Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla (21 page)

Naturally, the Twain pictures would become the centerpiece. S. L. Clemens, as he signed his letters to Tesla, came to the laboratory on March 4, 1894, and again on April 26.
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Twain wrote to postpone the initial meeting for one day, and Tesla and Johnson exchanged notes about it. Curiously, Twain’s private log for this period makes no reference to the occasion. He had dined with Stanford White at his Madison Square Garden tower in January and, the following month, had received a notice that $160,000 in royalties were coming his way because of the Paige typesetting machine which he had backed, but that was all he jotted down, even though Twain had been aware of Tesla from the very first moment that the inventor had gone public with his creation of the AC polyphase system.
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Back in November 1888, Twain had written: “I have just seen the drawings & description of an electrical machine lately patented by a Mr. Tesla, & sold to the Westinghouse Company, which will revolutionize the whole electric business of the world. It is the most valuable patent since the telephone.”
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Twain had run into Tesla on occasion, at the Players’ Club or Delmonico’s, or at the artist Robert Reid’s studio. One night, in Twain’s words, “the world-wide illustrious electrician” had joined the Reid party. Jokes and stories were swapped, and songs were sung, particularly Kipling’s “On the Road to Mandalay.”
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Tesla related the story of how Twain’s books saved his life when he was a boy of twelve struck down with a case of malaria, and this tale served to endear Tesla to Twain to the point of bringing tears to the writer’s eyes.
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Interested in inventions and their exploitation, Twain asked Tesla at the lab if it would be all right if he could sell high-frequency electrotherapy machines to rich widows in Europe upon his next sojourn; the inventor naturally agreed. Tesla, in turn, showed the great writer yet another creation which he claimed would help these widows digest their meals.

This contraption, he explained, “consists of a platform supported on elastic cushions that are made to oscillate by means of compressed air. One day, I stepped on the platform and the vibrations imparted were transmitted to my body…Evidently, these isochronous rapid oscillations stimulated powerfully the peristaltic movements which propel the food-stuffs through the alimentary channels.”

“You mean, it’ll make me regular?” Twain inquired.

“Precisely, and without the use of elixirs, specific remedies or internal applications whatever.”

Without further ado, Twain stepped aboard as Tesla tried to stop his assistants from chuckling. As Twain had been so enthusiastic, Tesla neglected to inform him that peristaltic action is induced almost immediately.

“Suddenly, Twain felt an unspeakable and pressing necessity which had to be promptly satisfied,” Tesla told the Johnsons the next day to their tearful glee, for he had to jump off the platform and find his way swiftly to the lavatory.

“I think I’ll start with the electrotherapy machines,” Twain said upon his return. “Wouldn’t want the widows to get too healthy all at one shot.”
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The photos of Twain and the others were processed nearly one full year before they would appear in print. Tesla was elated and commented to Johnson that the one of Joseph Jefferson was “simply immense. I mean the one showing him alone in the darkness. I think it is a [work] of art.”
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Katharine suggested that they all celebrate at Delmonico’s and that he then join them for a summer holiday at the Hamptons. Tesla wrote back: “I fear
that if I depart very often from my simple habits I shall come to grief.” However, realizing that he would soon be missing “the pleasure of your company” he reluctantly agreed to go to dinner, but not to the holiday, and therefore signed off, “In the anticipation of the joy [of dining with friends] and subsequent sorrows, I remain, Yours sincerely, N. Tesla.”
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Concerning the photographs, which were the first ever taken with phosphorescent lights, Tesla, who had his eye on potential investors, became impatient for the publicity; but Martin and Johnson were aghast.

“I think that we ought to have a little talk about giving to the daily newspapers a hint that Mr. Tesla has succeeded in taking photos by phosphorescence,” Martin warned.
“It will leak
out some hour and then someone…with the customary arrogance [will place it] in the papers…[We need] to get our priorities established. I think R. U. Johnson feels the same way.”
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This became the beginning of a series of disagreements between the inventor and his editor.
The Inventions, Researches and Writings of Nikola Tesla
was now in press, and Martin and Tesla were making money from the sale of the book; however, Tesla kept wanting to give copies away freely. He sent the text to each of his uncles and his three sisters in Bosnia/Croatia and also mailed his article on Zmai to his uncle Pajo and his sister Marica.
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Martin had to tread carefully, for although he was unhappy with Tesla’s lack of concern for the financial side of the situation, he also in no way wanted to alienate himself from the wellspring. Martin wrote, “Your request [for more free copies] is just too hard. It seems to me that the Pittsburgh boys, if they love you, ought to be willing to blow a little money of their own on the book. But you are the best judge of relations to them.” Martin promised to send Tesla a dozen copies at reduced prices. “Perhaps,” Martin requested, “you would like to make us a bid on the whole edition,” closing as follows: “When you write me, make it autographic as often as you can. People are beginning to deplete my stock.”
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From Tesla’s point of view, it was his book, and Martin should simply do as he asked. This would become a sore point, especially because Martin would come to lend Tesla money based on profits that were due him as editor and Tesla would never repay him.
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Martin would overlook it, for now.

After the first photographs arrived, including the discreetly stylized engraving of Tesla based on his most recent portrait, Martin requested a sneak preview. “I will lock [them] up or put [them] in a safe deposit vault, if you wish, until the hour of publication,” promised Martin. “But I want to get one of the
first
as an historical souvenir.” At the same time, Martin informed Johnson that the University of Nebraska had offered Tesla an honorary doctorate in celebration of their twenty-fifth anniversary. “I have
urged him to accept. I want you and Mrs. Johnson to bring your influence on him also. Her spell is now a potent one, I fancy, with him, so far as any woman’s can be, next [to] his sisters.”
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It is unlikely, however, that Tesla thought much about getting a doctorate from the obscure University of Nebraska. To a person of his background and education, the offer was virtually meaningless. Johnson thought it more appropriate for a prestigious institution, such as Columbia College, to grant such an honor. Tesla had just received the Elliott Cresson Gold Medal Award from the Franklin Institute for “his earnest and indefatigable work as a pioneer in this field, and on account of the great value to science of his researches.”
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However, this was not the same as a doctorate, and so Johnson wrote to Hewey Fairfield Osborn, one of the dignitaries at Columbia, urging that they make the offer instead.

Johnson wrote:

There would be a particular appropriateness in Columbia giving him a degree, since his first lecture was, if I mistake not, delivered at the College and since New York City is the scene of his most important discoveries…I think it may truly be said that there are few men occupying this unique position…in both the theoretical and practical phases of scientific work…As to his general culture, I may say that he…is widely read in the best literature of Italy, Germany and France as well as much of the Slavic countries to say nothing of Greek and Latin. He is particularly fond of poetry and is always quoting Leopardi…or Goethe or the Hungarians or Russians. I know of few men of such diversity of general culture or such accuracy of knowledge.

Johnson ended the letter with a character reference. His personality, he said, “is one of distinguished sweetness, sincerity, modesty, refinement, generosity and force.”
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Since Professor Osborn knew Tesla well and had been witness to the Columbia lecture, he concurred with Johnson and thereupon spoke to Seth Low, the president of the university. “Poulton tells me,” Osborn said, “that Tesla was covered with honors while in England and France. We certainly must not allow any other university to anticipate us in honoring a man who lives under our very eyes.”

“Isn’t he a countryman of Pupin’s?” Low inquired.

“Yes, of course. It was at the urging of Professor Pupin and Professor Crocker that Tesla spoke here to begin with.”

“Didn’t they have a row between them?” the president responded cautiously.

“I have learned confidentially that there has sprung up some slight difference between them, but I’m sure it will probably be healed. In any
event, there seems little doubt that Tesla is the leading electrician in the country.”
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Within a few weeks, the inventor was given an honorary doctorate from Columbia, and shortly thereafter he received a similar honor from Yale.

Having received professional recognition among his peers, Tesla had arrived. Feature articles were appearing in prestigious periodicals, and he was hobnobbing with the most esteemed literary and social figures of the day.

How extraordinary was my life an incident may illustrate…[As a youth] I was fascinated by a description of Niagara Falls I had perused, and pictured in my imagination a big wheel run by the Falls. I told my uncle that I would go to America and carry out this scheme. Thirty years later I saw my ideas carried out at Niagara and marveled at the unfathomable mystery of the mind.

N
IKOLA
T
ESLA
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C
onquest of Niagara was by no means assured. It hinged on very specific factors. The first serious scheme to harness the mighty cataract, the Evershed plan, was proposed in 1886. Thomas Evershed, a civil engineer, who had worked on the Erie Canal, had conceived the idea of the creation of a complex network of canals and tunnels running adjacent to the Falls, whereby two hundred waterwheels and accompanying industrial mills would be placed. He had probably ruminated over the scheme for twoscore years, as Evershed had worked as a surveyor at Niagara in his youth as far back as the 1840s. Although the idea was attractive, it was costly and dangerous to implement, as most of the nine miles of excavation required for the canals and wheel pits had to be done by blasting through stone; estimates ran as high as $10 million. Thus, the officials of the Cataract Construction Company sought counsel from notable engineers and inventors.
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In 1889, Edison submitted a plan which boldly asserted that DC could be transmitted to Buffalo, approximately twenty miles away. As appreciable amounts of DC electricity had never traversed a distance in excess of one or two miles, this suggestion appeared highly optimistic, and it was doubted by most other engineers, particularly Sprague and Kennelly, two of Edison’s coworkers. Westinghouse was also dubious of the feasibility of transmitting electrical energy, and he suggested the implementation of a
sophisticated system of cables and compressed air tubes to transfer the power to Buffalo.
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Thus, for these reasons, plans for harnesing the falls centered for the most part on constructing an industrial complex adjacent to the falls.

The long-distance transmission of electrical
power
was simply beyond imagining. It must be remembered that what Edison generated was meager amounts of electricity capable of illuminating lightbulbs, and then only in close proximity to the source of the power. Since his DC apparatus still made use of a commutator, he was incapable of transmitting appreciable amounts of power, although he could run a few motors if they were close to the generator. That is why the 1891 Lauffen-Frankfurt transmission was so startling. Brown and Dobrowolsky had not only surpassed, by a factor of about one hundred, Edison’s long-distance record; they had also transmitted significant amounts of power, a spectacular achievement with no comparable precedent.

Brown and Dobrowolsky had had predecessors. Two years earlier, Sebastian Ziani de Ferranti, the son of an Italian musician living in Liverpool, England, had been the first to use Tesla’s apparatus at a plant at Depford. Ferranti, a brilliant engineer with talents purported to have rivaled Edison’s, had already made important modifications on the Gaulard-Gibbs AC apparatus for Siemens Brothers and also Ganz & Company at their London branch. His bold idea was to create a central station along the Thames so that electricity could be pumped to numerous substations around town.
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In 1889, from Depford, Ferranti transmitted an unprecedented 11,000 volts to four substations of six to seven miles away, where 10,000 horsepower alternators were driven.
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This was a magnificent accomplishment, but it appears doubtful that many people understood that it was Tesla’s system
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or even that true success had been achieved. In no way did it gain the publicity of the Lauffen-Frankfurt enterprise, nor did it spark the idea of spreading the energy of Niagara Falls beyond its surrounding area.

Nor had Westinghouse’s initial achievements in electrical power transmission demonstrated the capabilities of the Tesla system. He had succeeded at Telluride, Colorado, with Stillwell, Shallenberger, and Scott, in transmitting 60,000 volts of AC for a distance of four miles to run a 100 horsepower Tesla motor, and he had illuminated the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. Both of these were great triumphs, but neither demonstrated that electrical power could be transmitted over long distances. In short, without the Lauffen-Frankfurt success, there would have been no proof that AC was capable of traversing the twenty miles from Niagara to Buffalo, let alone from Niagara to New York City, which was over three hundred miles away. That is why the financial backers of the Niagara project sent Edward Dean Adams, president of the Cataract Construction Company, to Europe
to confer with Brown and Dobrowolsky, and that is why Dobrowolsky intimated that the invention was his. There was no physical proof to the contrary, as clearly he and Brown had been the first and only engineers to realize such a feat.

Adams, from the firm Winslow, Lanier & Company, out of Boston, was a slight, gentle-looking man with large round eyes, small head, the face of a teenager, and a mammoth handlebar mustache. He began his relationship with longtime J. P. Morgan associate Charles Lanier in 1881. Working his way up to full partner, Adams was placed on the board of directors of a number of major railroads, including Henry Villard’s Northern Pacific, and also the Ontario and Western Railroad, with lines stemming from Buffalo to New York City.
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He also sat on the board of directors of the Edison Electric Light Company, as its second largest stockholder.

In 1889, along with Villard, who was attempting to combine all the major electric companies into one large corporation, Adams tried to curtail the highly expensive lightbulb patent dispute between Edison and Westinghouse by getting them to confer with one another, but, of course, Edison wanted no part of such an arrangement.
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As president of the Cataract Construction Company, Adams sold his shares in the Edison concern so that he could be impartial in his investigations, and in 1890 he “established the International Niagara Commission, with headquarters in London…His intention was to consult with leading European scientists and engineers and to examine the most advanced hydraulic-power [compressed air] techniques, a branch of engineering in which Switzerland excelled.”
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In 1890, Adams traveled to Europe with Dr. Coleman Sellers, another executive of the Cataract Construction Company, where they conferred with engineers in France, Switzerland, and England. In London they visited Ferranti at his electrical station at Depford; they also met with Professor Rowland, who had traveled from Johns Hopkins University, and Gisbert Kapp, electrical engineering editor and author of the classic text
Electrical Transmission of Energy.
Rowland argued in favor of AC, and Kapp recommended C. E. L. Brown as the most prominent engineer to undertake the project. He was located at the Maschinenfabrin Oerlikon Works in Switzerland. Adams wired J. Pierpont Morgan, who was in Paris, with the suggestion that he return to Switzerland to meet with Brown. Morgan concurred.
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Before leaving England, Adams met with Sir William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), whom he placed in charge of the International Niagara Commission, and a contest was created awarding cash prizes totaling $20,000 for the best plans submitted for harnessing the falls. L. B. Stillwell, who was in London with H. H. Byllesby, at the Westinghouse branch, wired to Pittsburgh to request permission to compete by giving Adams a plan based
on the Tesla system; but Westinghouse turned down the idea because he did not want to give away $100,000 worth of advice for such a paltry sum.

Of the twenty proposals submitted, most involved compressed air and hydraulic equipment. “Of the six electrical plans, four used direct current…[one] proposed single phase [AC], but ‘details were not fully described.’ The remaining plan by Prof. George Forbes advocated polyphase installation.”
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Forbes, who was a professor from Glasgow and who was later hired as consulting engineer to the Niagara Power Company, wrote to the commission: “It will be somewhat startling to many, as I confess it was at first to myself, to find as the result of a thorough and impartial examination of the problem that the only practical solution lies in the adoption of alternating current generators and motors…The only [workable one] is the Tesla motor manufactured by the Westinghouse Electric Company and which I have myself put through various tests at their works at Pittsburgh.”
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Although initially rejected by the commission, the Forbes report caught the eye of Adams. Nevertheless, Adams went to Switzerland to confer with C. E. L. Brown, who declined the offers to head up the Niagara project.

Morgan’s emissary was Francis Lynde Stetson, a lawyer who was also part of the Cataract Construction Company. He was sent to Switzerland and London to review the prevailing technology for their company, GE, but it was starting to become obvious that the major patents were all owned by Westinghouse. In Tivoli, where there were waterfalls 334 feet high, Ganz & Company of Budapest, another Westinghouse-linked operation, was constructing a hydroelectric plant to transmit electricity to Rome, which was eighteen miles away, and in Portland, Oregon, at Willamette Falls, Westinghouse was also transmitting thousands of volts of AC over distances of twelve miles. Although Kelvin sided with Edison in insisting that DC was superior, Adams now knew that Westinghouse held all the trump cards.
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In America, however, and from the point of view of GE, the outcome was not all that obvious. The Panic of 1893 had taken its toll, and Charles Coffin, CEO of GE, was forced to “ruthlessly” lay off a large number of their workers and cut the pay of many others. Not only had production of electrical equipment fallen dramatically, in-fighting between the Edison and Thomson camps peaked.
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Although Thomson and Steinmetz now realized that AC was vastly superior to DC, they were unable to guarantee to Coffin that they could devise equipment superior to Tesla’s. Desperate to compete, it appears that a memorandum was sent by Thomson to E. G. Waters, general manager of the GE plant in Pittsburgh, for the purpose of recruiting an informant who worked for Westinghouse.
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Noticing that blueprints were missing, Westinghouse accused GE of
industrial espionage, and charges were brought against Thomson’s Lynn plant, where a sheriff, acting under court order, found the missing documents. The GE officials claimed that their interest was in seeing whether Westinghouse was pirating their protected lightbulbs, and the jury split six to six on the decision. Westinghouse suspected that a janitor was the culprit, but the man was never prosecuted.
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Simultaneously, Steinmetz and Thomson were submitting patent applications for an AC motor which used a “teaser current” instead of a full-fledged polyphase one,
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but it was obvious to the patent office that the apparatus was based on the Tesla system, and their patent application was denied. This did not stop Thomson from insisting that he was the real inventor of the AC system, and by 1894, with Thomson’s great expertise, he devised an induction motor that in some respects was superior to the one produced by Westinghouse.
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Ironically, even to this day, biographies of Elihu Thomson often accuse Tesla of the piracy instead of the reverse!
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Although GE was brought to trial for stealing blueprints, they audaciously continued for the next several years, through Waters, to pay spies to obtain information from the Westinghouse plant.

Nevertheless, Westinghouse’s success at Telluride and at the Chicago World’s Fair eliminated any remaining doubts as to who would be awarded the Niagara contract. In the first months of 1893, Forbes, Rowland, and Sellers visited Pittsburgh to test their equipment, and in May of that year the deal was signed with Westinghouse.

As J. Pierpont Morgan was the major force behind GE, it is interesting to speculate about why he allowed Westinghouse to gain the bid. First of all, when the actual contract was signed, because the operation was so enormous (and because of Morgan’s ties to GE), a large portion of the work was also given to GE. Westinghouse constructed the “generators, switchgear and auxiliary equipment in the powerhouse, [and] GE was awarded contracts for the transformers, the transmission line to Buffalo, and the equipment for the substation there.”
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Thus, although Westinghouse got the larger share, GE was by no means cut out and in fact ended up with a licensing arrangement which gave them their first legal foothold on the fundamental patents held by the other company.

Morgan had close ties to August Belmont, who was one of Westinghouse’s financial backers, and it is possible that this connection had something to do with the arrangement. He acquiesced in part because of his respect for the commission Adams had set up and also because of the advice he received from his lawyer William B. Rankine, who lived in Buffalo and who had devoted his life to the enterprise, and his close associate, Francis Lynde Stetson, who told Morgan of Tesla’s “daring promise [as far back as 1890] to place 100,000 hp on a wire and send it 450 miles in one direction to New York City, the metropolis of the East, and 500
miles in the other direction to Chicago, the metropolis of the West, [to] serve the purpose of these great urban communities.”
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In 1894, Tesla hit his stride. The Martin article in the
Century
opened the floodgates, and an army of reporters from newspapers and magazines descended upon him. That year would find features on Tesla in such prestigious periodicals as
New Science Review, Outlook
and
Cassiers; McClure’s
and
Review of Reviews
boldly announced that Tesla was the founder of the discoveries which lay behind “the largest electrical enterprise in the world,”
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and the
New York Times
profiled him in a four-column spread complete with a large stylized portrait and an in-depth account of his philosophies and newest creations.
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The following year, the
Times
wrote, “To Tesla belongs the undisputed honor of being the man whose work made this Niagara enterprise possible…There could be no better evidence of the practical qualities of his inventive genius.”
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