Chapter 7 – Tesla’s Extreme Science

 

Suppose the whole earth to be like a hollow rubber ball filled with water, and at one place I have a tube attached to this, with a plunger in the tube. If I press upon the plunger the water in the tube will be driven into the rubber ball, and as the water is practically incompressible, every part of the surface of the ball will be expanded. If I withdraw the plunger, the water follows it and every part of the ball will contract. Now, if I pierce the surface of the ball several times and set tubes and plungers at each place the plungers in these will vibrate up and down in answer to every movement which I may produce in the plunger of the first tube. If I were to produce an explosion in the centre of the body of water in the ball, this would set up a series of vibrations in the whole body. If I could then set the plunger in one of the tubes to vibrating in consonance … in a little while and with the use of a very little energy I could burst the whole thing asunder.

Nikola Tesla, explaining a global telegraph system

 

Back in New York, Tesla began developing Elisha Gray’s teleautography into telephotography. Edison then announced that he planned to launch the autographic telegraph, which would allow journalists to file their stories effortlessly, along with sketches and pictures. Tesla claimed his system could also work wirelessly, at a time when sending a Morse signal still had to be perfected.

Tesla had studied a system developed in 1846 by Scottish physicist Alexander Bain (1810 – 77). It transmitted pictures using a grid of wires imbedded in wax under a sheet of chemically treated paper. The receiver used the same grid where an electric stylus drew the shape. Tesla found that it was better to break down the elements of the picture using one wire and a spinning disc. Dr Arthur Korn of the University of Munich, who transmitted a photograph in 1902, cited his debt to Tesla. These experiments were the basis of the fax machine and the television.

 

Connecting to the Earth’s Energy

From what he read, Tesla began to suspect that Marconi was using clones of Tesla’s equipment in his experiments. After Sir William Preece had cancelled the test of Tesla’s equipment, Lloyds of London contacted Tesla and asked if he would rig up a ship-to-shore system for an international yacht race in 1896. Tesla high-handedly refused, fearing that his work would be confused with the amateurish efforts of others in the field.

He then began secret experiments that he did not even tell his lab assistants about. He would set up his transmitter in East Houston Street, then take a battery-powered receiver up the Hudson River to West Point, a distance of some 50 miles. From there, he could tune in to the signal from the transmitter. He did this two or three times, he told a court in 1915.

At the same time, he considered harnessing wind power, tidal power, solar energy and geothermal energy. Electricity could be used to electrolyze water, separating it into hydrogen and oxygen, whose explosive recombination would produce heat and steam. He patented a machine to produce ozone and worked out how to separate nitrogen out of air electrically. The farmer would simply shovel earth into the machine and switch it on. The current would drive out the oxygen and hydrogen, leaving the nitrogen to be absorbed in the soil which would emerge ready-fertilized.

Over 4,000 people turned out to see his lecture on the advances he had made in the field of X-rays at the New York Academy of Science, though it is thought that they had hoped to see him hurling thunderbolts again. Then in an article in Scribner’s Magazine on Marconi’s successful transmission of a radio signal 8 miles (13 km), he outlined a system for transmitting messages instantly around the world using the telluric currents that run below the surface of the Earth. He also had plans to transmit signals through the ionized layers thought to exist in the upper atmosphere.

While Tesla had done all the early development in radio, Marconi was preparing to transmit a signal across the English Channel. Once again Tesla had failed to exploit his own invention. Without the money to pursue his bigger projects, his pronouncements made him sound like a mad scientist. Brown and Peck were still earning thousands from his patents, while Westinghouse had joined forces with GE. Tesla’s induction motors and polyphase system were about to power subway trains without a penny going to the inventor.

Tesla was further sidelined at an electrical exhibition in New York organized by Stanford White. The Marconi company was represented by Edison’s son, Tom Edison Jr. Marconi had needed some wireless patents that Edison had taken out, and the Wizard of Menlo Park was happy to do business.

 

Making the Earth Move

Tesla placed one of his oscillators in the central support beam in the basement of the building of his Houston Street lab and adjusted the frequency until the beam began to hum. While he was distracted momentarily, the building began to shake, along with the earth and all the buildings around it. According to the Brooklyn Eagle: ‘The Fire Department responded to an alarm frantically turned in; four tons of machinery flew across the basement and the only thing which saved the building from utter collapse was the quick action of Dr Tesla in seizing a sledgehammer and destroying his machine.’

Tesla called the device a ‘Frankenstein’s monster’, and pointed out that no building could stand the strokes of a 5-pound hammer, delivered at its resonant frequency. On another occasion, Tesla claimed to have gone down to Wall Street where there was a ten-storey steel frame of a building under construction, clamped an oscillator the size of an alarm-clock to it and tuned it in.

In a few minutes, I could feel the beam trembling. Gradually the trembling increased in intensity and extended throughout the whole great mass of steel. Finally, the structure began to creak and weave, and the steel workers came to the ground panic-stricken, believing that there had been an earthquake. Rumours spread that the building was about to fall, and the police reserves were called out. Before anything serious happened, I took off the vibrator, put it in my pocket, and went away. But if I had kept on 10 minutes more, I could have laid that building flat in the street. And, with the same vibrator, I could drop the Brooklyn Bridge in less than an hour.

He told reporters that he could have split the Earth the same way, destroying mankind. He had worked out that the resonant frequency of the Earth has a periodicity of 1 hour, 49 minutes. If he were to explode a ton of dynamite every 1 hour, 49 minutes, the shock waves would keep reinforcing one another. He estimated that it would take a year to smash the world to pieces, ‘but in a few weeks I could set the earth’s crust into such a state of vibration that it would rise and fall hundreds of feet, throwing rivers out of their beds, wrecking buildings and practically destroying civilization. The principle cannot fail.’

 

Researching Remote Control

In 1898, the United States went to war with Spain after the battleship, the USS Maine, was sunk in Havana harbour. Cuba was still a Spanish colony at the time. It was thought that Tesla was on John Jacob Astor’s yacht when, to aid the war effort, he proposed the idea of a guided torpedo.

While Astor and his yacht went to war, Tesla began making preliminary experiments with a remote-controlled boat. Tesla had a large tank in the auditorium of the Electrical Exhibition in 1898. In it was a 4 ft (1.2 m) boat. By means of transmitters working at various frequencies, he could start and stop the boat, steer it and switch its lights on and off. He had also planned to build a submersible, perhaps to stage mock battles between Spanish ships and the American fleet. But he was upstaged by the Marconi company who were demonstrating remotely controlled mines, detonated wirelessly. The press got particularly excited when Tom Edison Jr accidentally blew up his desk where other mines were stored.

 

Crew-less Devil Automata

Tesla’s invention seemed all the more crazy when he proposed a 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’s side, make its devious way below the surface, through dangerous channels of mine beds, into protected harbours and attack a fleet at anchor, or go out to sea and circle about, watching for its prey, then dart upon it at a favourable moment, rush up to within a hundred feet if need be, discharge its deadly weapon and return to the hand that sent it. Yet through all these wonderful evolutions it will be under the absolute and instant control of a distant human hand on a far-off headland, or on a war ship whose hull is below the horizon and invisible to the enemy.

I am aware that this sounds almost incredible and I have refrained from making this invention public till I had worked out every practical detail of it. In my laboratory I now have such a model, and my plans and description at the Patent Office at Washington show the full specifications of it.

Even the Electrical Engineer, edited by his friend Thomas Martin, complained that Tesla was always promising great things and failing to deliver, saying: ‘Mr Tesla fools himself, if he fools anybody, when he launches forth into the dazzling theories and speculations associated with his name.’

He would tether up aloft balloons in those strata and deliver to them large quantities of current at such high potential that it would travel economically across the space without wires, say from Niagara Falls to Paris. By this facile distribution of water power, coal and steam would become unnecessary to industry. The new plan may explain why Mr Tesla has abandoned his old steam oscillator. It is earnestly to be hoped that this novel idea will prove workable. Balloons were a dismal failure in our late war, but that is no criterion, and Mr Tesla may have some superior gas for inflation and sustentation purposes. It will be remembered that Mr Marconi has already telegraphed from balloon to balloon, without wires, a distance of over 20 miles, thus proving in advance the tenability of Mr Tesla’s proposition.

Perhaps Tesla was caught up in war fever but he was convinced his ‘Devil Automata’ was the way of the future. ‘The continuous development in this direction must ultimately make war a mere contest of machines without men and without loss of life,’ he wrote, ‘a condition which would have been impossible without this new departure, and which, in my opinion, must be reached as preliminary to permanent peace.’

Others agreed with him. One of them was Mark Twain who wanted to sell patents to European governments. Tesla himself entered into negotiations with Czar Nicholas II (1868 – 1918) of Russia. Nevertheless, some began to write him off. The journal Public Opinion compared his remote-control boat to the mysterious ‘motive power’ of John Worrell Keely (1837 –98) who had just died, and said: ‘The facts of Mr Tesla’s inventions are few and simple as the fancies which have been woven around it are many and extravagant. The principle of the invention are not new, nor was Tesla the original discoverer.’

 

Beautiful but Incomplete Inventions

Tesla was upset by Thomas Martin’s attack and wrote a response that Electrical Engineer was forced to publish. It said: ‘Being a bearer of high honours 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.’

Martin struck back, saying directly after Tesla’s letter: ‘Our foremost electrical inventor has been kind enough to say that the Electrical Engineer made Mr Tesla.’ The implication, of course, being that Tesla was not America’s foremost electrical engineer. And it was true that between 1890 and 1898, Electrical Engineer had published 167 articles by or about Tesla. In that time, Electrical Review had published 127 and Electrical World just 97.

The rebuttal was headed ‘His Friends to Mr Tesla’ and urged him to complete a long list of ‘beautiful but unfinished inventions’, but he should stop making statements about such fantastic things as remote-control aircraft that would ‘explode at will… [and] never make a miss’. The world was not ready at that point in time for the cruise missile that Tesla was describing.

But Martin had a point. Tesla’s oscillator was not a commercial success. His fluorescent tubes never went on the market. And his wireless transmission of power was never realized. Tesla was sanguine. He wrote later: ‘I’m glad that I am living in a place in which, though they can roast me in the papers, they cannot burn me at the stake.’

As a final shot at Martin and the Electrical Engineer, he published an article in Electrical Review with pictures showing him, holding a glowing wireless vacuum lamp the size of a basket ball lit by millions of volts conducted by his body.

 

I, Robot …

A reporter from The New York Times watching his remote control boat said he could envision a wireless torpedo. Tesla had a bigger vision. ‘You do not see there a wireless torpedo,’ he said, ‘you see there the first of a race of robots, mechanical men which will do the laborious work of the human race.’ For Tesla it was a short leap from a remote-controlled machine to one that could think for itself. In Century magazine in June 1900, he wrote: ‘I am an automaton endowed with power of movement, which merely responds to external stimuli beating upon my sense organs, and thinks and acts and moves accordingly. I remember only one or two cases in all my life in which I was unable to locate the first impression which prompted a movement or a thought, or even a dream.’ Consequently, a sentient being could be manufactured.

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 has 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 matters little, provided it can perform all the duties required of it like an intelligent being.

However, people found it hard to take his ideas seriously. Tesla called his remotely controlled boat ‘The First Telautomaton’, but the examiner-in-chief of patents found the concept so unbelievable that he had to come and see it for himself. And when he thought of offering it to the government, the official in Washington he spoke to burst out laughing.

During the Spanish-American war, the Secretary of the Navy also turned down Tesla’s offer of wireless transmitters to help coordinate ship and troop movements for fear of the sparks that they might give off. Tesla assured him that he had overcome this problem, but the persistent image of Tesla with lighting bolts pouring from his fingers was too vivid.

 

Ignited by Cosmic Forces

Tesla also believed that we are shaped by cosmic forces ‘not in the vague and delusive sense of astrology, but in the rigid and positive meaning of physical science’. After all, science ‘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, when our means and methods for investigating psychical and other states and phenomena shall have been brought to great perfection’.

The spark of life was present in every inanimate object too. ‘Even matter called inorganic, believed to be dead, responds to irritants and gives unmistakable evidence of a living principle within,’ he said. ‘Thus, everything that exists, organic or inorganic, animated or inert, is susceptible to stimulus from the outside … What is it that causes inorganic matter to run into organic forms? … It is the Sun’s heat and light. Wherever they are there is life.’

 

Not Mad At All

Some people still had faith. Tesla boasted that he had produced a lamp that was far superior to the incandescent bulb, using one-third of the energy.

As my lamps will last forever, the cost of maintenance will be minute. The cost of copper, which in the old system is a most important item, is in mine reduced to a mere trifle, for I can run on a wire sufficient for one incandescent lamp more than a thousand of my own lamps, giving fully five thousand times as much light.

On the strength of this, Tesla’s friend John Jacob Astor invested $100,000 in the Tesla Electric Company and Tesla moved into the Waldorf-Astoria.