Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla (13 page)

With Gano Dunn, his assistant,
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Tesla began his talk somewhat nervously but gained momentum as he progressed: “Of all the forms of nature’s immeasurable, all-pervading energy, which ever and ever change and move, like a soul animates an innate universe, electricity and magnetism are perhaps the most fascinating…We know,” Tesla continued, “that [electricity] acts like an incompressible fluid; that there must be a constant quantity of it in nature; that it can neither be produced or destroyed…and that electric and ether phenomena are identical.” Having set up the premise that our world is immersed in a great sea of electricity, the wizard proceeded to astound the audience with his myriad experiments. And at the end, Tesla’s matched his opening in poetic expression: “We are whirling through endless space, with an inconceivable speed,” he said. “All around us everything is spinning, everything is moving, everywhere is energy.” Based on this premise, Tesla ended with a prophetic supposition, which has often been interpreted by some to suggest that a zero point, or free energy strata, exists. “There must be some way of availing ourselves of this energy directly,” he said. “Then, with the light obtained through the medium, with the power derived from it, with every form of energy obtained without effort, from stores forever inexhaustible, humanity will advance with giant strides. The mere contemplation of these magnificent possibilities expands our minds, strengthens our hopes and fills our hearts with supreme delight.”
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Those who attended the lecture, including Professor Anthony, Alfred S. Brown, Elmer Sperry,
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William Stanley, Elihu Thomson, and Francis Upton, would remember the historic occasion for the rest of their lives.
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Robert Millikan, for instance, who later won a Nobel Prize for his work with cosmic rays, was a graduate student at Columbia at the time. He said many years later, “I have done no small fraction of my research work with the aid of the principles I learned that night.”
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Michael Pupin, who also attended, however, appears not to have been so entranced. “[While] I was lecturing,” Tesla told a Serbian reporter, “Mr. Pupin, with his friends, [most likely, Elihu Thomson and Carl Hering] interrupted…by whistling, and I had difficulty quieting down the misled audience.”
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Pupin wrote to Tesla to smooth things over and to set up an appointment to see the motor, as he was scheduled to deliver a number of lectures on polyphase currents, but Tesla avoided him.
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In Europe rumors began to circulate about the new electrical Svengali in America, and Tesla was quickly invited to speak before European scientific societies.

Many of the investigations of the book apply to polyphase systems circuits [with chapters] on induction motors, generators, synchronous motors, [etc.]…A part of this book is original, other parts have been published before by other investigators…I have, however, omitted altogether literary references, for the reason that incomplete references would be worse than some, while complete references would entail expenditure of much more time than is at my disposal…I believe that the reader…is more interested in the information than in knowing who first investigated the phenomenon.

C
HARLES
S
TEINMETZ
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T
hree months after Tesla’s Columbia College lecture, in August 1891, two engineers, Charles Eugene Lancelot Brown, of the Swiss firm of Maschinenfabrik Oerlikon, and Michael von Dolivo-Dobrowolsky, representing the German firm Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG), galvanized the engineering community when they successfully transmitted 190 horsepower from a waterfall at a cement factory on the Neckar River in Lauffen to the International Electrical Exposition, which was being held at Frankfurt, Germany, 112 miles away. With the support of three different governments, the lines passed through Wurtemberg, Bavaria, and Prussia before arriving in Frankfurt.
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By using oil as an insulator, as Tesla had explained in his Columbia College lecture, Brown was able to generate as much as 40,000 volts on his equipment, 25,000 of which he transported along the wires, stepping them down to usable frequencies when they reached the exposition. The efficiency of 74.5 percent astounded his colleagues. Dobrowolsky, who suggested that the invention was his conceptualization, utilized a three-phase AC with a working frequency of 40 cycles per second (instead of the single-phase current, with a frequency of 133 cycles per second, that the
Westinghouse people kept insisting on). The power was so great at the Frankfurt site that a large advertising sign with a thousand incandescent lamps was lit, and a motor pump powering an artificial waterfall was harnessed.
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On December 16, Michael Pupin delivered a talk before the AIEE on polyphase systems. Having given the same talk a week before at the New York Mathematical Society, Pupin was proud to advance abstract theories on this new field of polyphase systems. With his hair swept back, wearing wire-rimmed glasses, a brush mustache tapered at the ends, and a professorial three-piece suit, Pupin was fast readjusting to his return to the States. Now he was beginning to carve a name for himself. Dutifully, he had written Tesla before the talk to discuss his motors, but the inventor had eluded him.

In his opening remarks at the AIEE, with Arthur Kennelly, Elihu Thomson, Charles Bradley, and Charles Steinmetz present, Pupin referred to the “beautiful inventions of Nikola Tesla and the completeness of the success which Dobrowolsky and Brown obtained by the practical applications of these inventions,” but he also described the German operation in such a way as to imply that aspects of it were independently conceived.

It appears that Tesla did not attend the lecture. Instead, he wrote Pupin the day after; but it was not to offer congratulations or to extend an invitation to meet. Tesla suggested that Pupin obtain the original patent specifications; the German design was simply a copy of his work.

But Pupin shot back, “I don’t think that you ought to find fault with me for not having given your inventions a fuller discussion…In the first place, it was a little bit too soon to discuss the practical details…in a paper which treats of the most general fundamental principles of the polyphasal systems. Secondly, I know of your motors only by hearsay; I have not had the pleasure of being shown one by anybody…I looked you up twice at your hotel and wrote you once…but all my efforts were in vain.”
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Pupin tried at the end of the letter to set up a personal interview, but Tesla was not one who could easily forgive such naïveté, especially from a Serb who spoke the native tongue so poorly.
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To the hypersensitive Tesla, Pupin was a man who spread falsehoods. And his continual association with Thomson did not help. As Tesla was about to take a trip to Europe, a meeting of amelioration never took place.

Concerning the dispute over whose invention it really was, it is important to realize that obfuscation of the truth continues to this day.
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The problem began with Michael von Dolivo-Dobrowolsky himself, who was reluctant to admit that he got the idea from Tesla, and it was perpetuated by his friend Carl Hering, who wrote a prodigious number of
articles on the episode in the journals as the event unfolded throughout 1891. Hering had been a professor of engineering at the university in Darmstadt, Germany, in the early 1880s. His protégé Dobrowolsky, a native of St. Petersburg and the son of a Russian nobleman, replaced Hering when he retired from the university at the end of 1883.

C. E. L. Brown, a Swiss native and son of a designer of steam engines, began successfully transmitting electrical power with AC dynamos he had constructed while working in Lucerne. Brown, who was a year younger than Dobrowolsky and seven years younger than Tesla, had received most of his training in Winterthur and Basel, where he worked for the Burgin machine shops. In 1884 he began his employment at Oerlikon and within two years became director of operations.
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On February 9, 1891, Brown delivered an address in Frankfurt on the subject of long-distance transmisssion of electrical power, and that is where he met Dobrowolsky. A partnership was formed between Oerlikon and AEG, and within seven months, their success between Lauffen and Frankfurt was achieved.
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Now, with Dobrowolsky’s claims and Hering’s one-sided reporting in the electrical journals,
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factions of the American engineering community that were locked out of the Tesla patents could extol the Lauffen-Frankfurt venture while at the same time continuing to imply that Tesla’s work was not intrinsic to its success. Ironically, the Westinghouse side wanted to downplay the event as well, not only because it proved Tesla right and them wrong but also because it dwarfed their success at Telluride. Thus, when perusing the Westinghouse literature, one is hard-pressed to find any mention of Lauffen-Frankfurt at all.

Pupin, in his lectures, did not support Tesla’s role, nor did Kennelly, Thomson, or Bradley. Charles Proteus Steinmetz, however, was in another category. Like Pupin, he had just emigrated from Europe, and also like Pupin, he was academically oriented, with no particular economic stake in the invention at that time.

Steinmetz, who had fled Germany in 1889 in order to escape imprisonment for being a revolutionary socialist, was a brilliant student of mathematics from the University of Breslau. A dwarf hunchback, with his head sunk into his shoulders and one leg shorter than the other, Steinmetz had to continually overcome his odd appearance and frail disposition by displaying an advanced intellect. Just twenty-six years old and still attempting to cultivate a mustache and beard, Steinmetz, who was gaining a reputation for his work on the law of hysteresis (which involved a mathematical explanation that explained the lagging of magnetic effects when electromagnetic forces are changed) recognized some flaws in Pupin’s talk. As this would be one of his earliest attempts to express himself before his peers in the difficult English language,
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he carefully bolstered
the addendum by bringing along calculations and drawings. Working in Yonkers, Steinmetz had developed a single-phase commutator motor a year before, in the summer of 1890.
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With brazenly long shoulder-length hair, the gnome was dressed in a slightly wrinkled three-piece suit adorned with an opulent watch chain and a pair of pince-nez that hung distinctively from a strap attached to his right collar. Standing to his full height of four feet and reaching for his glasses to read off his calculations, Steinmetz noted in his German accent that “Ferraris built only a little toy.” He also went on to correct Pupin’s implication that the Dobrowolsky creation was the first to use a three-phase system. “I cannot agree with that in the least, for [that] already [exists] in the old Tesla motor.” Summing up, Steinmetz concluded, “I really cannot see anything new…in the new…Dobrowolsky system.”
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It would take a few months for Steinmetz to realize why his colleagues raised their eyebrows as he dashed all hopes for Dobrowolsky’s claims. Nevertheless, they were impressed with his analysis and mathematical expertise. Elihu Thomson returned to his firm of Thomson-Houston in Lynn, Massachusetts, with the knowledge that a new mathematical genius had arrived from Europe, and soon thereafter Thomson-Houston offered Steinmetz a job at Lynn.

Meanwhile, in Pittsburgh, unbeknown to Edison, Westinghouse had been surreptitiously meeting with Henry Villard, Edison’s financial backer, over a two-year period to discuss a possible merger. Villard, who had recently combined a number of smaller companies with Edison Electric to create Edison General Electric, was well aware that Edison did not get along with Westinghouse. Villard was an immigrant from Germany, the son of a Bavarian judge. Having tried in his earlier days to set up a “free soil” German settlement in Kansas, Villard was the individual who drove the golden spike in the Northern Pacific Railroad to link the West Coast with the East. He conferred with J. Pierpont Morgan, the real power behind the operation, and had Morgan send Edward Dean Adams, a longtime banking associate, to Menlo Park to try and get Edison to align with Westinghouse. Thriving on “beating the other guy,” Edison would hear none of it. “Westinghouse,” he said, “has gone crazy over sudden accession of wealth or something unknown to me and is flying a kite that will land him in the mud sooner or later.”
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Legal fees in trying to protect the Edison lightbulb patents had already cost Edison $2 million and Westinghouse the same. The Edison camp had decided to sue Westinghouse rather than Thomson-Houston, because the Pittsburgh company had purchased United States Electric, the concern that held the competing patents from Sawyer-Man and Hiram Maxim, while Thomson-Houston had only a lease agreement. Thus, while
two giants fought each other in what Edison called “a suicide of time,” Thomson-Houston got rich.

On July 14, 1891, after many years of battles and appeals on priority of invention of the lightbulb, Judge Bradley ruled in favor of Edison. Although Westinghouse was caught with the wrong lightbulb patents, his Tesla AC power system was an asset worth attaining; but Westinghouse was proving difficult to negotiate with. Villard therefore began to make overtures to Tesla directly, but the inventor had to yield to Westinghouse’s decisions.

“Dear Sir,” Tesla wrote Villard in his tidiest penmanship, “I have approached Mr. Westinghouse in a number of ways and endeavored to get to an understanding…[but] the results have not been very promising…Realizing this, and also considering carefully the chances and probabilities of success, I have concluded that I cannot associate myself with the undertaking you contemplate.” Tesla reluctantly concluded the letter by wishing the financier “best success in [his] pioneer enterprise.”
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Villard switched tactics and approached Thomson-Houston with the thought of buying them out. He had gone up to Lynn, Massachusetts, in February and had continued secret negotiations with Charles Coffin, chief executive officer (CEO) of Thomson-Houston, throughout the summer. In December a meeting was held at 23 Wall Street, in Morgan’s office, to finalize plans for a merger. After Morgan looked over the financial records of both companies, he realized that Edison Electric, which was in debt for $3.5 million, had less revenue than the smaller and solvent Thomson-Houston. Morgan thereupon reversed himself and suggested that Thomson-Houston buy out Edison Electric. Either way, he created a monopoly. Simultaneously, Morgan maneuvered Villard out of the company altogether—he had to blame someone for the problems—and Charles Coffin took control of the new consolidation. They named the company General Electric (GE).

Because of the enormous debt of his company and the possibility that he was working with inferior DC equipment, Edison had lost his edge. The thought of working with that patent pirate Elihu Thomson and the removal of his own name from the marquee made the electrical wizard, for the time, a beaten man. Although he stirred the hornets’ nest before he left, Edison realized that a new age of electricity had arrived, one that would not countenance his commonsense, trial-and-error approach. Over a year before the actual merger was completed, he wrote Villard, “It is clear that my usefulness is gone…Viewing it from this light you will see how impossible it is for me to spur my mind, under the shadow of possible future affiliations…I would now ask you not to oppose my gradual retirement from the lighting business, which will enable me to enter into fresh and congenial fields of work.”
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And so Edison turned his interests to
furthering the work of Edward Muybridge, a pioneer in motion pictures. In 1888 and 1891 he had his first patents on a device he called the kinetograph, and a few years later, he developed a fully working movie camera and projection system. In 1893, Edison could write to the elderly Muybridge
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that he now had a peep-show device that people would pay five cents to see.
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The “Morganization” of GE created an even greater foe for Westinghouse but also a critical problem for GE. Whereas Westinghouse was blocked from using an efficient lightbulb, GE was blocked from generating AC. As the Edison patents were only valid for another two years, certainly Westinghouse was in the better position. But in 1891-92 it was still too early in the game to realize this. From the point of view of the courts, it was still undecided as to who the author of the AC polyphase system really was, even though Westinghouse had the Ferraris patent trump card to back those of Tesla’s, and so, over the next few years, Westinghouse was forced to sue not only a number of subsidiaries of GE but also some independents, such as William Stanley, who were now producing polyphase systems on their own.