Chapter 14 – A New Source of Energy
I’m happy to hear that you are celebrating your 75th birthday, and that, as a successful pioneer in the field of high-frequency currents, you have been able to witness the wonderful development of this field of technology. I congratulate you on the magnificent success of your life’s work.
While working on his petrol-powered turbine in Philadelphia in 1924 – 25, Tesla met John B. Flowers, an inspector of an aircraft factory. With development of his bladeless turbine reaching a dead end, Tesla returned to the idea of powering planes and cars remotely from large central power stations like the one he had tried to build at Wardenclyffe. In Tesla’s hotel suite, Flowers helped draft a proposal to test and implement Tesla’s Wireless Power System to present it to J. H. Dillinger, head of the Radio Laboratory at the Bureau of Standards in Washington, DC.
Flowers told Dillinger that Tesla’s system would power a plane at any point around the world and that Tesla had already developed an oscillator to provide the power which he was willing to give to the American government if they agreed to build the plant. A meeting in Washington was arranged and Dillinger sent the proposal to physicist Harvey L. Curtis (1875 – 1956).
The 10-page document outlined a plan to use
standing waves to operate cars and planes. To demonstrate this, a sketch showed a balloon, standing in for the Earth, and a mechanical oscillator standing in for the electrical device:
… a mechanical oscillator arm was fastened to the tied opening of a rubber balloon 20 inches [50 cm] in diameter. The oscillator arm was operated with an electrical motor at 1,750 rpm by means of an eccentric on the motor shaft. The balloon hung free in the air. The rubber surface of the balloon represented the earth’s conducting surface and the air inside its insulating interior. The waves were propagated in the rubber surface at the rate of 51 ft per second [15.5 m per second], the frequency of transmission was 29 cycles per second and the wavelength was 21 inches [53 cm].
The mechanical oscillator was used in place of Tesla’s electrical oscillator as it presents an almost perfect analogy. Standing or stationary waves of the rubber surface replace the electromagnetic waves of Tesla’s system. By the test of this analogue, the operation of Tesla’s system can be forecast. When the oscillator arm was set in motion by operating the motor, there were three standing waves having six loops on the Earth’s surface – all having the same amplitude of vibration!
When the finger was pushed against one or more loops, all the loops were reduced in amplitude in the same proportion showing the ability to obtain all the power out at one or more points! The waves extended completely around the world and returned to the sending station.
Curtis rejected the proposal as, with Tesla’s standing waves, there would be a concentration of energy at the nodes. But, as Curtis pointed out:
The system proposed by Mr Flowers does not have this feature. He proposes to collect energy at any point … some means would have to be devised for concentrating this energy and making it available. No such method has been proposed, and I do not think of any that would be feasible … I do not know of any wireless apparatus of sufficient magnitude to warrant the expectation that power can be economically transmitted by radio methods.
Faster than the Speed of Light
Tesla denied that the electricity would be available only at the nodal points, advising that, in a hydraulic system, the pressure of the fluid is the same throughout. There was energy available at an electrical outlet even when nothing is plugged in. He explained that the oscillations would spread from his magnifying transmitter theoretically at an infinite speed, then slow down – at first very quickly, then at slower rate. After around 6,000 miles (9,500 km) they would travel at the speed of light.
From there on it increases in speed, slowly at first, and then more rapidly, reaching the antipode with approximately an infinite velocity. The laws of motion can be expressed by stating that the waves on the terrestrial surface sweep in equal intervals of time over equal areas, but it must be understood that the current penetrates deep into the Earth and the effects produced on the receivers are the same as if the whole flow was confined to the Earth’s axis joining the transmitter with the antipode. The mean surface speed is thus about 471,200 km per second [292,790 miles a second] – 57 per cent greater than that of the so-called Hertz waves.
There was a problem with this. James Clerk Maxwell’s equations predicted the speed of light at 186,000 miles a second (300,000 km a second). At first, it was assumed that this speed was relative to the background ether that electromagnetic radiation propagated through. But the Michelson-Morley experiment showed there was no such thing as ether. Einstein realized that this meant the speed of light was an absolute – and there was no such thing as a speed faster than light.
Tesla railed against Einstein and relativity. He would not accept the concept of curved space, as predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity, either. But Einstein, with his Nobel Prize, was the new star in the scientific firmament. Tesla, Edison, who died in 1931, Bell, who died in 1922, and the Wright brothers, who died in 1912 and 1948, were old hat.
Business As Usual
Despite the rejection of their plans in Washington, Flowers and Tesla went to Detroit to try and sell his ‘flying automobile’ to General Motors. Tesla also tried to sell his speedometer to Ford, but its high cost made it better suited to luxury cars. In Detroit, Tesla met his nephew Nicholas Trbojevich and there was an incident that became part of family lore. The two were going for a late snack in an expensive hotel. The head waiter suggested that they wait five minutes. Then the $5 cover charge would be lifted. This was in the middle of the Great Depression when $5 would feed a family for a week. But Tesla was not prepared to wait. When Trbojevich questioned his uncle over the matter of the cover charge, Tesla said: ‘I’ll never die rich unless the money comes in the door faster than I can shovel it out of the window.’
Tesla held talks with US Steel concerning installing his bladeless turbines on the exhaust from the blast furnaces, generating huge amounts of electricity. But, apparently, a test did not go ahead. Then in Buffalo, Tesla conducted some top-secret experiments. It was said that the petrol engine of a Pierce-Arrow sedan was replaced by an AC induction motor. A ‘power receiver’ using 12 vacuum tubes was set in the dashboard connected to a 6 ft (2 m) antenna. There is other speculation that it was powered by a steam or petrol-driven turbine, but no physical evidence of either design has been found.
While experimenters were using Tesla Coils to try and split the atom, Tesla himself was making more outlandish predictions, saying that all the machinery on Earth could be powered by cosmic rays. Unlimited quantities of power could be transmitted through wires or wirelessly from a central station to anywhere on the globe, eliminating the need for coal, oil, gas or any other terrestrial energy source. Already the central source of energy on Earth was the Sun, he said, but the new source of power would not be turned off at night.
Heralding a New Industrial Revolution
With just five days to go to his 75th birthday, Tesla said that he would soon announce ‘by far the most important discovery’ of his long career. ‘It will throw light on many puzzling phenomena of the cosmos,’ he said, ‘and may prove also of great industrial value, particularly in creating a new and virtually unlimited market for steel.’
He said that he had been wonderfully fortunate in coming up with new ideas that he was sure would be remembered by posterity. He was confident that his rotating magnetic field, induction motor and wireless system would live on long after he was gone, but he still considered his latest discoveries the most important. They would mark a new departure in science, be of great practical values and inaugurate a new industrial revolution, he said.
He had already succeeded in proving his theories by experimentation and, if the calculations based on them turned out to be true, the world would have a new source of energy in practically unlimited amounts, available at any point on the globe. But, again, he was tantalizingly vague when it came to the details:
I can only say at this time that it will come from an entirely new and unsuspected source, and will be for all practical purposes constant, day and night, and at all times of the year. The apparatus for capturing the energy and transforming it will partake both mechanical and electrical features, and will be of ideal simplicity. At first the cost may be found too high, but this obstacle will be overcome. Moreover, the installment will be, so to speak, indestructible, and will continue to function for any length of time without additional expenditures.
The press had heard such promises from Tesla before and wanted to know when he was going to make an official announcement of his new discoveries. But the great man was unwilling to be pinned down. These ideas had not come to him overnight, but as the result of intense study and experimentation for nearly 36 years. He said he was anxious to give the facts to the world as soon as possible, but wished to present them in a finished form. That may take a few months, or a few years, he said.
All the energy that the Earth receives from all the suns and stars of the universe is only about one-quarter of one per cent of that which it receives directly from the Sun. Therefore, it would be incomparably more rational to harness the heat and light rays of the Sun than attempt to capture the insignificant energy of this radiation … We can do it now, and we are doing it to a certain extent. But the tremendous handicap is found in the periodic character of this kind of energy supply. Many attempts have been made in this direction, but invariably it was found that the power was too expensive.
Dismissing Atomic Energy
Having rejected Einstein’s theory of relativity, Tesla also dismissed the idea of atomic energy. ‘The idea of atomic energy is illusionary,’ he said, ‘but it has taken so powerful a hold on the minds that, although I have preached against it for 25 years, there still are some who believe it to be realizable.’
He claimed to have disintegrated atoms in his experiments with the high-potential vacuum tube he developed in 1896, which he considered one of his best inventions. He operated at a range of potentials from 4 million to 18 millions volts. More recently, he said, he had designed an apparatus that would work at 50 million volts, which should produce results of great scientific importance. ‘But as to atomic energy, my experimental observations have shown that the process of disintegration is not accompanied by a liberation of such energy as might be expected from present theories,’ he said.
Cosmic Rays and Beyond
Tesla claims to have discovered cosmic rays while investigating X-rays and radioactivity in Colorado Springs in 1899, but his findings were in disagreement with theories advanced more recently:
I have satisfied myself that the rays are not generated by the formation of new matter in space, a process which would be like water running up hill. Nor do they come to any appreciable amount from the stars. According to my investigations the Sun emits a radiation of such a penetrative power that it is virtually impossible to absorb it in lead or other substances. It has, furthermore, other extraordinary properties in regard to which I shall express myself at some future date. This ray, which I call the primary solar ray, gives rise to a secondary radiation by impact against the cosmic dust scattered through space. It is the secondary radiation which now is commonly called the cosmic rays, and comes, of course, equally from all directions in space.
He also dismissed the idea that radioactivity resulted from activity within radioactive substances. It was caused by rays emitted from the Sun. If radium could be screened effectively from this ray, it would cease to be radioactive, he said. He had also been designing rocket-ships that he said could attain speeds of nearly a mile a second – 3,600 miles an hour (5,793 km per hour) – through the rarefied medium above the stratosphere. Again, he hoped his rocket-ships would bring world peace:
I anticipate that such machines will be of tremendous importance in international conflicts in the future. I foresee that in times not too distant wars between various countries will be carried on without a single combatant passing the border. At this very time it is possible to construct such infernal machines which will carry any desired quantity of poisoned gases and explosives, launch them against a target thousands of miles away and destroy a whole city. If wars are not done away with, we are bound to come eventually to this kind of warfare, because it is the most economical means of inflicting injury and striking terror in the hearts of enemies that ever has been imagined. Densely populated countries, like England and Japan, will be at a great disadvantage as compared with those embracing vast territories, such as the United States and Russia.
Although some of Tesla’s ideas in later life can be dismissed as the ravings of a mad scientist, sometimes he shows remarkable prescience.
Sending Signals to the Stars
When Time magazine put the ageing and eccentric inventor on their cover of the 20 July 1931 issue to celebrate his 75th birthday, Tesla did not disappoint. He told them of his new invention, the Tesla-scope, that he could use to signal to the stars, saying:
I think that nothing can be more important than interplanetary communication. It will certainly come some day, and the certitude that there are other human beings in the universe, working, suffering, struggling like ourselves, will produce a magic effect on mankind, and will form the foundation of a universal brotherhood that will last as long as humanity itself.
Asked when this would happen, he said: ‘I have been leading a secluded life, one of continuous, concentrated thought and deep meditation. Naturally enough I have accumulated a great number of ideas. The question is whether my physical powers will be adequate to working them out and giving them to the world.’
He also claimed that with 15 million volts – ‘the highest ever used’ – he split atoms over and over again, but no energy was released. The Time article carried several other amusing stories about Tesla. It said that he left the ‘swank’ Hotel St Regis after the maids complained that he kept four pet pigeons in his roll-top desk and that, while walking down an icy Fifth Avenue, ‘he slipped, threw himself into a flying somersault, landed on his feet, unperturbed kept on walking’. Time reported more eccentricities:
At the Hotel Governor Clinton where he now lives, if someone rings him up on the telephone or knocks at his door and he does not want to answer, he locks himself in the bathroom, turns the water loudly on. He is very sensitive to sensory stimuli. When he gets excited, blinding lights flash through his mind. He retreats to bed. A lifelong bachelor, habitually he goes to bed at 5.30 am, rises at 10.30 am. But he does not sleep the whole period. Proudly, yet almost plaintively, he explains: ‘I roll around and work on my problems.’
The Plaudits of Peers
Birthday accolades flooded in. Over a hundred letters of congratulation were received from other scientists or inventors including Sir Oliver Lodge, Lee De Forest and Albert Einstein. Notably absent were birthday greetings from Marconi and Pupin. And none could match the tribute bestowed on Edison when he died 3 months later and the lights of New York were dimmed in reverence.
Naturally, Tesla was full of new predictions. ‘I feel that we are nearing a period when the human mind will perform greater wonders than ever before,’ he said. ‘This is due to the continuous refinement of means and methods of observation and ever-increasing delicacy of our perception.’
We were about to conquer nature, contact beings on other planets and transmit huge amounts of power vast distances. A reporter from The New York Times again asked when he was going to make his discovery public. ‘There was a trace of regret in his voice as he answered,’ said the paper, ‘and the look of a man who has work enough for centuries and only a few years to do it in.’ Tesla then quoted Goethe. ‘He had not read Goethe for 40 years, he said, and he quoted it from memory.’
He was also at odds with the new ideas of quantum mechanics. ‘There is no chance in nature,’ he said, ‘although the modern theory of indeterminacy attempts to show scientifically that events are governed by chance. I positively deny that. The causes and effects, however complex, are intimately linked, and the result of all inferences must be inevitably fixed as by a mathematical formula.’
Waves in Time and Space
He re-asserted that human beings were automatons completely under the control of external forces and he denied the existence of individuality, saying:
It took me not less than 20 years to develop a faculty to trace every thought or act of mine to an external influence. We are just waves in time and space, changing continuously, and the illusion of individuality is produced through the concatenation of the rapidly succeeding phases of existence. What we define as likeness is merely the result of the symmetrical arrangement of molecules which compose our body.
He also denied the existence of the soul or spirit, saying they were merely expressions of the functions of the body. ‘These functions cease with death and so do soul and spirit,’ he said. ‘What humanity needs is ideals. Idealism is the force that will free us from material fetters.’
Photographing Thought
At 77, Tesla told a journalist from the Kansas City Journal-Post that he expected soon to be able to photograph thoughts, explaining:
In 1893, while engaged in certain investigations, I became convinced that a definite image formed in thought must, by reflex action, produce a corresponding image on the retina, which might possibly be read by suitable apparatus. This brought me to my system of television, which I announced at that time. My idea was to employ an artificial retina receiving the image of the object seen, an ‘optic nerve’ and another such retina at the place of reproduction. These two retinas were to be constructed after the fashion of a checkerboard with many separate little sections, and the so-called optic nerve was nothing more than a part of the earth.
An invention of mine enables me to transmit simultaneously, and without any interference whatsoever, hundreds of thousands of distinct impulses through the ground just as though I had so many separate wires. I did not contemplate using any moving part – a scanning apparatus or a cathodic ray, which is a sort of moving device, the use of which I suggested in one of my lectures.
Now if it be true that a thought reflects an image on the retina, it is a mere question of illuminating the same property and taking photographs, and then using the ordinary methods which are available to project the image on a screen. If this can be done successfully, then the objects imagined by a person would be clearly reflected on the screen as they are formed, and in this way every thought of the individual could be read. Our minds would then, indeed, be like open books.
As always, he claimed to have discovered a new source of power. He was not ready to go into details. He had to check his findings before they could be formally announced. But he had been working the underlying principles for many years. From the practical point of view, his generator would require a huge initial investment, but once a machine was installed it would work indefinitely and the cost of operation would be next to nothing.
But this time he gave more details. The design was relatively simple – ‘just a big mass of steel, copper and aluminium, comprising a stationary and rotating part, peculiarly assembled’. The electricity would then be distributed long distances by his AC system which, he said, already distributed 30 million horsepower of waterpower, and there were projects then going on all over the world which would double that amount.
‘Unfortunately, there is not enough water power to satisfy the present needs,’ he said, ‘and everywhere inventors and engineers are endeavouring to unlock some additional store of energy.’
The Formula for a Long Life
In his eighth decade, Tesla still expected to live a long time and reflected on life and longevity.
Quite early in life I set about disciplining myself, planning out a programme of living for what I considered the most sane and worthwhile life. Since I love my work above all things, it is only natural that I should wish to continue it until I die. I want no vacation – no surcease from my labours. If people would select a life work compatible with their temperaments, the sum total of happiness would be immeasurably increased in the world.
Many are saddened and depressed by the brevity of life. ‘What is the use of attempting to accomplish anything?’ they say. ‘Life is so short. We may never live to see the completion of the task.’ Well, people could prolong their lives considerably if they would but make the effort. Human beings do so many things that pave the way to an early grave.
First of all, we eat too much, but this we have heard said often before. And we eat the wrong kinds of foods and drink the wrong kinds of liquids. Most of the harm is done by overeating and under-exercising, which bring about toxic conditions in the body and make it impossible to throw off the accumulated poisons.
My regime for the good life and my diet? Well, for one thing, I drink plenty of milk and water. Why overburden the bodies that serve us? I eat but two meals a day, and I avoid all acid-producing foods. Almost everyone eats too many peas and beans and other foods containing uric acid and other poisons. I partake liberally of fresh vegetables, fish and meat sparingly, and rarely. Fish is reputed as fine brain food, but has a very strong acid reaction, as it contains a great deal of phosphorus. Acidity is by far the worst enemy to fight off in old age.
Potatoes are splendid, and should be eaten at least once a day. They contain valuable mineral salts and are neutralizing. I believe in plenty of exercise. I walk 8 or 10 miles every day, and never take a cab or other conveyances when I have the time to use leg power. I also exercise in my bath daily, for I think that this is of great importance. I take a warm bath, followed by a prolonged cold shower.
Sleep? I scarcely ever sleep. I come of a long-lived family, but it is noted for its poor sleepers. I expect to match the records of my ancestors and live to be at least 100. My sleeplessness does not worry me. Sometimes I doze for an hour or so. Occasionally, however, once in a few months, I may sleep for 4 or 5 hours. Then I awaken virtually charged with energy, like a battery. Nothing can stop me after such a night. I feel great strength then. There is no doubt about it but that sleep is a restorer, a vitalizer, that it increases energy. But on the other hand, I do not think it is essential to one’s well being, particularly if one is habitually a poor sleeper.
Today, at 77, as a result of a well-regulated life, sleeplessness notwithstanding, I have an excellent certificate of health. I never felt better in my life. I am energetic, strong, in full possession of all my mental facilities. In my prime I did not possess the energy I have today. And what is more, in solving my problems I use but a small part of the energy I possess, for I have learned how to conserve it. Because of my experience and knowledge gained through the years, my tasks are much lighter. Contrary to general belief, work comes easier for older people if they are in good health, because they have learned through years of practice how to arrive at a given place by the shortest path.
Developing the Death Ray
Tesla had inherited a deep hatred of war from his father. Throughout his life, he sought ways to end warfare. Short of that, he thought wars should be fought out between machines. His idea for a death ray began back in the 1890s when he produced a type of lamp which, with a beam of electrons, could vaporize zirconia or diamonds. And in 1915, he talked of beaming energy from Wardenclyffe, that would ‘paralyze or kill’.
In World War I, British inventor Harry Grindell-Matthews claimed to have invented a ‘diabolical ray’ that could be used against zeppelins. In the early 1920s, both the British and the French governments showed an interest. In 1924, he went to New York where he met Hugo Gernsback and, probably, Tesla. However, Gernsback and Professor W. Severinghouse, a physicist from Columbia University, tried unsuccessfully to duplicate his findings. Not to be outdone, the Germans and the Soviets both claimed to have developed beams that could bring down planes.
But, Tesla was not convinced. In 1934, he said: ‘It is impossible to develop such a ray. I worked on that idea for many years before my ignorance was dispelled and I became convinced that it could not be realized.’
He was working on something that he said was entirely different. ‘This new beam of mine consists of minute bullets moving at a terrific speed, and any amount of power desired can be transmitted by them. The whole plant is just a gun, but one which is incomparably superior to the present.’
The war clouds were gathering over Europe again and, on 11 July 1934, The New York Times carried the headline on its front page, reading: Tesla, at 78, Bares New ‘Death Beam’. Tesla said his new invention ‘will send concentrated beams of particles through the free air, of such tremendous energy that they will bring down a fleet of 10,000 enemy airplanes at a distance of 250 miles (400 km) from a defending nation’s borders and will cause armies of millions to drop dead in their tracks’.
The death beam would operate silently at distances as far as you could see with a telescope and limited only by the curvature of the Earth. It would be invisible and leave no marks beyond the evidence of its destruction. An army of a million men would be annihilated in a second and, even with the most powerful microscope, it would not be possible to see what had caused their deaths.
It would also be the perfect defence against bombing. ‘The flying machine has completely demoralized the world,’ he wrote, ‘so much that in some cities, as London and Paris, people are in mortal fear of aerial bombing. The new means I have perfected afford absolute protection against this and other forms of attack.’
Tesla said that his death beam would make war impossible by offering every country an ‘invisible Chinese Wall, only a million times more impenetrable’. It would make every nation impregnable to attack by aeroplanes or large invading armies.
While making every nation safe from invasion, Tesla said they could not be used as offensive weapons as the death beam ‘could be generated only from large, stationary and immovable power plants, stationed in the manner of old-time forts at various strategic distances from each country’s border … they could not be moved for purposes of attack’.
However, he admitted that smaller generating plants could be mounted on battleships with enough power to destroy incoming aircraft – re-establishing the superiority of the battleship over the aeroplane again. Submarines could also become obsolete, he said, as methods of detecting them had been perfected to the point where there was no point in submerging. Once a submarine had been located, the death beam could be employed as it would work underwater, though not as well as in air.
Elsewhere he proclaimed that the battleship was doomed. ‘What happened to the armoured knight will also happen to the armoured vessel,’ he said. The money spent on battleships ‘should be directed in channels that will improve the welfare of the country’.
Manifestations of Energy
The production of the death beam involved four new inventions of Tesla’s, though he would not provide details of these until they had been submitted to the proper scientific authorities. However, he said, the first invention was an apparatus for producing rays and ‘other manifestations of energy in free air’, eliminating the high vacuum necessary at present for the production of such rays and beams. The second was a new method for producing a very great electrical force. The third was a method for amplifying this and the fourth, he said, was ‘a new method for producing a tremendous electrical repelling force’. Again Tesla was looking at a potential of 50 million volts which would catapult microscopic particles of matter towards the target. He reckoned that it would cost no more than $2 million and take only three months to build.
‘All my inventions are at the service of the United States government,’ he said.
Should the government take him up on his offer, he said he would go to work at once and keep on going until he collapsed. However, he added: ‘I would have to insist on one condition – I would not suffer interference from any experts. They would have to trust me.’
In the New York Herald journalist Joseph Alsop described the progress Tesla was making developing his death ray:
He illustrated the sort of thing that the particles will be by recalling an incident that occurred often enough when he was experimenting with a cathode tube. Then, sometimes, a particle larger than an electron, but still very tiny, would break off from the cathode, pass out of the tube and hit him. He said he could feel a sharp, stinging pain where it entered his body, and again at the place where it passed out. The particles in the beam of force, ammunition which the operators of the generating machine will have to supply, will travel far faster than such particles as broke off from the cathode, and they will travel in concentrations, he said.
As Dr Tesla explained it, the tremendous speed of the particles will give them their destruction-dealing qualities. All but the thickest armoured surfaces confronting them would be melted through in an instant by the heat generated in the concussion. Such beams or rays of particles now known to science are composed always of fragments of atoms, whereas, according to Dr Tesla, his would be of microscopic dust of a suitable sort.
The chief differentiation between his and the present rays would appear to be, however, that his are produced in free air instead of in a vacuum tube. The vacuum tube rays have been projected out into the air, but there they travel only a few inches, and they are capable only of causing burns or slight disintegration of objects which they strike.
Tesla tried to get Jack Morgan to finance a prototype of his invention, but Morgan was unconvinced. He tried to deal directly with the British, to no avail. Frustrated, he sent an elaborate technical paper, including diagrams, to a number of nations including the US, Canada, Britain, France, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Called ‘The New Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-Dispersive Energy Through Natural Media’, the paper provided the first technical description of a charged particle beam weapon. And it was not just fantasy. Tesla had solved one of the key problems of a death ray – how to operate a vacuum chamber with one end open to the atmosphere. He achieved this by directing a high-velocity stream of air at the tip of his gun to maintain ‘dynamic seal’. This would be provided by a large Tesla turbine.
Interest came from the Soviet Union and, in 1937, Tesla presented a plan to the Amtorg Trading Corporation, in New York City, which handled trade with the Soviet Union. Two years later, in 1939, part of the prototype was tested in the USSR and Tesla received a payment of $25,000. But by then, the Soviet Union had allied itself with Nazi Germany.
While Tesla’s death beam did not see the light of day in World War II, during the Cold War both the US and the Soviet Union worked on charged particle beams.
Resembling Dr Frankenstein
Tesla made a further move into science fiction when the 1931 horror classic Frankenstein used Tesla Coils to make lightning flashes. Much of the equipment used by Dr Frankenstein bears an uncanny resemblance to the apparatus Tesla invented for his experiments. Indeed, Tesla favoured the movie’s producer Carl Laemmle as he fought patent battles with Edison when establishing Universal Pictures.
In 1935, one of Tesla’s electrical extravaganzas was filmed by a newsreel camera man and offered to Paramount, but they found the subject too technical. Nevertheless Hugo Gernsback and Frank Paul continued to use Tesla’s ideas in their sci-fi comics.
Meanwhile Tesla went about work on his death ray in a secret laboratory under the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. One of his other inventions of the period was a wooden birdcage, complete with birdbath. Western Union boys were despatched with these to rescue injured pigeons from around New York Public Library, Bryant Park and St Patrick’s Cathedral.
Tainted with Anti-Semitism
Tesla also had ties with a Hungarian architect named Titus deBobula, possibly through the Puskás brothers. deBobula borrowed money from the inventor as early as 1900. In 1908, he married the niece of Pittsburgh steel magnate Charles Schwab (1862 – 1939). deBobula then designed and built Schwab’s new mansion and borrowed money from him for a number of real estate ventures. He offered to find the backing to rebuild Wardenclyffe, but deBobula’s ventures turned sour. He fell out with Schwab and became an anarchist. Back in Budapest, he joined a pro-Hitler group and wrote a paper denouncing ‘Jewish physics’ as the Nazis dubbed the new departures into relativity and quantum physics. Echoes of anti-Semitism can be found in Tesla’s attacks on Einstein.
Returning to the US, deBobula designed a 120-ft (36-m) tower for Tesla’s death beam. However, his involvement with a munitions company run by a German-American brought him to the attention of the IRS and the FBI. When his apartment was searched it was found to be full of grenades, tear-gas bombs and dynamite. Tesla was furious when deBobula used his name in an arms deal with Paraguay. Questioned by the authorities, deBobula denied any ties to the Communist Party or the German-American Bund which supported Hitler. The FBI monitored his activities throughout World War II. Nothing was ever proved against him. However, Tesla was tainted by association.
Reviewing His Greatest Inventions
The following year Tesla was still full of wild and abstruse pronouncements. He invited some 30 journalists to a gourmet luncheon to celebrate his 79th birthday in the private dining room of the Hotel New Yorker, where he was then staying. He had been thrown out of the Hotel Pennsylvania in 1930, owing $2,000, when other patrons complained of the pigeon droppings. While the reporters feasted at his expense, Tesla did not even touch a glass of water. However, towards the end of the meal, he went and got a small bottle of pasteurized milk which he poured into a silver dish and heated on a small oil stove beside the table. The Hotel New Yorker then supplied a birthday cake with one candle for their honoured guest.
Asked what was his greatest feat in the field of engineering, he said: ‘An apparatus by which mechanical energy can be transmitted to any part of the terrestrial globe.’
He called this discovery ‘tele-geo-dynamics’ and admitted that it would ‘appear almost preposterous’. However, it would give the world a new means of unfailing communication, provide a new and by far the safest means for guiding ships at sea and into port, furnish a ‘divining rod’ for locating any type of ore beneath the surface of the Earth, and give scientists a means of ‘laying bare the physical conditions of the Earth and enable them to determine all the Earth’s physical constants’.
The apparatus needed to do this, he said, was simple. It consisted of a stationary part and a cylinder of fine steel ‘floating’ in the air. He had, he said, discovered a means of ‘impressing on the floating part powerful impulses which react on the stationary part, and through the latter to transmit energy through the Earth’. To do this he had ‘found a new amplifier for a known type of energy’. The purpose was ‘to produce impulses through the Earth and then pick them up whenever needed’.
His second greatest invention, he said, ‘will be considered absolutely impossible by any competent electrical engineer’. It was a new method of producing direct current without a commutator – something, he said, ‘that has been considered impossible since the days of Faraday’.
‘Incredible as it seems,’ he said, ‘I have found a solution for this old problem.’
Next he came to cosmic rays which, he said, were produced by the force of electrostatic repulsion and consisted of powerfully charged positive particles that come to Earth from the Sun and other stars. ‘After experimentation,’ he said, ‘the Sun is charged with an electrical potential of 215 billion volts, while the electric charge stored in the Sun amounted to around 50 billion billion electrostatic units.’
Again he dismissed the theory of relativity, describing it as ‘a mass of error and deceptive ideas violently opposed to the teachings of great men of science and even to common sense’.
The theory, wraps all these errors and fallacies and clothes them in magnificent mathematical garb which fascinates, dazzles and makes people blind to the underlying errors. The theory is like a beggar clothed in purple whom ignorant people take for a king. Its exponents are brilliant men, but they are metaphysicists rather than scientists. Not a single one of the relativity propositions has been proved.
One of Tesla’s great bugbears with relativity was its prohibition of anything travelling faster than the speed of light, which upset his theories about standing waves and the wireless transmission of energy. He was adamant that, in his observations of cosmic rays, he had already discovered particles that travelled faster than light.
In 1899, I obtained mathematical and experimental proofs that the Sun, and other heavenly bodies similarly conditioned, emit rays of great energy which consist of inconceivably small particles animated by velocities vastly exceeding that of light. So great is the penetrative power of these rays that they can traverse thousands of miles of solid matter with but slight diminution of velocity. In passing through space, which is filled with cosmic dust, they generated a secondary radiation of constant intensity, day and night, and pouring upon the earth equally from all directions. As the primary rays projected from the suns and stars can pass through distances measured in light-years without great diminution of velocity, it follows that whether a secondary ray is generated near a sun or at any distance from it, however great, its intensity is the same.
As of yet, no one else has found particles that travel faster than light. However, neutrinos generated by the fusion reactions in the Sun do have the penetrative power Tesla mentioned. They were predicted by the Italian-born physicist Enrico Fermi (1901 – 54) in 1934, but not detected experimentally for another 20 years. Nevertheless in 1932, Tesla said that he had ‘harnessed the cosmic rays and caused them to operate a motive device’. Cosmic rays, he said, struck the atmosphere, ionizing the air and creating charged particles – ions and electrons. ‘These charges are captured in a condenser which is made to discharge through the circuit of a motor,’ he said. He also said that he had ‘hopes of building such a motor on a large scale’. However, by 1935, he was also telling the New York Herald Tribune that some day the Sun would explode.
The Tesla Institute
In 1936, the Tesla Institute was opened in Belgrade, then the capital of Yugoslavia. A fully equipped research centre, it was funded by the Yugoslav government and private sources. A week of celebrations commemorating the great man’s 80th birthday followed. They occurred in Belgrade on 26, 27 and 28 May, in Zagreb, capital of Croatia, on 30 May and in his native village of Smiljan on 2 June, and again on 12 July 1936.