Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla (12 page)

At one bound [Tesla] placed himself abreast such men as Edison, Brush, Elihu Thomson, and Alexander Graham Bell…His performance touched on the marvelous.

J
OSEPH
W
ETZLER IN
H
ARPER’S
W
EEKLY
,
J
ULY
11, 1891
¹

T
esla returned from Paris during the summer of 1889 to his new laboratory near Bleecker Street. Down the road from one of Edison’s showrooms, the lab took up the entire fourth floor of a six-story building located at 33-35 South Fifth Avenue (which today is called West Broadway). At the same time, he toured the hotels, moving into the Astor House, a posh five-story establishment situated by a trolley line in the heart of the city.

Over the summer, Tesla’s “best friend,” Anthony Szegeti, passed away. He wrote home to notify his family. “I feel alienated,” he told Uncle Pajo, “and it is difficult [for me to adapt to the American lifestyle].”
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Now part of the nouveau riche, and also the star of the family, the inventor began sending money home to his mother and sisters and also to some of the cousins. Addressing the letters mostly to his sisters’ husbands, all of whom were priests, Tesla wrote Uncle Pajo, “Somehow it is hard to correspond with the ladies.”
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Although occasionally he did write his sisters, mostly he just sent checks, and each of them would repeatedly write back to try and get a more personal word from “the only brother that we have.”
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Throughout the 1890s, Tesla sent several thousand forints, at 150 forints a clip, which was an amount equivalent to six months’ rent at a well-to-do home or six months salary for a Serbian workman. Some of the funds were given as gifts, some to pay back his uncles for their aid in funding his education and sojourn to the New World, and other funds, which were partially obtained through European royalties, were used as investments.
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To Uncle Petar, who had advanced to become a Metropolitan (Cardinal) in
Bosnia, Tesla revealed that he was receiving many letters from dignitaries and also such respect that it was difficult for him to describe.
⁶

Uncle Pajo occasionally shipped European bottles of wine to his finicky nephew, unhappy with the selection in the United States. Impatiently waiting for these bottles was, for Tesla, like “waiting for the messiah.”
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As Tesla’s fame grew, and reports of his successes made the headlines in their local papers, Tesla became a virtual demigod to the Serbian and Croatian people, and a noble, though distant benefactor to his family. “We think about you even in [our] dreams,” one of his brothers-in-law wrote.
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Except for occasional dinners with such friends as T. C. Martin or necessary trips to Pittsburgh, the inventor spent virtually all of his waking existence at the lab. His partner, Alfred S. Brown, would stop by to help when needed, but mostly Tesla worked with either one or two assistants or alone. As was his custom, he could labor seven days a week and around the clock, stopping only to freshen up at the hotel or for a necessary appointment. Monastic by choice and compelled by an all-consuming desire to be a major player in the burgeoning new age, the wizard preferred working through the night, when distractions could be minimized and concentration could be intensified.

Now free, he began his investigations along a number of separate but interrelated lines. As an experimental physicist, he began to study the difference between electromagnetic and electrostatic phenomena, and also the relationship of the structure of the ether to that of electricity, matter, and light. As an inventor, he began to design equipment for generating extremely high frequencies and voltages and for transforming direct into alternating current, or vice versa, and for creating uniform oscillations. Tesla also wanted to devise ways to manufacture light and to explore the concept of wireless communication. Already concerned about the fragility of the earth’s natural resources, the finite supply of timber and coal, Tesla spent endless hours in contemplation, reviewing and replicating the findings of others, criticizing or improving upon their inventions, and also designing completely original creations. His goal was influenced by an evolutionary perspective and pragmatic considerations: He wanted to devise mechanical means for doing away with needless tasks of physical labor so that humans could spend more time in creative endeavors.

Unlike Karl Marx, who saw the worker becoming “an appendage of the machine,”
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Tesla realized that machines could liberate the worker.

The inventor, in Tesla’s eyes, had always been and always would be the light giver of the species, guiding its future through advanced technology. The masses, in turn, would benefit because machines would perform menial tasks so that they could pursue more intellectual occupations. With increased technology, cultural evolution would proceed at ever
faster rates. “Conversely,” Tesla warned, “everything that is against the teachings of religion and law of hygiene…tend[s] to decrease [human energy].”
¹⁰
Impure drinking water, in particular, was one of the greatest dangers.

Within the next eighteen months Tesla initiated most of the inventions that would occupy him for the next half century. During the last weeks of 1889, Martin met with him on several occasions in order to finalize his article on the Serb’s heritage and plans for the future. The inventor would talk late into the night about his youth and the incessant struggle of his ancestors to fight off the diabolical Turks. As Martin took notes, Tesla outlined some of his inventions, particularly his work with high frequencies and his original theories on the relationship between electromagnetism and the structure of light. Martin tried to talk the inventor into presenting his ideas before the AIEE, but Tesla evaded a direct response. “Suppose I were to obtain for you Lord Kelvin’s lectures? I know they are a bit wearisome, and somewhat beyond solution, but I believe that you, Samson like, can wrestle the honey from this lion’s jaw.”
¹¹

“Perhaps” was Tesla’s reply.

On January 21, 1890, Professor Anthony took over the presidency of the AIEE from Elihu Thomson (who followed T. C. Martin) and opened the year with his own lecture on new electrical theories.
¹²
Happy to see the professor again, Tesla attended the seminar and was elected vice president. Participating in the discussion which followed, he was joined by Irish mathematician Arthur Kennelly of the Edison Company and Michael Pupin, a physics teacher and fellow Serb.

Having just returned from Helmholtz’s laboratory in Germany, Pupin was unaware of the extent of the animosity that existed between the Edison and Westinghouse camps.

Pupin was from Idvor, a Serbian town north of Belgrade. His father had been a
knez,
or village leader, much like Tesla’s father, but unlike Milutin Tesla, Mr. Pupin was an illiterate peasant and not part of the clerical aristocracy. Many of Pupin’s relatives, like Tesla’s, were war heroes who had fought off the Turks to protect the empire; and, like Tesla, Pupin had avoided military service.

Michael Pupin emigrated to the United States in 1874. After working at odd jobs, he entered Columbia College in New York in 1878. Graduating in 1884 with a keen interest in electrical theory and with honors, Pupin received a fellowship to study abroad. He wanted to go to Cambridge to learn under James Clerk Maxwell, but he found upon his arrival that Maxwell had been dead for four years.
¹³
This tendency to overlook the obvious appears to be a theme that runs through Pupin’s life. After Cambridge, he went on to the University of Berlin, where he received a
doctorate in physics. In 1889 he returned to New York to become an instructor at Columbia College.

In February 1890, the full-page Martin article on Tesla was published in
Electrical World
accompanied by a very prominent photograph of the youthful-looking engineer. For Tesla it was excellent publicity, the first major essay to appear portraying the up-and-coming inventor.

A meeting of the AIEE, devoted entirely to the new Tesla AC system, was planned for the following month. In particular, the conference had been sparked by a number of important developments; most notably plans coming from Switzerland and Germany for a proposed long-distance AC power-transmission experiment,
¹⁴
the impending success of the Westinghouse Company in instituting a hydroelectric plant utilizing the Tesla AC system at a mining camp in Telluride, Colorado, and the announcement of an International Niagara Commission to look into the best way to harness Niagara Falls.

At the March AIEE meeting, Prof. Louis Duncan was the main speaker; his lecture began with a mathematical dissection of the workings of “the novel and admirable little machine invented by Mr. Tesla.” A former officer from the U.S. Naval Academy, Duncan had recently transferred from the South Pacific to Johns Hopkins University, where he stayed on to teach. An important ally, he gave the Tesla invention academic credibility. “The great advantage of the motor,” Duncan said, “lies in the fact that it has no commutator and it permits the use of very high voltages. In the future, power will be transmitted electrically at voltages that will make machines with the commutator next to useless.” After the lecture, there was a discussion, and Tesla participated.
¹⁵

Pupin, who spoke that summer in Boston and again in New York the following year on “Alternating Current Theory,” was fast becoming an admirer of Tesla’s work. However, at the same time, Pupin was also becoming embroiled in the controversy as to who was the real author of the AC polyphase system, and from Tesla’s vantage point, Pupin made the mistake of befriending the wrong people.

At the Boston meeting, Pupin “noticed that my audience was divided into two distinct groups; one group was cordial and appreciative, but the other was as cold as ice. The famous electrical engineer and inventor, Elihu Thomson, was in the friendly group, and he looked me up after the address and congratulated me cordially. That was a great encouragement and I felt happy.” Other prominent individuals, however, tried to have Pupin fired from the electrical engineering department at Columbia because of his adherence to AC,
¹⁶
but Pupin overrode the controversy and at the same time increased his friendship with Thomson.

Unbeknown to Pupin, Thomson himself was in a quandary because he now recognized the clear advantage of the Tesla system, but he was
locked out of its use because Westinghouse owned the patents.

Although the Thomson-Houston Electric Company was extremely profitable, the concern faced certain doom if it was unable to use efficient AC machinery. As Elihu Thomson had worked with AC for over a decade, he felt fully justified in adapting a Tesla-like system, especially because there were other engineers who also claimed legitimate priorities of aspects of the system, notably Shallenberger and Ferraris. Furthermore, Thomson himself had come close to conceiving a similar workable plan. That Tesla held fundamental patents on a completely revolutionary invention was continually overlooked by Thomson as he sought ways to rationalize his position while working at his company, presiding at the AIEE, and writing in the electrical journals. He had successfully circumvented the Edison lightbulb patents by paying Sawyer for a license to produce the stopper lamp, (an exhausted light bulb similar to Edison’s which used a rubber plug—stopper—to hold in the vacuum) and so he sought a similar tack with AC.

During a heated series of articles in
Electrical World
between Thomson and Tesla, it appears that Thomson admits to some of his distaste for his rival when he writes, “I confess that my statement as to the motive of my critical remarks may have been out of place. They were elicited, however, by Mr. Tesla having on a former occasion misunderstood my motives.”
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And so Pupin’s feelings for his Serbian brother became undermined as his friendship with Thomson grew.

Tesla agreed to present his work in high-frequency phenomena during a three-day symposium of the AIEE, which was held in May 1891, three months after he first published his research on the topic.
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A hall was booked at Columbia College, which, at the time, was located between Park and Madison avenues, on Forty-ninth and Fiftieth Streets, and the public was invited.
¹⁹

It is difficult to calculate the enormous impact that this lecture had on the engineers of the day and on the course of Tesla’s life, for it is clear that after the event Tesla was perceived in an extraordinary way. Joseph Wetzler, or Josh, as he preferred to be called, covered the talk for
Electrical World.
But Tesla’s lecture was too important for a single exposure in a journal of limited circulation, and Wetzler was able to also peddle the piece as a spectacular full-page account in the prestigious
Harper’s Weekly.

“[With] lucid explanations in pure nervous English,” Wetzler proclaimed, “this stripling from the dim border-land of Austro-Hungary…[had] not only gone far beyond the two distinguished European scientists Dr. Lodge and Professor Hertz in grasp of electro-magnetic theory of light, but…he had actually made apparatus by which electrostatic waves or ‘thrusts’ would give light for ordinary every-day uses.” Tesla had not only presented a remarkable display of electrical phantasmagoria,
he had also outlined new “fundamental and far reaching principles.”
²⁰

Wetzler cogently pointed out that Tesla had gone far beyond Heinrich Geissler and Sir William Crookes in the production of light by use of vacuum tubes, and he had also “eclipsed” the Wizard of Menlo Park with his refinements of the incandescent lamp. “But Mr. Tesla was not satisfied with these results, brilliant as they were. He had set himself no less a task than to create a lamp which, without any external connection to wires…would glow brightly when placed anywhere in an apartment.”
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And if that were not enough, for a conclusion, Tesla passed tens of thousands of volts of AC through his body to light up lightbulbs and shoot sparks off his fingertips and to show the world that it was not at all a killer current when utilized correctly. “Exhausted tubes…held in the hand of Mr. Tesla…appeared like a luminous sword in the hand of an archangel representing justice,” said one reporter.
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