Tesla’s Friends and Contemporaries

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Thomas Alva Edison (1847 – 1931)

Born in Ohio, Edison had little schooling. At the age of 12 he got a job on the railroad where he learned telegraphy. He went on to develop the duplex system that sent two messages at once and a printer that converted electrical signals into letters.

He quit and went into business for himself, developing the quadruplex system, which sent four messages at once for Western Union and their rivals. With the help of his father, he established a laboratory and machine shop at Menlo Park, New Jersey, which became the world’s first industrial research facility. There he developed underwater cable for the telegraph, set about improving the primitive telephone developed by Alexander Graham Bell, and inventing the phonograph. This brought him worldwide fame as the Wizard of Menlo Park.

He worked on the incandescent light bulb, though battles over patents ensued. He also developed electric motors and generators to power his lighting systems, first on the steamship Columbia, then on buildings in New York and London.

A pioneer in motion pictures, he also developed batteries for submarines and the Model T Ford. In all, he took out a world record 1,093 patents and remains the most famous inventor in American history. <Back>

 

Alexander Graham Bell (1847 – 1922)

Edinburgh-born Bell first visited the USA in 1871 where he demonstrated his father’s method of teaching speech to the deaf. The following year he opened a school for teachers of the method in Boston.

With young technician Thomas Watson, he set to work on developing ways of using electricity to transmit sound, getting his patent for the telephone in 1876. Hundreds of patent suits followed. Nevertheless, the Bell Telephone Company was established the following year, successfully fighting off suits by two subsidiaries of the Western Union Telegraph Company.

Bell also invented the photophone, which transmitted sound on a beam of light, and the Graphophone, that recorded sound on wax cylinders. He experimented with sonar detection, huge flying kites and hydrofoils, while continuing to find ways to aid the deaf. <Back>

 

George Westinghouse (1846 – 1914)

George Westinghouse was a descendent of the aristocratic Russian von Wistinghousen family. His father was also an inventor with six patents for farming machinery to his name. In his father’s machine shop in Schenectady, New York, the young Westinghouse experimented with batteries and Leyden jars – glass jars coated with metal foil, used for storing electrical charge. At 15, he made his first invention, a rotary steam engine. After serving in both the US Army and Navy during the American Civil War, he attended the nearby Union College, but soon dropped out. In 1865, he patented his rotary engine, and a device for putting derailed freight cars back on the tracks. Soon after, he designed a reversible cast-steel frog which prolonged the life of railroad track switches.

Having been involved in a near collision on the railway, he put his mind to improving the braking system which, until then, had depended on a brakeman on every carriage. His first system, using steam, proved impractical. But then in 1869 he came up with air-brakes that soon became standard in the US and Europe.

He then worked on signalling, devising an electrical system. With the aid of Tesla, Westinghouse entered the ‘War of the Currents’, championing AC against Edison’s DC system. By 1889, the Westinghouse Electric Corporation was a global company, employing over 500,000 people. However, in the financial panic of 1907, he lost control of the companies and retired altogether in 1911. <Back>

 

Lord Kelvin (1824 – 1907)

Scottish engineer, mathematician and physicist, William Thomson was knighted in 1866 and made a peer in 1892 for his services to science and engineering. He helped develop the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the mathematical analysis of electricity and magnetism, the electromagnetic theory of light, the geophysical determination of the age of the Earth and the basics of hydrodynamics. His work on submarine telegraph cables helped make Britain the hub of global communications. He perfected the mariner’s compass and worked out the correct value of absolute zero. The units of the absolute temperature scale are named Kelvins in tribute to him. <Back>

 

James Clerk Maxwell (1831–79)

Born in Scotland, James Clerk Maxwell had already demonstrated colour photography and worked on the standardization of electrical units when, in 1865, he published A Dynamical Theory of Electrical Field. In it, he sought to convert the physical laws of electromagnetic induction discovered by Faraday into mathematics. His famous equations showed that electric and magnetic fields travel through space as waves moving at the speed of light. This led him to propose that light was electromagnetic radiation and predicted the existence of radio waves. <Back>

 

Hermann von Helmholtz (1821 – 94)

Like many scientists of the day, Helmholtz worked in multiple fields, including physiology, optics, meteorology, hydrodynamics and the philosophy of science. He is best known for the Law of Conservation of Energy. Between 1869 and 1871, he studied electrical oscillation, and he noted the oscillations of electricity in a coil when it was connected to a Leyden jar. He sought to measure the speed of electromagnetic induction, but left the determination of the length of electric waves to his star pupil, Heinrich Hertz. <Back>

 

Heinrich Hertz (1857 – 94)

After studying under Helmholtz, Hertz began his investigation of the theories of James Clerk Maxwell. He developed primitive equipment to generate electromagnetic waves and measured their wavelengths and velocity. Demonstrating that they could be reflected and refracted like light and radiant heat, he showed that light and heat were also electromagnetic waves. He was just 36 when he died. <Back>

 

Michelson-Morley Experiment

Devised by A.A. Michelson and later refined with Edward Morley, the Michelson-Morley experiment sought to detect the velocity of the Earth through the all-pervading ether which Helmholtz and Hertz maintained electromagnetic waves were propagated through. A sensitive interferometer was used to compare the speed of light in two directions at right angles to each other. If the universe is filled with ether, the speed of light along the Earth’s direction of travel should be less than its velocity at right angles to it. No difference was detected. Ergo the ether did not exist. <Back>

 

Guglielmo Marconi (1874 – 1937)

In 1894, Marconi began experimenting with an induction coil, a Morse key and a sparking gap, along with a simple detector, at his father’s estate near Bologna. Devising a simple aerial, he increased the range to 1.5 miles (2.4 km). He moved to London where he filed his first patent in June 1896. Using balloons and kites, he increased the range still further. In 1899, signals were sent across the English Channel and the America’s Cup used Marconi’s equipment for ship-to-shore communication. The following year Marconi took out patent No. 7777, which enabled several stations to operate on different frequencies. This was overturned by the US Supreme Court in 1943 when it was shown that Tesla and others had already developed radio-tuning circuits.

In December 1901, Marconi transmitted a signal across the Atlantic from Cornwall in England to Newfoundland in Canada. This led to the discovery that the curvature of the Earth had proved no obstacle because radio waves reflected off ionized layers in the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Marconi continued to improve the range and efficiency of wireless devices and set up companies to exploit his discoveries. In 1909 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics and in 1932 the Marconi company won the contract to establish short-wave communication between England and the countries of the British Empire. <Back>

 

Mark Twain (1835 – 1910)

Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Twain was an American humorist and writer who found worldwide fame with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). He was also known for his travel writing – The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872) and Life on the Mississippi (1883). <Back>

 

Joseph Rudyard Kipling (1865 – 1936)

Born in Bombay (Mumbai), India, Kipling was a short-story writer, poet and novelist who chronicled the British Empire at the height of its power. He also wrote for children. Principally remembered for the adventure novel Kim, The Jungle Book, Just So Stories, the short-story The Man Who Would be King and the poems Mandalay, Gunga Din, The White Man’s Burden and If–, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. <Back>

 

John Muir (1838 – 1914)

Born in Scotland, Muir emigrated to the US with his family in 1849. After studying science at the University of Wisconsin, he found work in a factory where he adapted and improved machinery. An accident nearly cost him his sight. In its aftermath he undertook a walk of nearly 1,000 miles (1,600 km) from Indiana to Florida. In 1868, he arrived in the Yosemite Valley in California and became an advocate for the preservation of the wilderness there. Due to his lobbying, National Parks were set up at Yosemite, Sequoia and elsewhere. In 1903, he accompanied President Theodore Roosevelt on a camping trip in the Yosemite region. <Back>

 

Richmond Pearson Hobson (1870 – 1937)

Graduating from the US Naval Academy in 1889, Hobson was given temporary command of the collier Merrimac during the Spanish-American War. Off Cuba, his ship was disabled by enemy fire and he scuttled her in the entrance to Santiago Harbour, blockading the Spanish Fleet. He and his crew of six were imprisoned in Morro Castle. When he was released in a prisoner exchange in 1898, he returned to the US to a hero’s welcome. Women admirers flocked to him and he became ‘the most kissed man in America’. Awarded the Medal of Honor, he became a congressman. One of Tesla’s closest friends, he said the inventor once told him that he had ‘never touched a woman’. <Back>

 

The X-Ray Man – Wilhelm Röntgen (1845 – 1923)

In 1895, while he was professor of physics at Würzburg, Germany, Röntgen noticed that when he ran an electric current through a partially evacuated glass tube it gave off a mysterious radiation that affected photographic plates. Unlike light this passed through paper, wood and aluminium, so he called them X-rays. Soon after, he took a picture of the bones in his wife’s hand. News of his discovery spread quickly round the world and he was awarded the first Nobel Prize in physics in 1901. <Back>

 

Hammond and Son

Mining engineer and philanthropist John Hays Hammond (1855 – 1936) gave Tesla $10,000 to develop his Telautomaton. Later his son, John (Jack) Hays Hammond Jr (1888 – 1965), developed Tesla’s ideas and became known as ‘The Father of Remote Control’. At Yale, Jack developed electrically controlled steering and engine control for a boat, controlling the mechanisms at a distance using a wireless device. In 1909, he got his father to arrange a meeting for him with Tesla because there was some ‘important information’ he needed from him. With Marconi wireless, which itself used Tesla Coils, attached to two 360-ft (110 m) towers, Jack could control a crew-less boat from a lookout station near his laboratory at Freshwater Cove. Later, Jack invited Tesla to speak at his graduation from Yale. <Back>

 

Tesla, a boxing fan

Tesla claimed to have made a study of heavyweight title fights after the 1892 match where street-fighter John L. Sullivan (1858 – 1918), who had held the world title for 10 years, was knocked out by college-educated ‘Gentleman Jim’ Corbett (1866 – 1933). In 1927, he made headlines predicting the outcome of the rematch between Gene Tunney (1897 – 1978) and the ‘Manassa Mauler’ Jack Dempsey (1895 – 1983) who, though he had lost the title a year earlier, was ahead in the betting.

The New York Herald Tribune said: ‘Sitting in this suite at the Hotel Pennsylvania, the 71-year-old inventor did not hedge or pussyfoot, but declared that Tunney was ‘at least 10 to 1 favourite’. On the basis of mechanics, Tesla said, ‘Tunney will hit Dempsey continuously and at will’. He added that Tunney also had the advantage because he was single. ‘Other things being equal,’ Tesla said, ‘the single man can always excel the married man.’ In his later years, Tesla would be seen dining with other boxers, including the ‘Midland Mauler’ Jimmy Adamick and Yugoslav welterweight Fritzie Zivic. <Back>

 

J.P. Morgan (1837 – 1913)

The son of a successful financier, Junius Spencer Morgan (1813-90), John Pierpont Morgan began his career in 1857 with the New York banking firm of Duncan, Sherman and Company, which was the US representative of the London firm George Peabody and Company. By 1871 he was a partner at Drexel, Morgan and Company, soon the predominant source of government financing. In 1895, it became J.P. Morgan and Company, and one of the most powerful banking houses in the world. Because of his links with Peabody, Morgan was able to provide the rapidly growing US industrial corporations with capital from British banks.

Investing in railroads, by 1902, he controlled some 5,000 miles (8,000 km) of track. In 1891, he arranged the merger of Edison General Electric and Thomson-Houston Electric Company to form General Electric. In the depression that followed the panic of 1893, he formed a syndicate to resupply the US government’s depleted gold reserve. Having financed the creation of the Federal Steel Company in 1898, he merged it with the giant Carnegie Steel Company in 1901 to form US Steel Corporation. The following year, he formed the International Harvester Company and the International Merchantile Marine, which dominated transatlantic shipping. He led the attempt to avert a general financial collapse following the stock market panic of 1907. Then he began amassing banks and insurance companies. This gave him control over the nation’s leading corporations and financial institutions. <Back>

 

Lee De Forest (1873 – 1961)

Like Tesla, De Forest was the son of a church minister who hoped his son would follow him into the ministry. Lee spent much of his youth at Talladega College, traditionally an African-American school where his father was president. In 1893, he enrolled at the Sheffield Scientific at Yale where he studied engineering. Six years later he was awarded a PhD for a thesis entitled Reflections of Hertzian Waves from the Ends of Parallel Wires.

Experimenting in radio-telegraphy, he managed to interest the US Army and Navy in his apparatus. His equipment was used by European reporters to send despatches during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 – 05. In 1906, De Forest filed a patent for a vacuum tube diode to detect radio waves. The following year, he patented the triode or Audion valve. This placed a grid between the electrodes which allowed it amplify feeble electric currents. While others developed its full potential, it was the mainstay of amplification until the invention of the transistor. In 1912, De Forest was indicted, and subsequently acquitted, of mail fraud by seeking to promote this ‘worthless device’. His triode made transcontinental wireless telephony possible.

Seeking to promote radio as a new medium, in 1910, De Forest broadcast a live performance by Italian opera star Enrico Caruso from the Metropolitan Opera House. Two years later De Forest found he could boost a weak signal further by feeding the output of one tube to the grid of the next, and so on. He also found that by feeding the output of an Audion tube back to its own grid, he could produce a stable oscillator whose signal could be modulated to carry speech and music.

In the face of a storm of infringement suits, he sold his patents to others to exploit. He went on to invent a system for recording sound on film, making the talkies possible. <Back>

 

Reginald Fessenden (1866 – 1932)

Born in Quebec, Fessenden studied mathematics, but left university without a degree. In 1886, he moved to the US and went to work for Thomas Edison. He worked on a series of projects, but in 1890, when Edison suffered a financial set back, he was laid off. After working in various manufacturing companies, he became professor of electrical engineering at Purdue University, moving onto the Western University of Pennsylvania – now Pittsburgh University – the following year.

From 1900 to 1902, he worked for the Weather Bureau, adapting wireless telegraphy for weather forecasting and storm warnings. In 1900 he was granted a patent for a sensitive detector that made wireless telephone possible and invented the heterodyne receiver which combines two high-frequencies to produce an audible tone. With two Pittsburgh financiers, he formed the National Electric Signaling Company in 1902, which transmitted the first voice signals over a distance. In 1906, he made the first two-way transatlantic transmission. But he fell out with his backers and the company ended up bankrupt.

During his career Fessenden filed some 300 patents, many were subject to litigation. He sued RCA for $60 million, settling out of court in 1928 for a large cash payment. Among his admirers was Elihu Thomson who called Fessenden ‘the greatest wireless inventor of the age – greater than Marconi’. <Back>

 

Fritz Lowenstein (1874 – 1922)

Born in Carlsbad in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic), Lowenstein studied engineering in Europe before emigrating to the US in 1899 where he went to work for Tesla. He helped build and operate the magnifying transmitter in Colorado Springs. ‘Possessed of the highest technical training,’ Tesla said, he became a close confidant, discussing the project with him every day over lunch and dinner at the Alta Vista Hotel. They parted when Lowenstein returned to Germany to marry, but Tesla re-employed Lowenstein in 1902 to work at Wardenclyffe. He also worked with Jack Hammond and Alexander Graham Bell, and subsequently began a company making radio sets for the US Navy during World War I, paying royalties to Tesla for the use of his patents. <Back>

 

Benjamin Franklin Miessner (1890 – 1976)

Miessner studied electrical engineering at Purdue University and worked for the US Navy in 1908 before becoming chief assistant in the Tesla-Hammond lab at Gloucester. He worked on the development of the electric dog and superheterodyne reception. This improved the amplification in a wireless set fifty-fold and allowed them to work without a long aerial, essentially turning the wireless receiver from an experimental apparatus into a domestic appliance. He is also credited with inventing the ‘cat’s whisker’ detector in early crystal sets, which he sold for $200, and the electric organ. A pioneer in aircraft radio and directional microphones in submarines, he sold more than two hundred patents, making over $2 million. <Back>

 

Sir Oliver Lodge (1851 – 1940)

Lodge entered his father’s clay business in Staffordshire, England when he was 14. Then on a visit to London he heard prominent physicist John Tyndall (1820 – 93) lecture at the Royal Institution. This piqued his interest in science and, at the age of 22, he resumed his education. In 1890, the French scientist Édouard Branly (1844 – 1940) showed that iron filings in a glass tube coalesced – or ‘cohered’ – under the influence of electromagnetic waves. Lodge added a ‘trembler’ that shook up the filings between waves and made other improvements, making an effective detector.

Following in the footsteps of Hertz, he studied standing waves in conducting wires. After Hertz’s untimely death in 1894, he gave a lecture at the Royal Institution called The Work of Hertz. When this was published, it had a widespread influence across Europe. He also filed a number of important patents. When his son Raymond was killed in World War I, he became interested in spiritualism and served as president of the Society for Psychical Research. <Back>

 

Michael Pupin (1858 – 1935)

Born in Banat, a buffer zone between the Ottoman and the Austrian Empires, Pupin was a Serb like Tesla. His parents were illiterate and sent him to Prague. After a year, not yet 16, he went alone to America, arriving in New York in 1874. For 5 years, he took a series of odd jobs, while studying at night for admission to Columbia College, now Columbia University. He went on to study in Cambridge and Berlin, where he worked under Helmholtz. He returned to New York to teach mathematical physics at the newly formed department of electrical engineering. In 1901, he was made Professor of Electromechanics, a position he held until he retired in 1931.

In 1896, he discovered that atoms struck by X-rays emit secondary X-ray radiation and worked on X-ray fluoroscopy. Five years later, the Bell Telephone Company bought the patents for his method of extending the range of telephone communication by placing loading coils at specific distances along the line. In 1924, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his best-selling autobiography From Immigrant to Inventor.

Pupin sided with Elihu Thomson in the controversy over who invented the AC polyphase system and Tesla accused Pupin of stealing his work. In the long passages on the development of AC in From Immigrant to Inventor, Tesla is hardly mentioned. When working with X-rays, Pupin again ignored Tesla’s contribution. It was Pupin who introduced Marconi to Tesla in 1900, but he also helped facilitate Marconi’s cooperation with Edison, earning him, once more, the enmity of Tesla.

When Pupin was on his deathbed in 1935, he got his secretary to visit Yugoslav diplomat Stanko Stoilkovic and ask him to plead with Tesla to visit Pupin who wanted to make peace with him before he died. Tesla said that he would have to think about Pupin’s request overnight. The following day, Tesla turned up at the hospital. In Pupin’s room he approached the bed with his hand extended and said: ‘How are you old friend?’

Pupin was overcome with emotion. They were left alone to talk. Tesla said they had agreed they would meet up again, but Pupin died immediately after Tesla’s visit. Reconciled at last, Tesla attended his funeral. <Back>

 

Karl Ferdinand Braun (1850 – 1918)

Born in Germany, Braun received his doctorate from the University of Berlin in 1872 and held a number of academic posts before becoming director of the Physical Institute and Professor of Physics at the University of Strasbourg in 1895. In 1897, he developed the first oscilloscope, or Braun tube, to study alternating currents using a beam of electrons in a cathode ray. From this, television tubes were developed. He went on to study why early wireless transmission was limited to 9.5 miles (15 km), concluding that the limiting factor was the length of the spark. The solution was to introduce a sparkless antenna circuit, which he patented in 1899. He also developed an antenna that directed the transmission in one direction. The Nobel Committee recognized that he had made considerable improvements to Marconi’s apparatus and awarded the Nobel Prize to them jointly in 1909.

Braun travelled to New York in 1915. When the US joined the Allies in World War I in 1917, he was detained as an enemy alien and died before the war ended. <Back>

 

John Stone Stone (1869 – 1943)

Born in America, but brought up in Egypt and Europe, Stone, who was fluent in Arabic, French and English, was brought home to the US to study in the school of mines at Columbia and Johns Hopkins University, before entering the Bell Labs in Boston. In 1899, he set up the Stone Telegraph and Telephone Company. Lecturing on electrical oscillations at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he filed a patent on tuning in 1902. He also developed a wireless direction finder, worked on the use of loading coils on telephone lines before Pupin and became president of the Institute of Radio Engineers and the AIEE. He holds many ‘space telegraphy’ patents. <Back>

 

Bernard A. Behrend (1875 – 1932)

Born in Villeneuve, Switzerland, Behrend studied engineering in Berlin before emigrating to the US in 1894. He was one of the first to understand Tesla’s work with alternating currents and began publishing articles on the applications of AC in 1896. His treatise The Induction Motor was published by Electrical World & Engineer in 1901. It was expanded and published as a book, The Induction Motor and Other Alternating Current Motors in 1921. Behrend met Tesla in 1901 when he was assigned to design a motor for Wardenclyffe. In Behrend, Tesla found a like-mind. Behrend was the inventor of numerous electrical devices and took out over 70 patents. After a period of ill-health he committed suicide at his home in Massachusetts. <Back>

 

Arthur E. Kennelly (1861 – 1939)

Born in India of Irish parents, Kennelly studied in London before going to work for Edison in New Jersey as a mathematician. With Harold P. Brown, he worked on the development of the electric chair. He also developed the use of complex numbers in analyzing AC circuits. In 1901, he noticed that Marconi’s signals arrived in Newfoundland in greater strength than expected and postulated that they had been reflected from an ionized layer in the upper reaches of the atmosphere predicted by English electrical-engineer Oliver Heaviside (1850 – 1925). This became known as the Kennelly-Heaviside layer. Professor of Electrical Engineering at Harvard, Kennelly served as president of the AIEE (1898 – 1900) and the Institute of Radio Engineers (1916). He was awarded the Edison Medal in 1933. <Back>

 

Hugo Gernsback (1884 – 1967)

Born Hugo Gernsbacher in Luxembourg, Gernsback had heard of Tesla as a child. He studied electronics in Bingen Technicum in Germany, before emigrating to the US in 1903. He imported electronic components from Europe and, in 1908, founded the magazine Modern Electrics. The Electrical Experimenter followed in 1913 and Science and Invention in 1920. These magazines began to carry science-fiction stories, starting with his own RALPH 124C41+ set in the year 2660, which was serialized in Modern Electronics in 1911.

He began the first dedicated science-fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, in 1926. Despite his reputation for dubious business practices, he continued to write and publish. The Hugo Awards, presented annually by the World Science Fiction Convention, were named after him and, in 1960, he received a special Hugo Award as the ‘Father of Magazine Science Fiction’. <Back>

 

Frank R. Paul (1884 – 1963)

One of the most influential science fiction illustrators of his time, Frank Paul was born in Austria and studied art in Vienna, Paris and New York. He was working as an illustrator on a rural newspaper when Gernsback employed him to work on Electrical Experimenter. He produced the cover illustration for Gernsback’s RALPH 124C41+ when it appeared in book form in 1925. He also worked for Amazing Stories, Science Wonder Stories, Planet Stories, Superworld Comics, Science Fiction magazine and Marvel Comics. Paul is credited with the first depiction of a flying saucer, a space ship and a space station. <Back>

 

Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955)

Born in Germany, Einstein completed his education in Switzerland and took a job in the patent office in Bern. It was there he realized that, if the speed of light was an absolute, Isaac Newton’s laws of motion must be rewritten to accommodate Maxwell’s equations. The result was his theory of special relativity, which he published in 1905. He then realized that this did not deal with acceleration or gravity. He combined those to make his theory of general relativity in 1915. This was confirmed by astronomical observation 4 years later and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1921.

In 1933, he emigrated to the United States, settling in Princeton. Einstein’s equation E=mc² predicts the possibility of making an atomic bomb. Fearing that Nazi Germany may well have been on their way to doing so, Einstein was persuaded to sign a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt warning him of the possibility. He spent the rest of his life trying to develop a unified field theory that would combine all the forces of motion into one theoretical framework. <Back>

 

George Sylvester Viereck (1884 – 1962)

One of Tesla’s more unusual friends towards the end of his life was the poet and author George Sylvester Viereck. Born in Munich, he was thought to have been the illegitimate grandson of Kaiser Wilhelm I, an idea he encouraged. He emigrated to the US with his family in 1896 and published his first book of poetry Gedichte in 1904 while still a student at the College of the City of New York. It received some favourable critical attention and he quickly built a reputation. But then came Word War I. He said: ‘In spite of my staunch support of the American war effort, I was decried as an isolationist and a pro-German. I was boycotted by the war party. Five celebrated authors banded themselves together under the slogan, Never Again Viereck. My verse was dropped from anthologies and my name from Who’s Who in America. I was expelled from the Poetry Society of America which owed its existence largely to my efforts and from the Author’s League. I was now a poet without a licence.’

He then laboured to build a reputation as a novelist and, as a journalist, interviewed Sigmund Freud, George Bernard Shaw, Mussolini, Hindenburg, Grand Duke Alexander of Russia, Einstein, Henry Ford and, of course, Tesla. With the advent of World War II, he was again thought to be pro-German. This time with good reason. He was found to have accepted money from the Nazi Party to spread propaganda in the US and was jailed. After the war, his memoir of his prison experiences Men Into Beast sold well, but he never regained his literary reputation. Tesla knew all his poems by heart. <Back>

 

Elmer Gertz (1906 – 2000)

Another of the dinner guests Tesla met at Viereck’s house on Riverside Drive was the attorney Elmer Gertz. He was a friend of the poet Carl Sandburg (1878 – 1967) and the biographer and agent of British journalist and voluptuary Frank Harris (1856 – 1931). He also defended the work of American writer Henry Miller (1891 – 1980) in obscenity trials, murderer Nathan Leopold (1904 – 71) in the 1924 Leopold and Loeb case and club owner Jack Ruby (1911 – 67) who murdered President Kennedy’s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald (1939 – 63). He was impressed that he had seen Tesla in the same house as novelist Sinclair Lewis (1885 – 1951), Einstein and countless others. He said: ‘In a communicative mood, Tesla told his life story unostentatiously, simply, with quiet eloquence. He told of his platonic affairs of the heart … explained the inventions that have made the world his debtor … and told of his plans, of his credo, of his foibles. It was a tale of wonder, told with guileless simplicity.’

 

Edwin Armstrong (1890 – 1954)

At the age of 14, Armstrong read of the achievements of Marconi and set about building wireless equipment in the attic of his family home in New York. He studied under Pupin at Columbia, where he developed the regenerative, or feedback, circuit using De Forest’s Audion tube. This increased the amplification a thousand-fold. Signals that could barely be distinguished through headphones could now be heard across the room. At its highest amplification, the circuit became an oscillator that generated radio waves and became the basis of radio and television broadcasting. However, Armstrong was challenged by De Forest in a series of patent suits which dragged on for 14 years.

In the army during World War I, Armstrong improved Fessenden’s heterodyne circuit to make the superheterodyne circuit, which again greatly improved the sensitivity and stability of radio signals that underlies nearly all radio, radar and television reception over the airwaves. He sold the patents to Westinghouse, which made him, briefly, a millionaire, and he married Marion MacInnis, secretary to David Sarnoff, then general manager of RCA.

Armstrong went on to invent FM, or frequency modulation. By modulating the frequency of the signal rather than its amplitude, or strength, as in AM, high-fidelity broadcasting became possible. But the well established AM broadcasters were resistant. Armstrong had to spend $300,000 on building an FM station to prove its worth. After World War II, Armstrong began a patent-infringement suit against RCA who had adopted FM for television. Impoverished by litigation, Armstrong jumped to his death from a 13th storey window. <Back>