before. The top of the tower was so large that it would act as a sail in stiff winds and easily topple the entire structure. When finally completed in 1902, the tower loomed high over the Wardenclyffe facility like a bizarre erector set topped by a huge mushroom.
In order for Tesla to achieve the objective of transmitting electrical power through the Earth, he reasoned that he would need a ground connection from the transmitting tower. To this end, he sank a 10-foot by twelve-foot well 120 feet under the tower and below the water table. Then, to complete the ground, he connected a metal shaft from the mushroom cap of the tower to the bottom of the well. An elaborate system was also necessary to properly connect the primary coils and the magnifying transmitter's secondary coil. Patent 1,119,732 – APPARATUS FOR TRANSMITTING ELECTRICAL ENERGY provided an illustration and principles for Wardenclyffe Tower.
The big question was would it work?
Complicating matters, Marconi claimed to have sent the three-dot, Morse code signal “SSS” across the Atlantic on December 12–13, 1901, heralded in The New York Times. Thomas Commerford Martin switched his allegiance from Tesla to Marconi, arranging for the latter to address the AIEE about his accomplishment. Tesla brushed off the announcement with a glib rejoinder: Marconi was merely sending signals, whereas he would be able to transmit electrical power wirelessly.
Morgan, also sensing that Marconi was ahead of Tesla in creating a wireless telegraphy system, felt little motivation to provide Tesla with additional funding. Moreover, Tesla had not lived up to his contract with Morgan to deliver a transatlantic telegraphy system. Indeed, Tesla had hoodwinked Morgan into believing that he was building the communication system while in fact he was working on his wireless energy dream.
Nor was Marconi the only inventor whose publicity campaign pushed him ahead of Tesla. Other notable entrants in the field included Elihu Thomson, Michael Pupin, and rival wireless inventor Lee de Forest, who made major innovations in broadcasting and sound-on-film development. All of their advances were fundamentally inspired by Tesla's discoveries.
In 1902, Tesla stepped up his entreaties to Morgan to pour more money into the Wardenclyffe enterprise. In a series of earnest letters to the financier, Tesla appealed to Morgan's vanity and business instincts. Tesla outlined a “World Telegraphy System” for which Morgan could potentially reap great profits from all the receivers that would have to be built around the world.
It makes possible not only the instantaneous and precise wireless transmission of any kind of signals, messages or characters, to all parts of the world, but also the inter-connection of the existing telegraph, telephone, and other signal stations without any change in their present equipment. By its means, for instance, a telephone subscriber here may call up and talk to any other subscriber on the Globe. An inexpensive receiver, not bigger than a watch, will enable him to listen anywhere, on land or sea, to a speech delivered or music played in some other place, however distant. (My Inventions)
Was this just grandiose boasting?
No matter what, Tesla drove himself to complete as much of the tower as possible. He had to begin testing in order to prove the viability of his concept. The New York Sun reported on July 16, 1903:
Natives hereabouts are intensely interested in the nightly electrical display shown from the tall tower where Nikola is conducting his experiments in wireless telegraphy and telephony. For a time, the air was filled with blinding streaks of electricity traveling through the darkness on some mysterious errand.
Morgan, for his part, was too deeply involved in his own myriad interests in the shipping, steel, and railroad industries to pay much attention to Tesla. The inventor's incessant pleas for money eventually became full of vituperation and anger toward the industrial baron. Morgan flatly refused to become involved in any more of Tesla's schemes; the great enterprise at Wardenclyffe still had not demonstrated the ability to turn a profit. In all probability, the many speculators then entering the broadcast field also contributed to Tesla's diminished creditability. Although Morgan now viewed him as a poor risk, Tesla still believed that
the true rewards are ever in proportion to the labor and sacrifices made.... I feel certain that of all my inventions, the Magnifying Transmitter will prove most important and valuable to future generations. I am promoted to this prediction not so much by thoughts of commercial and industrial revolution which it will surely bring about, but of the humanitarian consequences of the many achievements it makes possible. (My Inventions)
Without Morgan's capital and endorsement, Tesla went into a downward spiral. As much as he tried to keep working, the bills mounted and his creditors besieged him. His debts in Colorado Springs had not been fulfilled. He could not pay Westinghouse for the dynamos and other machinery loaned to him on credit. His current employees were going without pay and began to leave. Before long, only his loyal assistant George Scherff remained to help with the research. Even that came to a halt when Tesla could no longer pay for the coal to fuel the boilers.
Financially overwhelmed and psychologically overcome, Tesla was forced to abandon Wardenclyffe in late summer 1905. He apparently suffered a complete nervous breakdown, clinging to his vision for world wireless energy. He returned to New York City to live on credit at the Waldorf Astoria.
Tesla's personal world underwent further transformation in the succeeding years with the passing of some of the important figures in his life. Stanford White, who had designed both the Niagara Falls and Wardenclyffe powerhouses, was famously murdered by Harry K. Thaw over a lover's dispute with showgirl Evelyn Nesbitt in 1906. Mark Twain would succumb in 1910. John Jacob Astor was lost in the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. George Westinghouse passed on two years later.
Besieged by creditors, Tesla resorted to desperate measures. To guarantee payment of his hotel bills, he gave two mortgages on Wardenclyffe to the proprietor of the Waldorf Astoria, George C. Boldt. Unable to make any payments at all, Tesla turned over the full deed in 1915.
Wardenclyffe would be Tesla's last undertaking of such magnitude. While the tower had a futuristic science-fiction aspect, he left no clear plans or description of the full operating system.
