Chapter 6 – Niagara Falls

 

In the schoolroom there were a few mechanical models which interested me and turned my attention to water turbines. I constructed many of these and found great pleasure in operating them. How extraordinary was my life an incident may illustrate. My uncle had no use for this kind of pastime and more than once rebuked me. I was fascinated by a description of Niagara Falls I had perused, and pictured in my imagination a big wheel run by the Falls. I told my uncle that I would go to America and carry out this scheme. Thirty years later I saw my ideas carried out at Niagara and marvelled at the unfathomable mystery of the mind.

Nikola Tesla

 

In 1886, civil engineer Thomas Evershed, who had worked on the Erie Canal, proposed digging a series of canals and tunnels to carry water from Niagara Falls to waterwheels that would be used to power industrial mills and factories. Three years later, Edison drew up a plan to electrify the city of Buffalo, NY, which was 20 miles (32 km) away. However, DC had never been transmitted more than one or two miles.

Even Westinghouse, at that time, was dubious that electricity could be transmitted so far and suggested a complex system of compressed air tubes and cables to convey the power. Plans were drawn up for the construction of an industrial complex next to the Falls, but then came the news that AC power had been transmitted the 109 miles (175 km) from Lauffen to Frankfurt by AEG in Germany.

The International Niagara Commission, headed by Lord Kelvin, offered $20,000 for the best plan to harness the power of the Falls. Like Edison, Kelvin was opposed to AC – until he saw it in action at the Columbian Exposition. Then he became an enthusiastic convert. Westinghouse refused to enter at first as he felt that, to win, he would be handing over $100,000-worth of advice. Of the twenty schemes submitted, fourteen used hydraulics or compressed air. Four involved DC power, one of which was endorsed by Edison. Two used AC. One of them was not fully worked out; the other used the Tesla system manufactured by Westinghouse.

 

Closing the Deal

GE thought they were still in the running and when blueprints went missing from the Westinghouse works they were accused of industrial espionage. However the success of the hydroelectric plant at Telluride followed by Westinghouse’s triumph at the Chicago World’s Fair left no one in doubt about who should be awarded the contract. Thomas Martin’s article on Tesla in Century closed the deal. The following year, The New York Times wrote: ‘To Tesla belongs the undisputed honor of being the man whose work made this Niagara enterprise possible … There could be no better evidence of the practical qualities of his inventive genius.’

Meanwhile the president of the Cataract Construction Company, Edward Dean Adams, visited Tesla in New York and offered him $100,000 for a controlling interest in fourteen US and foreign patents, along with any future inventions Tesla may come up with. Tesla accepted and in February 1895 the Nikola Tesla Company was set up. Not only was Tesla working on wireless and remote control, he was putting his mind to cheap refrigeration, the production of liquid air, the manufacture of fertilizers and nitric acid from the air, and artificial intelligence.

 

Electrifying Buffalo

Construction of the first power station at Niagara took 5 years. It was a headache for investors throughout. The outlay was huge and no one knew whether it would work as the plans lay principally in Tesla’s three-dimensional imagination. However their worries evaporated when the switch was thrown and the first power reached Buffalo at midnight on 16 November 1896. The Niagara Gazette reported: ‘The turning of a switch in the big powerhouse at Niagara completed a circuit which caused the Niagara River to flow uphill.’ The first 1,000 horsepower of electricity reaching Buffalo was taken by the street railway company, but already the local power company had orders from residents for 5,000 more. Within a few years the number of AC generators at Niagara Falls reached the planned ten, and power lines ran as far as New York City. Broadway was ablaze with lights. It powered streetcars and the subway system. Even Thomas Edison’s networks converted to alternating current.

 

Mesmerized by Mars

While these developments were going on, Tesla was doing more experiments with wireless transmission. He set up a transmitter on the roof of his laboratory and using an aerial strung from a balloon, he could detect a signal on top of the Hotel Gerlach, thirty blocks away.

As always, Tesla was a visionary. Walking up Fifth Avenue one fine Sunday afternoon in 1894, he said to his young assistant D. McFarlan Moore: ‘After we have signalled from any point to any point on the Earth, the next step we will be signalling other planets.’

America was in the grip of Martian fever at the time. The noted astronomer Percival Lowell (1855 – 1916) was studying the ‘canals’ on Mars and John Jacob Astor (1864 – 1912) – the richest man to die on the Titanic – had just published A Journey to Other Worlds. He gave a copy to Tesla.

For the time being, Tesla was planning to see if he could receive signals from a ferry on the Hudson River, but on 13 March 1895 his laboratory burnt down. While Tesla was wrestling with depression, Westinghouse was fighting over the patents for Tesla’s AC induction motors against GE and others. GE, of course, promulgated the theory that the fire at Tesla’s lab had been caused by the sparks emanating from one of his motors. In fact, it had started on the floor below.

Tesla set about finding a new lab. In the meantime, Edison let him use a workshop in Llewellyn Park, New Jersey, and, although uninsured, Tesla was confident that Westinghouse would pay for any new equipment he needed. However, Westinghouse was a hard-headed businessman and billed Tesla. Meanwhile, he announced that he was planning to use Tesla’s motors, whose patents he owned, to power locomotives.

The following year, 1896, Tesla told the press that he was looking into the ‘possibility of beckoning Martians’ and, when Lord Kelvin arrived in America in 1897, he suggested using the lights of New York to flash a signal to the Martians. Meanwhile Edison was working on something even more outlandish – a telephone to contact the dead.

But for Tesla contacting Mars was just an ‘extreme application of [my] principle of propagation of electric waves’. It was merely an extension of a more Earthly goal. He pointed out: ‘The same principle may be employed with good effects for the transmission of news to all parts of the Earth … Every city on the globe could be on an immense circuit … a message sent from New York would be in England, Africa and Australia in an instant. What a grand thing that would be.’

 

Electric Demon Duo

Arthur Brisbane in The World newspaper had announced that Tesla was ‘greater even than Edison’, but New York’s Troy Press asked: ‘Who is electric king, Edison or Tesla?’ Meanwhile, the two men, now billed as the ‘Twin Wizards of Electricity’, were appearing at the National Electrical Exposition in Philadelphia. Tesla was then on the ascendant as AC had been transmitted along telephone lines for a record-breaking 500 miles (800 km). Tesla was disappointed though as the power at the Exposition was restricted due to the fear of fire.

By this time, Edison was conceding: ‘The most amazing thing about this Exposition is the demonstration of the ability to deliver here an electric current generated at Niagara Falls. To my mind it solves one of the most important questions associated with electrical development.’ Bell concurred, stating, ‘This long distance transmission of electric power was the most important discovery of electric science that had been made for many years.’

Tesla told the Philadelphia Press: ‘I am now convinced beyond any question that it is possible to transmit electricity … to commercial advantage over a distance of 500 miles at half the cost of generation by steam … I am willing to stake my reputation and my life on this declaration.’

 

The Power of Electrical Healing

Following on from Mark Twain’s idea, Tesla began to experiment on the healing properties of electricity in his new laboratory on Houston Street in Greenwich Village. At the time, doctors were promoting electricity as a ‘vitality booster’ and a ‘universal healing agent’. Some even said that it could cure tuberculosis, which was rife at the time. It was reported that Tesla took daily doses to deal with his depression after his lab burnt down. He said that high-frequencies ‘produce an anti-germicidal action’. As part of his daily routine, he would strip off and climb on board his apparatus and crank up the juice.

He was also said to be working on an electric weeding tool to clear railroad tracks of unwanted undergrowth. He paid a short visit to Colorado, where he claimed to have transmitted a signal through Pike’s Peak, using the energy of the Earth, rather than his oscillators. Announcing the success of this experiment in Arthur Brisbane’s newspaper The World on 8 March 1896, he said: ‘Electricity would be as free as the air. The end has come to telegraph, telephone companies, and other monopolies … with a crash.’

 

X-Rays, Shadowgraphs and Cosmic Rays

While running a current through partially evacuated glass tubes, Tesla had also noticed a special radiation was given off that could be detected by phosphorescent and fluorescent substances. In 1892, he gave lectures on what he called ‘black light and very special radiation’. Experimenting with his radiation he notice that he could produce what he called ‘Shadowgraphs’ on plates inside metal containers. Unfortunately, these were lost when his laboratory burned down.

When he read of Röntgen’s discovery of X-rays, he realized that these were the same thing as his ‘very special radiation’. He produced more shadowgraphs and sent them to Röntgen who asked how they had been made.

Tesla quickly realized that he could get better results with a Tesla Coil that developed 4 million volts. While others were X-raying thin structures such as hands and feet, he was taking photographs through the skull at a distance of 40 ft (12 m) from the tube.

While experimenting, Tesla noticed that the energy had both particle and wave-like attributes, something later recognized by Albert Einstein. He also speculated that the tiny lumps of matter involved, later known as electrons, might be broken up into even smaller pieces and said that ‘similar streams must be emitted by the Sun’ – what we now know as cosmic rays.

Tesla X-rayed birds and animals, himself and his assistants, quite oblivious to the fact that this might be dangerous. He reasoned that the amount of material involved was so small that it would take centuries to build up enough to be poisonous. He himself suffered from bad headaches when experimenting with X-rays and an assistant suffered blistering and inflammation of exposed skin.

Edison was also experimenting with X-rays and noted that they caused sensations in the eyes of the blind. He believed that eyesight might be restored by the application of X-rays. Tesla disagreed and there was another falling out.

The rift was mended when the Kentucky School of Medicine combined devices made by Tesla and Edison to remove birdshot from the foot of a voter who had been shot during an election scuffle. Thomas Martin then took Tesla, Edison and other electricians on a fishing trip off Sandy Hook. Ironically, Tesla caught a large flounder; Edison a huge fluke.

 

Heading for The Falls

In July 1896, Tesla, Westinghouse, Adams and others involved in the Niagara project, travelled up to the Falls. On their arrival, the Niagara Gazette reported:

Tesla is an idealist, and anyone who has created an ideal of him from the fame that he has won will not be disappointed in seeing him for the first time. He is fully six feet tall, very dark of complexion, nervous, and wiry. Impressionable maidens would fall in love with him at first sight, but he has no time to think of impressionable maidens. In fact, he has given as his opinion that inventors should never marry. Day and night he is working away at some deep problems that fascinate him, and anyone that talks with him for only a few minutes will get the impression that science is his only mistress, and that he cares more for her than for money and fame.

Tesla was overcome at the sight of the Falls and the first of the hydroelectric power stations designed by Stanford White built there. It would house some ten gigantic Tesla turbines generating over 35,000 kilowatts.

Afterwards he returned to New York City, where he threw himself back into research into the wireless transmission, fearing that Marconi may steal a march. Again he refused to holiday with the Johnsons, though he did have Christmas dinner with them.

 

Respect, Acclaim and Kudos

The celebration for the inauguration of the Niagara Falls power station was held in January 1897 in the Ellicott Club in Buffalo, NY. The top 350 of America’s most prominent businessmen made the trek there. A notable no-show was Thomas Edison.

Tesla was introduced as the ‘greatest electrician on Earth’ and received a standing ovation. However, Tesla made a rambling, self-deprecating speech, saying it had been a mistake to invite him. He heaped praise on those who had helped. Running out of time, the master of ceremonies intervened and cut off the end of his speech. Just as well, as a blissfully unaware Tesla was about to enlighten the distinguished audience by telling them that they had wasted all their time and money building a power line from Niagara to Buffalo – he would soon be transmitting the electricity wirelessly …

His continual self-deprecation did him no favours. Others were claiming to have invented the induction motor and the Tesla Coil, and they were pirating his inventions. Meanwhile he turned down several applications to be his assistant from a top Yale student, Lee De Forest (1873 – 1961), who eventually went on to rival Marconi in the development of radio.